Читать книгу Frantz Fanon - David Macey - Страница 8
ОглавлениеForgetting Fanon, Remembering Fanon
Early in May 1962, a French journalist working for the daily Le Monde arrived in Ghardimaou, a small Tunisian town only a few kilometres from the border with Algeria. Once a French military base, Ghardimaou was now the headquarters of the Algerian Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) (National Liberation Army) and the situation there was tense. Two photographs decorated the otherwise bleak walls of the political commissariat. They were of Fidel Castro and Frantz Fanon.1 In the last week of June, Paris-Presse’s Jean-François Kahn also travelled to Ghardimaou to report on the situation there. He too saw a photograph on the wall. It was of Frantz Fanon, ‘the pamphleteer from Martinique’. Algeria’s long war of independence was virtually at an end; the Evian agreements had been signed by the French government and the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA) (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic) on 18 March and a ceasefire had come into effect the following day. Relations between Algeria’s ‘forces of the interior’ and the ‘frontier army’, penned behind the Morice Line of electrified wire entanglements, floodlights and mine-fields, had long been strained and were now almost at breaking point. Tensions between the GPRA, headed by Ahmed Ben Bella, and Colonel Houari Boumédienne’s ALN were also dangerously high. Kahn was convinced that a coup led by Boumédienne, former head of the ALN and now minister of defence, was in the offing. He was both right and wrong; Boumédienne’s Armée Nationale Populaire entered Algiers in triumph on 9 September 1962, but the coup against President Ben Bella did not occur until 1956. Boumédienne remained in power until his death in December 1978; Ben Bella remained in detention until 30 October 1980. He then spent ten years in exile, returning to Algeria only in 1990.
The djounoud (soldiers; the singular is djoundi) Kahn met in their stark concrete barracks were dressed in Chinese-style uniforms and wore neither decorations nor insignia of rank. They did not salute their officers, and addressed them in French with the familiar tu. Kahn asked a young officer what would happen if ‘certain leaders’ attempted to put a brake on their revolution. The officer was young – perhaps in his thirties – handsome and romantic-looking, but his tone was harsh and his answer brooked no argument: ‘We would eliminate them.’ The journalist concluded: ‘If one had to find an ideological name for the mystical faith that inspires these men, it would have to be “Fanonist”.’2
Kahn’s ‘Fanonists’ did indeed eliminate their enemies. As Boumédienne’s tanks swept into Algiers, they left corpses in their wake; an embittered Ferhat Abbas, who was the GPRA’s first president, later remarked that this was the only war ever fought by Boumédienne and his djounoud.3 Kahn’s spontaneous association of Fanon with ‘mystical’ violence sets the tone for much of the subsequent discussion of the man and his work. Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism. He was the horseman of a new apocalypse, the preacher of the gospel of the wretched of the earth, who were at last rising up against their oppressors. Although this image of Fanon is by no means inaccurate, it is very partial. The Fanon who advocated the use of violence in his Les Damnés de la terre, which was published as he lay dying far from Algeria, was the product of the most bloody of France’s wars of decolonization. There were other Frantz Fanons.
Frantz Fanon had been dead for six months when Kahn visited Ghardimaou, and it is possible that some of the djounoud he met there had been part of the honour guard that saluted Fanon’s body as it lay in ceremony in the field hospital. Fanon did not die, as might reasonably have been expected, in combat or at the hands of an assassin, although he did survive at least one assassination attempt. He died of leukaemia in an American hospital, and his body was flown back to Tunis in a Lockheed Electra II for burial on Algerian soil. At 14.30 on 12 December 1961, a small column crossed the border into Algeria. For the first and only time in the war of independence that they had been waging since 1954, the FLN and ALN were able to bury one of their own with full honours:
On the Algerian border. Two ALN platoons present arms as the coffin enters national territory. The coffin is placed on a stretcher made of branches, raised and carried up the slope by fifteen djounoud. An astonishing march through the forest begins, while two columns of ALN soldiers stand guard on the hillside and in the valley floor to protect the path the column is following. The forest is majestic, the sky dazzling; the column moves along silently and in absolute calm, with the bearers taking it in turn to carry the coffin.
Gunfire can be heard in the valley, further to the north. Very high in the sky, two aircraft fly over. The war is there, very close at hand, and at the same time, things are calm here. A procession of brothers has come to grant one of their own his last wish.
In a martyrs’ cemetery. Once the site of an engagement, now in liberated territory. The grave is there, carefully prepared. Speaking in Arabic, an ALN commandant pronounces a final farewell to Frantz Fanon, who was known to everyone present: ‘Our late lamented brother Fanon was a sincere militant who rebelled against colonialism and racism; as early as 1952, he was taking an active role in the activities of liberal movements while he was pursuing his studies in France. At the very beginning of the Revolution, he joined the ranks of the Front de Libération Nationale and was a living model of discipline and respect for its principles during all the time that he had to carry out the tasks with which he was entrusted by the Algerian Revolution. During one of the missions he carried out in Morocco, he was the victim of an accident which probably brought on the illness that has just carried him away. He continued to work unrelentingly and redoubled his efforts, despite the illness that was gradually gnawing away at him. Realizing that his health was obviously deteriorating, the higher authorities advised him on several occasions to cease his activities and to devote himself to treating his illness. His answer was always the same: “I will not cease my activites while Algeria still continues the struggle and I will go on with my task until my dying day.” And that indeed is what he did.’4
It was then the turn of the GPRA’s Vice-President Belkacem Krim to bid Fanon farewell:
In the name of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, in the name of the Algerian people, in the name of all your brothers in struggle and in my personal capacity, I bid you farewell.
Although you are dead, your memory will live on and will always be evoked by the noblest figures of our Revolution.
Born into a large family, you experienced at a very early age the privations and humiliations which colonialists and racists inflict upon oppressed peoples. Despite these difficulties, you succeeded in becoming a brilliant student and then began an equally brilliant career as a doctor, especially at the psychiatric hospital in Blida. But even while you were at University, your desire to be a serious student did not prevent you from taking part in the anti-colonialist struggle; the heavy obligations you faced as a conscientious doctor did not interfere with your militant activities on behalf of your oppressed brothers. Indeed, it was through your professional activities that you arrived at a better understanding of the realities of colonialist oppression and became aware of the meaning of your commitment to the struggle against that oppression. Even before our Revolution was launched, you took a sustained interest in our liberation movement. After 1 November 1954, you flung yourself into clandestine action with all your characteristic fervour, and did not hesitate to expose yourself to danger. More specifically, and despite the dangers you could have encountered, you helped to ensure the safety of many patriots and party officials, and thus helped them to accomplish their missions.
Responding to the call of your responsibilities, you then joined the FLN’s foreign delegation.
Résistance algérienne and then El Moudjahid then benefited from your precious help, characterized by your vigorous and accurate analyses.
Various international conferences, and especially those in Accra, Monrovia, Tunis, Conakry, Addis-Ababa and Léopoldville provided you with an opportunity to make known the true face of our revolution and to explain the realities of our struggle. The many messages of sympathy that have been sent to the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic since the announcement of your death bear testimony to the profound influence you exercised as you performed your duty.
Because of the brilliant qualities you displayed in all these activities, the Algerian Government designated you as its representative in Accra in February 1960.
Frantz Fanon!
You devoted your life to the cause of freedom, dignity, justice and good.
Your loss causes us great pain.
In the name of the Provisional Government of Algeria, I offer your family our most sincere and most fraternal condolences.
I also offer our thanks to the representatives of those friendly and fraternal countries who, by being present at our side, have expressed their wish to join us in our mourning.
Frantz Fanon!
You will always be a living example. Rest in peace. Algeria will not forget you.5
The speeches made at Fanon’s funeral provide an accurate picture of how he was viewed by his Algerian comrades at the time of his death. Both Krim and the unnamed commandant (the rank is equivalent to that of a major in the British army) were speaking in all sincerity, but they had known Fanon in only one context. They never knew the child who was born in Martinique in 1925, and who was always marked by the experience of being born in that place and at that time. They knew the dedicated revolutionary, but not the equally dedicated psychiatrist. They were familiar with a polemicist, but not with the young man who once wanted to write plays. Fanon was always reluctant to talk about himself, and it is by no means certain that he told his Algerian brothers that he had fought with the French army during the Second World War and had been decorated for bravery.
Granting Fanon his last wish – to be buried on Algerian soil – had not been an easy task. It had involved some delicate negotiations with the Tunisian government, with the US State Department and even the CIA, whose agent Ollie Iselin was present at the funeral. The border crossing itself was made with the help of local people, without whom it would have been impossible for the funeral party to evade French patrols. Three days after the burial, ALN intelligence officers learned that most of the French officers responsible for the sector had been relieved of their functions: ‘Fanon had won his last victory.’6 For those who knew Fanon, the revenge must have been sweet; on the very day that the news of his death had reached Paris, the publisher’s stock of Les Damnés de la terre had been seized by the police on the grounds that it was a threat to national security.7 This did not prevent it from becoming an international bestseller and making Fanon the most famous spokesman of a Third Worldism, which held that the future of socialism – or even of the world – was no longer in the hands of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, but in those of the dispossessed wretched of the earth.
Fanon was buried a mere 600 metres inside Algerian territory because French static defences made it impossible to take his coffin further into his adopted country. On 25 June 1965, his remains were exhumed and reinterred in the martyrs’ cemetery in the hamlet of Ain Kerma, where a tombstone was at last erected.8 His family’s requests to have Fanon’s body returned to his native Martinique have always met with a negative response from the Algerian government. After the suicide of his mother on 13 July 1989,9 Fanon’s son Olivier requested permission to have his father’s remains interred with hers in Algiers, where she was buried as ‘Nadia’, the name she had used when she and Fanon were living in semi-clandestinity; she could not be buried in a Muslim cemetery under her Christian name Josie. This time, the refusal came from the people and local authorities of Ain Kerma; in their view, Fanon is their martyr and his grave is inviolable. Fanon’s body still lies in the far east of Algeria.
There is a memorial to Fanon in the town where he was born. The white-walled Cimetière de la Levée in the Martinican capital of Fort-de-France is the resting place of many of the town’s notables, and is known locally as the ‘cemetery of the rich’ – the poor are buried in the Cimetière du Trabaud on the other side of the Canal Lavassoir. French cemeteries are urbanized cities of the dead, and have none of the verdant charm of the traditional English graveyard. The Fanon family grave stands at the intersection of two asphalted paths and contains the remains of his parents, his brother Félix and his sister Gabrielle. Their photographs appear on the memorial plaques on the plinth inside the white marble construction. Frantz Fanon’s memorial is in the form of an open marble book. The left-hand page bears a photograph and the inscription: ‘To our brother Frantz Fanon, born 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, died 6 December 1961 in Washington (USA).’ The facing page is inscribed with the final words of his first book: ‘My final prayer: make me always a man who asks questions.’10 The grave is well tended, but it has not become a place of pilgrimage.
Over seventy years after his death, Fanon remains a surprisingly enigmatic and elusive figure. Whether he should be regarded as ‘Martinican’, ‘Algerian’, ‘French’ or simply ‘black’ is not a question that can be decided easily. It is also a long-standing question. Just four years after his death and a year after Boumédienne’s coup, a Swiss commentator could write with some justification that
The men who run Algeria today would have little use for Fanon’s exhortations; and the Algerian ‘masses’ would make a Martinican negro feel foreign in ways he would never have experienced in Paris. The prophet of Algeria’s national revolution would have found himself an exile from his chosen homeland, in search of another revolutionary war with which to identify himself.11
Despite Krim’s assurance that Algeria would never forget him, Fanon has never really become part of the pantheon of Algerian nationalism, even though he was posthumously awarded the Prix National des Lettres Algériennes in 1963, and even though copies of Les Damnés de la terre were given as school prizes in 1964.12 The standard history books studied by Algerian schoolchildren contain photographs and short biographies of the heroes of the FLN’s revolution, but Fanon is not counted amongst their number.13 In 1965, a group of Algerian students complained that it was impossible to find Peau noire, masques blancs in any bookshop in Algiers.14 The hospital where Fanon worked in Blida bears his name, and an Avenue du Dr Frantz Fanon (formerly the Avenue du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny) was inaugurated in Algiers in March 1963. There is a Lycée Frantz Fanon on the edge of the city’s Bab El Oued district, and yet in 1982 a group of teachers at the University of Algiers could complain that it was still necessary to ask ‘Who is Fanon?’ because there had been nothing on either the radio or the television to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death.15 For the youth of Algeria, ‘Fanon’ was no more than a name inscribed in capital letters on public buildings or street signs.16 The names of streets and institutions do not necessarily indicate that the memory of their eponyms is still alive. Even when Fanon is remembered in Algeria, the memory can be clouded by partial amnesia and ignorance. Fanny Colonna, who taught at the University of Tizi-Ouzo until she was forced by the rising tide of violence and xenophobia to leave for France in the early 1990s, recalls meeting school students who had read Fanon in their French class but did not know that he was black.17
The reasons for Fanon’s partial eclipse in Algeria are political and ideological. The insistence that, as the old slogan put it, the revolution had ‘only one hero: the people’, is designed to play down the role of specific individuals, as well as to mask internal divisions behind a façade of unity. The Algerian historiography of the war was for a long time designed to legitimize the one-party rule of the supposedly monolithic FLN, and the appearance of revisionist studies that began to show that it was a murderously divided party that killed some of those it officially venerated as heroes is a recent phenomenon.18 The nature of Algerian nationalism itself is an obstacle to a serious re-evaluation of Fanon’s role. Ever since its birth in the 1930s, modern Algerian nationalism has been defined as ‘Arab-Islamic’, and it is very difficult to absorb a black agnostic into that nationalism. Within two years of independence, it could be argued by certain Algerians that ‘Fanonism’ was an alien ideology which was foreign to Islam, and therefore to the Algerian nation, and that Fanon could not be Algerian because he was not a Muslim.19 In the 1970s, similar points were being made by Mohammed El Milli, a graduate of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University and Director of Information for the Algerian Ministry of Information and Culture. El Milli once worked with Fanon on the FLN’s newspaper El Moudjahid, but he was at pains to stress that Fanon owed much more to the Algerian revolution than it owed to him.20 Attempts to turn Fanon into ‘a key figure in the Algerian FLN’21 or ‘one of the chief theoreticians of the Algerian struggle’22 are simply not consonant with either contemporary or historical accounts of the Algerian revolution, none of which gives Fanon a leading role.23
In his autopsy of the war of independence, Ferhat Abbas, who was the GPRA’s first president and was for a while quite close to ‘this psychiatrist-doctor’, does not accord him any great importance in either organizational or political terms.24 Even as a roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria, Fanon had little power. Ambassadors for self-proclaimed provisional governments have little or no internationally recognized authority; Fanon did not have a diplomatic passport and travelled on short-term tourist visas. He was never a member of the FLN’s ruling body, the Comité de coordination et d’exécution, or of the Provisional Government established in September 1958. A colleague who worked with him in both Algeria and Tunisia recalls one of the inevitable discussions in Tunis in which Algerian exiles speculated about what they would do ‘after independence’. Someone half jokingly told Fanon that he would become Minister for Health. He was certainly better qualified than most in the FLN and even the GPRA to hold that position, but a touchy Fanon snapped that he did not want to be a minister. He was a psychiatrist, and he wanted to go on being a psychiatrist in an independent Algeria.25 Fanon certainly did not see himself as the Algerian Revolution’s chief theoretician and he has been cast in that role by default. There was ‘only one hero’ and in a sense, this was a revolution without a face. For many outside Algeria, Fanon became its face or perhaps its mask. The mask of ‘chief theoretician’ conceals as much as it reveals about both Fanon and Algeria.
In Martinique, Fort-de-France has its Avenue Frantz Fanon, as does the neighbouring town of Le Lamentin. There is a Centre Culturel Frantz Fanon in the suburbs of the capital, and a dilapidated Forum Frantz Fanon on the Savanne once hosted open-air events and meetings. The town of La Trinité has a Lycée Frantz Fanon. Yet, here too, it was possible to complain in 1991 that ‘For a very long time, Fanon has been marginalized by everyone, including the Martinique Communist Party.’ Here too, it could be said that even the generation of 1968 completely eclipsed Fanon, so great was the enthusiasm for revolutions that had taken place elsewhere in China and Albania.26 Fanon is an uncomfortable presence in Martinique, and particularly in Fort-de-France. It is difficult to reconcile the existence of an ‘Avenue Frantz Fanon’ and the inevitable evocation of the wretched of the earth with the street names that invoke a republican and abolitionist tradition (rue de la Liberté, rue Lamartine, rue Victor Hugo, rue Marat . . .) in such a way as to suggest that the history of Martinique began with the final abolition of slavery in 1848. A slightly different note is struck by the name of a street in the Terres-Sainville area, just outside the centre. Here, the rue de la Pétition des ouvriers de Paris recalls that, in 1848, the Parisian working class petitioned for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, but it still suggests that Martinique’s history centres on Paris. The statue in front of the Palais de Justice depicts Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893), the parliamentary architect of abolition: ‘the liberator frozen in a liberation of whitened stone’.27 In a paternalistic gesture, his right arm is draped around the shoulder of a black child; his left hand points the way to freedom. This is ‘white France caressing the frizzy hair of this fine negro whose chains have just been broken’.28 Only the graffiti on Schoelcher’s plinth suggests that his statue might not tell the whole story: ‘Death to the colonists.’
A further hint that the urban landscape of Fort-de-France might not tell the whole truth about its history can be seen on the Savanne, the large grassy square where a young Fanon played football on Sundays. The Savanne’s most famous monument is the statue of Joséphine. Marie-Josèphe Tascher de la Pagerie (1763–1814) was a white Creole born in Les Trois Ilets across the bay from Fort-de-France, and wife to Napoleon from 1794 to 1809, when he repudiated her because she could not give him an heir. The cult of Joséphine is alive and well in Martinique and there are still those who, like the Mayotte Capécia Fanon despised so much, can say that ‘The fact that a woman from Martinique could become Empress of the French, of the whole French Empire, filled us all with pride. We venerated her and, like every little girl in Martinique, I often dreamed of that unparalleled destiny.’29 Others do not take that view. ‘Joséphine, Empress of the French, dreaming very high above the nigger mob [la négraille]’,30 is widely believed to have been responsible for the reintroduction of slavery, which was first abolished in 1794, in the Napoleonic period. In 1991, Joséphine’s head was removed by some unidentified supporters of independence for Martinique, and it has never been replaced. The plinth of her statue has been daubed in red with Creole slogans demanding ‘Respect for Martinique’. Precisely how the head of a marble statue standing within earshot of a police station could be removed at night without anyone seeing or hearing anything is one of Martinique’s mysteries.
The streets of the little southern town of Rivière-Pilote tell a different story to those of Fort-de-France. A plaque in the rue du Marronage records the history of the runaway slaves or marrons who launched armed attacks on the white plantations.31 It explains: ‘In the Caribbean, some slaves fled to the hills and woods in order to rebel against slavery and to prepare for insurrection. This was marronage. The marron-blacks [les nègs-marrons] formed communities and organized themselves into small armies under the command of one leader in order to launch attacks on the plantations of the white masters so as to liberate their brothers and their country. Their heroic leaders included: Makandal, Boukman, Palmarès, Pagamé, Moncouchi, Simao, Secho . . .’
Nearby, a plaque in the rue des Insurrections anti-esclavagistes records the history of two centuries of slave rebellions. The French text reads: ‘Brought by force from Guinea, Senegal, Dahomey, Angola, etc., by French slavers, our Ancestors waged a fierce struggle for freedom from the very first days of their deportation and throughout the two hundred years of slavery: 1639, 1748, 1776. 1801: revolt in Le Carbet, led by Jean Kira, who raised the black and red flag. 1817: insurrection in St.-Pierre, organized by Molière. 1822: rising in Le Carbet. 1831: insurrection in St.-Pierre. 1833: revolt in Le Lorrain (formerly known as Grande Anse). May 1848: the slaves are victorious.’ It ends with an inscription in Creole: ‘Nég pété chenn’ (‘The black man broke his chains’). Slavery was abolished in the French colonies on 27 April 1848, but before the official decree reached Martinique, one final insurrection forced the governor to make a premature declaration of its abolition.32 That Fanon never mentions this insurrection, and believed that France simply granted her colonial slaves their freedom without a struggle,33 is a telling indictment of the history he was taught at school.
It is very unusual to see Creole inscribed in a public space, other than in the form of a graffitied ‘Wançais dewo’ (‘French out’). From 1946 onwards, Fort-de-France was the fief of Aimé Césaire, mayor, député, poet of negritude, former Communist and founder, in 1956, of the Parti Populaire Martiniquais; Rivière-Pilote is the stronghold of Alfred Marie-Jeanne, former teacher, mayor and founder, in 1972, of the small Mouvement Indépendentiste Martiniquais (MIM).34 In the general election of June 1997, Marie-Jeanne won the parliamentary seat of Le François and Le Robert with 64.07 per cent of the votes cast.35 It is probable that the vote reflected the popularity of an energetic mayor rather than active support for independence for Martinique, but Marie-Jeanne has been described by a political opponent as ‘the marron who slumbers in all of us’; he himself claims to be ‘one of those negroes that France despises so much’ and as ‘a great rebel before the Lord’.36 Two years later, Marie-Jeanne was elected president of the Regional Council, which made him one of the most powerful men in Martinique.37 For the MIM, Martinique is a colony, ‘politically dominated, economically exploited, culturally impoverished and militarily occupied’.38 It is Rivière-Pilote and not Fort-de-France that is home to the Bibliothèque Populaire Frantz Fanon, which houses a good collection of Fanon material. The guiding spirit behind the library project was of course Alfred Marie-Jeanne. The library and the small gallery associated with it are on the second floor of a building housing a number of community associations. The façade is decorated with a mural of an open book. The text is from Peau noire, masques blancs: ‘I do not want to sing the past at the expense of my present and my future. I want only one thing: an end to the enslavement of man by man, that is, to my enslavement by the other. May it be granted to me to discover and to will man wherever he may be.’39
Fanon seems quite at home in Rivière-Pilote but his memory remains rather marginal to Martinique as a whole. There is no ‘Fanonist’ party. The connection between Fanon and the supporters of independence is somewhat tenuous and Peau noire is not a pro-independence manifesto. His association with Martinican nationalism was at its strongest in the early 1960s, when, inspired by the Algerian Revolution and Fanon’s interpretation of it, a group of young students founded the Organisation de la Jeunesse Anticolonialiste de la Martinique (OJAM) and called on their fellows to join the struggle for the liberation of the island.40 OJAM’s leading members were arrested for ‘plotting against the State’ and put on trial in France. They were finally acquitted on appeal in April 1964.41
Neither the tiny Communist Party of Martinique nor Césaire’s much more powerful party can take full responsibility for Fanon’s Martinican eclipse, but it is true that neither has done a great deal to preserve his memory. In 1982, a ‘Mémorial International’ to honour Fanon was organized in Fort-de-France, but no political party supported or financed it. The members of the small ‘Cercle Frantz Fanon’ founded by Fanon’s childhood friend Marcel Manville had to rely upon public donations from the people of Martinique to finance it.42 A total of 200,000 francs was raised and the organizing committee brought speakers from twenty-five countries to Fort-de-France.43 Aimé Césaire did not attend the celebrations, but he did at least make municipal facilities available to the organizers.44 According to a somewhat optimistic commentator on nationalism in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the Mémorial marked the return to the people of the first heroes of a pantheon: the marron and Frantz Fanon.45 Not everyone agreed. In the course of a televised debate, members of the audience asked why so much publicity was being given to someone who had betrayed France and taken the side of the terrorists of the FLN in Algeria.46
The underlying reason for the – at best – ambivalence towards Fanon is captured by a rare Martinican review of Les Damnés de la terre:
The fact is that Fanon denounces with extreme rigour all the ugliness of old Europe’s policy of colonization, without ever taking into account what the France of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, republican and secular France, has done for the country he came from: the French West Indies, for Fanon is Martinican. It was as a result of his noble freedom as a free and independent Frenchman that he felt himself obliged to side with the FLN and to place his science and conscience at its service.47
There are still those in this Département d’Outre-Mer who regard Fanon as a traitor to the republican and secular France, of which it has been an integral part since 1946, when the former ‘old colony’ acquired the same constitutional status as Charente-Maritime or Seine-et-Marne. One of his nieces has remarked that it is ‘not easy’ to be a Fanon in Martinique,48 though it has to be said that the family is prosperous enough. When he visited Martinique for the first and last time, Olivier Fanon discovered that many Martinicans regarded his father as a pariah. When he produced his passport – he is by choice an Algerian national – he sensed a certain hostility even within his own family, and had the impression that he was in the same position as the son of a harki – an Algerian who fought on the French side in the war of independence – who had returned to Algeria.49 Others interested in Fanon have experienced more overt hostility. When his first biographer told his hotelier what he was working on, he was unceremoniously asked to find alternative accommodation. He discovered that none of Fanon’s works were on sale in Fort-de-France, and that booksellers refused to order them.50 Such hostility is now a thing of the past, and mention of an interest in Fanon provokes little more than polite indifference. Fanon’s books, or at least Peau noire, masques blancs and Les Damnés de la terre, are on sale in Fort-de-France’s few bookshops, where they are somewhat incongruously shelved alongside the ‘Creolist’ works of Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau in the ‘local interest’ section. There is no hint outside Rivière-Pilote that Fanon might possibly be regarded as a national hero.
The novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, who knew Fanon, describes the delighted reactions of the black American students who realized that he came from the same island as their hero, and then adds that years can go by without the author of Les Damnés de la terre being mentioned in even left-wing newspapers published in Martinique. He explains: ‘It is difficult for a West Indian to be Fanon’s brother or friend, or simply his comrade or “compatriot”. Because, of all the French-speaking West Indian intellectuals, he was the only one who matched action to words by espousing the Algerian cause.’51 The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar recalls with some amusement how her casual remark that she had known Fanon immediately raised her status in the eyes of black Americans.52 She would not have got the same reaction in his native Martinique. Speaking for a younger generation of Martinicans, Patrick Chamoiseau compares the memory of Fanon to that of the marrons. There were in fact relatively few marrons in Martinique, mainly because there are very few places to run to on an island with a surface area of only 1,080 square kilometres, but that does not diminish their importance for the collective memory of Martinique, as they are proof that the wretched of the earth can rise up. For Chamoiseau, who first read Fanon in his teens and at a time when he was influenced by the American black power movement, Fanon plays a similar role.53
There is no ‘Avenue Frantz Fanon’ in metropolitan France. Even though some psychiatrists who work with immigrants acknowledge, like Robert Berthelier, that Fanon’s clinical writings provide at least a starting point for reflections on transcultural psychiatry, no psychiatric institution in France bears his name.54 When Jacques Postel, who knew Fanon at medical school in Lyon, suggested that the journal Information psychiatrique should devote a special issue to reprinting a selection of Fanon’s papers, a number of his colleagues objected and muttered about the need to respect the memory of ‘our boys who died in Algeria’. It should be noted that Information psychiatrique has always been the most liberal of French psychiatric journals, and that Fanon published some important articles in it. And when Postel distributed a questionnaire to his psychiatry students at the Censier faculty in Paris, he discovered that whilst 95 per cent of them had heard of Fanon, only 5 per cent knew that he was a psychiatrist.55
It is not difficult to understand why Fanon has been largely forgotten in France, where there is now little interest in his work. Almost ten years after Fanon’s death, a critic noted that Fanon had been forgotten because France wanted to forget something else, namely a war in Algeria that lasted for eight years. France wanted to forget ‘one million dead, two million men, women and children in camps, police raids and torture in France and, at the same time, apart from rare fits of indignation, the passivity of the masses and the spinelessness of the entire Left’.56 It is of course difficult to remember something that never happened, and France has been slow to recognize that there was indeed an Algerian war. From 1954 onwards, peace was maintained in Algeria; police operations were undertaken; and rebels, terrorists and bandits were hunted down, but there was no war. Algeria consisted of three French départements, and a nation-state cannot declare war on part of its own territory. It was only in 1999 that France accepted that the Algerian war did take place and that references in legislative documents to ‘peace-keeping operations’ should be replaced by references to ‘the Algerian war’.57 The war, or ‘the war without a name’, has never been truly forgotten.58 There is an abundant literature on the subject, with new histories appearing at regular intervals. There is, however, no definitive ‘History’ and no public consensus as to the meaning of France’s actions in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. The issues of torture, of the fate of the harkis, of the tens of thousands of Algerian-born Europeans who were ‘repatriated’ to a France in which many of them had never set foot before 1962 and of just how many died when the police opened fire on Algerian demonstrators in Paris in October 1961 all remain bitterly controversial.59
The memory of Algeria is still an uneasy one. A stamp issued on 10 May 1997 commemorates the ‘French combatants’ who served in North Africa between 1952 and 1962, and thus blurs the differences between the Algerian war and the lesser conflicts that took place in Morocco and Tunisia. Even before it was issued, François Fillon, Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and Space, was at pains to stress that it did not commemorate the ceasefire of 19 March 1962.60 The names of the streets of Paris and other French cities provide a laconic account of important dates and names in French history. There is no ‘rue du 19 mars 1962’ in Paris, but there are streets and squares of that name in, for instance, a number of small towns in the Breton department of Finistère. Such names are testimony to the efforts of veterans’ associations anxious to ensure that their members do not become part of a forgotten generation. They have fought a long and difficult battle: it was only in 1974 that they were officially recognized as veterans and granted the appropriate pension rights.61 Whether or not French war memorials commemorate the memory of young men who died in Algeria depends upon the decisions – and the political complexion – of local councils, though they were informed as early as July 1959 that the names of France’s Algerian dead could join those of the victims of the two world wars and Indochina.62 Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was made in 1966, and won the Venice International Film Festival’s Grand Prix. It was a popular success in Algeria, but it was not until 1970 that it was granted a certificate for exhibition in France. Protests and threats of violence from veterans’ associations and groups representing the pied noir community forced the distributors to cancel the planned screening,63 and it was only in October 1971 that the film was finally shown in Paris. The memory of Frantz Fanon is therefore not a comfortable one. It is the memory of a black Frenchman from one of the old colonies who eventually spoke the defiant performative: ‘We Algerians’.64 Aimé Césaire puts it very simply: ‘He chose. He became Algerian. Lived, fought and died Algerian.’65 Such a man is not easy to remember in France.
Given his posthumous fame as a Third World revolutionary to be discussed alongside Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara or Vo Nguyen Giap, it is somewhat paradoxical to recall that Fanon was not particularly well known in his own lifetime. Editions du Seuil’s file on his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs, contains pitifully few reviews and not many of them are flattering. At the time of its author’s death, Peau noire had been out of print for years, and it was not reprinted until 1965. The articles Fanon wrote for the FLN’s paper El Moudjahid in Tunis between 1957 and 1960 were published unsigned, and few of their readers could have identified them as being by Kahn’s ‘pamphleteer from Martinique.’ It was only when they were reprinted together with other materials in 1964 that they were identified as being by Fanon.66 In response to Ernest Gellner’s sneering comment that Fanon had no influence in Algeria and was ‘for export only’, Eqbal Ahmad, the Indian political scientist who once worked with Fanon and who tends to overstate his impact upon Algerian politics, rightly points out that he was ‘barely known in “international literary-intellectual circles” until after his death at thirty-six’.67 The first French edition of Les Damnés de la terre, which by 1985 had sold 155,000 copies and had been translated into nineteen languages, sold only 3,300 copies in France – poor sales figures for what has come to be known as one of the classics of decolonization.68 It was the publication in 1965 of the American translation which turned it into a bestseller that was reprinted twice before it reached the bookstores and went through five paperback reprints within the space of a year.69
Jean-Paul Sartre’s notorious preface to Les Damnés de la terre introduced an inflammatory text and attracted more hostility than Fanon’s essay itself but did little to present its author, who remained an almost anonymous ‘African, man of the Third World and former colonial subject’ who happened to be a doctor.70 An obituary tribute to Fanon published in the Tunisian press adds to the air of mystery. It is by Maurice Maschino, one of the few young Frenchmen to have refused to serve with the French army in Algeria and to have chosen exile in Tunis, and the classic personification of the so-called ‘Algerian generation’.71 In some ways, the almost anonymous image of Fanon provides the basis for later identifications with and appropriations of Fanon, precisely because it is at once so ill-defined and so stereotypical. For Maschino:
Fanon is essentially a militant; more so than anyone else, he was what he did and existed in terms of his commitment – and the rest is of no consequence. Given that his existence merges into the fight he fought, the best tribute we can pay to our departed friend – or brother – is to evoke the continual struggle he waged, even as a young man, for freedom.
But how can we fail to see that the best way to kill Fanon is, precisely, to treat him as though he were dead. And that, what is more, we betray him – this man who never said ‘I’, who existed only through and for the revolution – if we make a front-page splash of elements of a biography which seem to turn this Algerian resistance fighter into a particular case (not everyone is a psychiatrist and not everyone was born in Martinique).72
Revolutionaries, it would seem, are destined for heroic anonymity. It is true that Fanon never gave a personal interview, but it is also true that in Peau noire, by far the most personal of his works, Fanon does say ‘I’ or, rather, that a variety of ‘I’s speak there. The anonymous integrity Maschino ascribes to Fanon easily becomes a source of confusion as to who and what he was. The militant was also a husband and a father, as well as a Martinican who enjoyed both the local rum and the beguine music of Alexandre Stellio, but he readily becomes an all-purpose revolutionary icon who can be transported anywhere and invoked in the name of any cause. Fanon’s complexity becomes obscured, and it is easily forgotten that the revolutionary psychiatrist – and it must be stressed from the outset that he was not a psychoanalyst – was also a clinician who worked well within the parameters of normal science and who, even as he was on the point of resigning his post and leaving Algeria, was conducting drug trials in time-honoured fashion.73
Maschino is a member of a generation who, faced with the prospect of a lengthy and potentially dangerous period of military service in a war they could not assume as their own, could find a new relevance in the opening words of Paul Nizan’s Aden-Arabie, first published in 1931 and republished in the spring of 1960: ‘I was twenty. I will never let anyone say that those are the best years of your life. Everything threatens a young man with ruin . . .’74 Nizan left the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in protest at the signing of the Soviet–German non-aggression pact of 1939 and was killed in May 1940 as the British unit with which he was serving as a liaison officer retreated towards Dunkirk. He was promptly denounced by his former comrades as a traitor who had always been a police spy. When Aden-Arabie was republished in 1960 with an angry preface by Sartre, Nizan became an important icon for those who, like Maschino, both supported the FLN and savagely criticised the French left, and especially the PCF, for its failure to lend any real support to the cause of Algerian independence.75 Aden-Arabie and Les Chiens de garde, which is its more philosophical companion volume, were calls to arms and critiques of the official philosophers whose very ‘humanism’ was a betrayal of a suffering and oppressed humanity: ‘Today’s philosophers still blush when they admit to having betrayed men for the bourgeoisie. When we betray the bourgeoisie for men, let’s not blush when we admit to being traitors.’76 For Sartre, Nizan was ‘the man who said “no” to the very end’; in 1960, it was no bad thing ‘to begin with this naked revolt: everything begins with a refusal’.77
‘Refusal’ [refus] was the title of Maschino’s autobiographical account of his desertion. Another deserter was quick to identify with Nizan, and explains why one of the tiny groups that actively supported the FLN by channelling its funds across the Swiss border took the name ‘The Nizan Group’: Nizan was ‘the name of Sartre’s friend, who had just been republished by Maspero. He said there was only one solution: betray the traitors.’78 Fanon never read Nizan’s words, but there is an almost uncanny similarity between Nizan’s call for the betrayal of the traitors and Fanon’s insistence in Les Damnés de la terre that the ‘national bourgeoisie’ must betray its own interests to remain true to the revolution. Nizan and Fanon briefly fused into a composite icon of total revolt.79 Significantly, both were published by François Maspero, whose young publishing house was, like the older Editions de Minuit, becoming a focus for opposition to the war. Maspero explains his decision to publish them as stemming from his early conviction that the colonial wars in Indochina and then North Africa were intolerable, and from his disillusionment with the orthodox left: ‘Nizan’s radical critique was directed against both the bourgeoisie (the same bourgeoisie that was sending us to fight in an unjust war) and what communism had become.’80
In France, the composite figure of Fanon–Nizan came to signify total revolt against French society and the PCF. For a tiny minority, Fanon also inspired a positive commitment to Algeria. Few young French people actually went to Algeria after the war, but Fanon was their inspiration. They read Fanon’s L’An V de la révolution algérienne and Les Damnés de la terre and were inspired to go along with the young Algerian republic as it took its first steps into what they thought was the socialist future.81 Juliette Minces, who went to Algiers to work on the Third Worldist journal Révolution africaine, describes in the preface to a collection of reprinted articles from that journal how a reading of Fanon inspired the conviction that Algeria’s long struggle for independence would inevitably produce a socialism that would work to the advantage of the wretched of the earth, and especially women and the poor peasantry. She also has to admit that this ‘lyrical enthusiasm’ was short-lived,82 as Algeria rapidly became mired in corruption and bureaucracy. As Maschino and his Algerian wife put it, their revolution had been confiscated.83 The promised liberation of the women of Algeria had not come about.84 On their return to France, these young people were dubbed ‘pieds rouges’ – a cruel pun on pieds noirs, the term used to designate the French population of Algeria, and particularly the defenders of French Algeria who finally fled when the prospect of independence offered them a grim choice between the suitcase or the coffin.
The period of what Minces calls ‘revolutionary Algeria’ represents the high tide of French Third Worldism, and Fanon helped to create that Third Worldism. A generation’s disillusionment with the orthodox left, and particularly with the Communist Party, coincided with the rise of nationalism in the Third World and gave birth to the belief that the emergence of new states there would create a new humanism or even a new socialism. Algeria, like Cuba, seemed to have a leading role in this process of rebirth.85 Disillusionment with Algeria, which soon came to look more like a sclerotic one-party despotism rather than a beacon of hope, and the ebb of Third Worldism, have brought about a decline in the French reputation of Frantz Fanon in France. When he is read, the readings are negative. In an essay which turns the ‘white man’s burden’ (le fardeau de l’homme blanc) into the ‘white man’s sob’ (le sanglot de l’homme blanc) and argues that there is no viable alternative to white European civilization, Pascal Bruckner claims that Sartre’s support for Fanon was no more than masochism, and argues that Fanon’s writings are based upon an analogy between the thesis that maturity is a form of decadence that has not lived up to its early promise and the adulation of the south, seen as the north’s only future.86 In 1982, former Maoist turned New Philosopher and anti-Marxist André Glucksmann could claim that Fanon was responsible for celebrating the ‘second wave’ of ‘planetary terrorism’ that came to Paris when a bomb exploded in the rue Mabeuf.87
As Third Worldism declined, former leftists found themselves in agreement with the author of The Closing of the American Mind, who, speaking at Harvard in 1988, described Fanon as ‘an ephemeral writer once promoted by Sartre because of his murderous hatred of Europeans and his espousal of terrorism’.88 By 1990, it had become possible to argue in the French press that ‘the recurrent theme of the noble savage who has been perverted by Western modernity and alienated by three-piece suits’ is a masochism that is ‘cultivated by the heirs of Frantz Fanon’.89 In 1962, these themes, and the underlying revisionism that suggests that colonialism was not so harmful, were those of the French right. So incensed by Les Damnés de la terre was one commentator that he reviewed it twice in different journals. With remarkable bad taste, he wrote: ‘In December, a mulatto from Martinique died of cancer in an American hospital, despite the efforts his doctors made to save him. Why did he ask the West he hated so much to prolong his life? His choice seems just as disturbing as his hatred, to judge by the written testimony he has left.’ In a second article, Comte opined that Fanon’s ‘brutal frankness and the pitiless hostility that screams in the mad darkness’ was reminiscent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.90 Three decades later, alarmingly similar views were being expressed by the liberal left. Alain Finkielkraut, for example, accused Fanon of reviving a ‘European’ and völkisch nationalism,91 even though the most striking feature of Fanon’s Algerian nationalism is that it does not define ‘the nation’ in ethnic or völkisch terms.
In 1990–1, a French sociologist was involved in a study of a deeply unpleasant but frighteningly articulate group of skinheads in Paris. Their racism was predictable, as was their apologia for violence. They were convinced that violence was the motor of history, and that ‘it is because we live in a degenerate society that people reject violence’. Their violence was, they claimed, a creative force, and it would help to create or recreate a nation. On hearing this, the sociologist was reminded of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, and then of Fanon.92
In Algeria, Fanon’s fate has been still stranger. His writings on revolutionary violence could be invoked by the fundamentalist Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) (Islamic Salvation Front) in its journal El-Mounquid to justify the wave of appalling violence that was visited on that country when the elections of 1992 were annulled after it won a majority in the first round. The FIS’s war was, it was argued, a continuation of the war against France, and the same redeeming violence had to be used to win it.93
One of the striking features of many of the tributes to Fanon that were published immediately after his death is the stress placed on his fundamental humanism. The negative emphasis on the theme of violence is probably a reflection of the American reception and of the way in which Fanon is read by Hannah Arendt in her book On Violence. She looks at Fanon’s influence on the violence that afflicted American university campuses in the 1960s, but fails to make any mention of Algeria.94 The small group that worked on Partisans, the classic Third Worldist journal published by Maspero, read him in a different way: ‘On reading his work, it was clearly obvious to those who help to edit Partisans that Frantz Fanon has given a new meaning to their thinking, their political actions and even their lives. For us, it is very simple: anyone who has in recent years read those pages that blaze with lucidity, inevitably finds born in them a new vision of men and a burning desire to take the dimensions of this vision into the future.’95
Outside France, the most familiar image of Fanon was for a long time that created in the United States, where Grove Press advertised Constance Farrington’s flawed translation of Les Damnés de la terre as ‘The handbook for a Negro Revolution that is changing the shape of the white world’:
Here, at last, is Frantz Fanon’s fiery manifesto – which in its original French edition served as a revolutionary bible for dozens of emerging African and Asian nations. Its startling advocacy of violence as an instrument for historical change has influenced events everywhere from Angola to Algeria, from the Congo to Vietnam – and is finding a growing audience among America’s civil rights workers.96
The book was reviewed very widely in the American press, usually in terms of warnings about James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’ syndrome. A reviewer writing for the Durham Morning Herald, and identified only as ‘C.B.’, compared Fanon’s book to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood on the grounds that both described the same hatred and despair, and turned them loose amongst the population at large. He or she went on to state that the wretched of the earth ‘are not communists. They are quite simply at the extremity of deprivation and despair, but surrounded by affluence. And there is a moral. If you have what it takes to be interested in the Feature Section of the Durham Morning Herald, chances are you’ve got what they want. If not a pile of milo, then a pile of something. Don’t knock the poverty programme; the life it saves may be your own.’97 Nat Hentoff put forward a similar argument in the New Yorker:
His arguments for violence are the most acute in current revolutionary theory . . . they are spreading amongst the young Negroes in American slums and on American lecture platforms. Those who are engaged in rebutting these precepts of violence (which includes arming for self-defence) ought to find his book a fundamental challenge, and for this reason, if for no other, Fanon should be read by the non-violent activists, and by people who are simply opposed to violence.98
William V. Shannon for the New York Times wrote, ‘The statements of H. Rapp Brown and other young radical Negro leaders are in accord with Fanon’s exalting of violence for therapeutic reasons.’99 At the opposite extreme of the political spectrum, a spokesman for the ‘counterculture’ could claim that: ‘The important literature now is the underground press, the speeches of Malcolm [i.e. Malcolm X], the works of Fanon, the songs of the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin.’100 Fanon was one of Stokely Carmichael’s ‘patron saints’,101 and Eldridge Cleaver could claim that ‘every brother on a roof top’ could quote Fanon.102 Unlike the French Third Worldists, most of Fanon’s American readers appeared not to have noticed that Les Damnés de la terre is, at least in part, a book about Algeria and not America. Carmichael seems not to have realized that his patron saint was simply not a black nationalist.
Further afield, similar images of Fanon as global theorist of revolution proliferated. It was argued that the war of liberation waged by FRELIMO in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique ‘verified’ Fanon’s theses about the cleansing and unifying function of violence.103 Visiting the office of a Palestinian organization in Amman in 1968, a journalist noticed a pile of books in the corner: Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Régis Debray’s Guevarist handbook on guerrilla warfare.104 In Cuba, a ‘Movimento Black Power’ flourished briefly at the end of the 1960s, and its members, who adopted ‘Afro’ hairstyles, met to discuss Fanon and other black writers. Most were arrested in 1971.105 In the Canadian province of Quebec, militants of the separatist Front de Libération Québecoise (FLQ) defined themselves as the ‘white niggers of North America’. One of the FLQ’s spokesmen wrote of himself that he was a ‘Québecois proletarian, one of America’s white niggers, one of the “wretched of the earth”’.106 Interestingly, he, like Maschino, invokes the composite Fanon–Nizan. Another spokesman for the FLQ argued that the Québecois’s use of the French language was the mark of his blackness, and that to speak French in front of an ‘Anglo coloniser’ was an act of self-decolonization to be described in Fanonian terms.107 It was, that is, assumed that an analysis made of the Algeria of 1959 could be transposed directly to the Québec of 1968: ‘Prior to 1954, speaking Arabic and rejecting French as both a language and a modality of cultural oppression was a privileged and day to day form of singularization, of national existence.’108
Two related processes are at work here. On the one hand, Fanon is being given an abstractly heroic status worthy of Maschino’s anonymous revolutionary. It is being forgotten that he was also ‘a particular case’. After all, Fanon was a psychiatrist and he was born in Martinique. On the other hand, the self-identification of civil rights workers, black power activists and Québecois separatists with Fanon’s wretched of the earth necessarily involves the misrecognition of exaggeration. In the United States, civil rights workers did encounter terrible violence and the protests of the Black Panthers did meet with armed repression. But they were not faced with General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Parachute Division and the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion. When Fanon speaks of ‘violence’, he is speaking of the French army’s destruction of whole villages and of the FLN’s bombing of cafés, or in other words of total war and not of limited low-level conflict. The extreme violence of the Algerian war was, fortunately, not reproduced in the United States or Canada. In some cases, the desire to be the wretched of the earth borders on the ludicrous, as members of the Parti National Occitan and Basque separatists claim Fanon as their patron saint,109 or when Breton Nationalists equate the black’s creation of negritude with the Breton’s construction of a ‘Breton personality’ and conveniently overlook Fanon’s comment that, whilst it is true that the Breton language was suppressed by a centralizing French state, its suppression was not the result of a black/white divide or of a white civilizing mission in a non-white country.110
For a short period after his death, Fanon was viewed as ‘the most original and articulate spokesman for a theoretical tendency which represents an important strand in the thinking of the Third World’.111 Some twenty years later, Les Damnés de la terre could be dismissed in France as ‘A dated work, a book of witness . . . Mao Tse-tung, Guevara, Fanon: three voices for a Tricontinental, fostering the illusions of a western youth that had been won over by a new Third-Worldist myth.’112 With the decline of Third Worldism, attention has shifted away from Les Damnés de la terre and back to Peau noire, masques blancs, which is more widely read now (at least in Britain and the United States) than at any time since its publication in 1952.113 The paradox is that, whilst Peau noire, masques blancs is read more and more intensely, fewer and fewer of Fanon’s other works are read at all.
The new interest in Fanon’s first book is a product of the emergence of post-colonial studies as a distinct, if at times alarmingly ill-defined, discipline. A canonical text defines the post-colonial field as comprising ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’.114 Despite the inclusive ‘all’, ‘culture’ effectively means ‘literature’ and the focus is inevitably on the English-speaking (or, more accurately, English-writing) world. Post-colonial theory developed in and around university departments of English and it is difficult not to see it as a continuation of English literature by other means. A ‘cultural studies’ approach to literature and an attempt to expand and challenge the canon reinforces, that is, the academic hegemony of ‘Eng. Lit’. Fanon is one of the very few non-Anglophones to be admitted to the post-colonial canon, and alarmingly few of the theorists involved realize – or admit – that they read him in very poor translations. The most obvious example of the problems posed by the translations is the title of the fifth chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon’s ‘L’Expérience vécue de l’homme noir’ (‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’) becomes ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The mistranslation obliterates Fanon’s philosophical frame of reference, which is supplied by a phenomenological theory of experience, but it also perverts his whole argument; for Fanon, there is no ‘fact of blackness’. The world is, in his view, experienced in particular ways by ‘the black man’ (sic), but that experience is defined in situational terms and not by some trans-historical ‘fact’. In 1995, London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) – obviously quite oblivious to translation problems – hosted a season of exhibitions, screenings and events inspired by Fanon’s writings; a year later, the related conference proceedings were published as The Fact of Blackness.115
The danger is that Fanon will be absorbed into accounts of ‘the colonial experience’ that are so generalized as to obscure both the specific features of his work and the trajectory of his life. Edward Said can cite Fanon and W. B. Yeats in a single paragraph.116 And whilst it is difficult to disagree with Homi K. Bhabha’s comment that the force of Fanon’s vision ‘comes . . . from the tradition of the oppressed, the language of a revolutionary awareness that, as Walter Benjamin suggests, “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule”’,117 it is startling to find that he makes no mention of Martinique. The argument that ‘one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks [is] that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master narrative that provides a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche’118 is no less jarring, though it is less alarming than a Fanon Critical Reader, which tells the reader that ‘In Fanon’s seventeenth year, Martinique was under occupation by the Nazis’.119 It was not. Growing up in Martinique was a very specific, even peculiar, ‘colonial experience’ and, whether or not one believes in the relevance of master narratives, Peau noire does provide an autobiographical background of social and historical facts. Fanon himself prefaces Peau noire, masques blancs by restricting the validity of his observations and conclusions to the French West Indies.120 Given that he never visited Guadeloupe, this can only mean that, whatever post-colonial theorists may say, Fanon himself thought he was writing about Martinique. There are times when it is advisable to ignore the proclamation of the ‘death of the author’ and to take authorial statements very seriously indeed.
The recent crop of books and articles – and one film121 – on Fanon contains very little that is of relevance to a biographer, not least because they construct a Fanon who exists outside time and space and in a purely textual dimension.122 Little will be said about them here. Although there are obvious exceptions – notably Françoise Vergès, whose essays on Fanon and psychiatry are very valuable123 – few of the authors concerned stray far away from the most familiar of his texts and appear to have consulted nothing produced by the FLN. Post-colonial theorists’ enthusiasm for Derrida and Lacan tends to blind them to Fanon’s debts to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, not to mention the similarities between his work and that of his contemporaries Albert Memmi and Jean Amrouche. In a way, the very sophistication of the post-colonial readings of Fanon is the source of their weakness. Such sophistication can co-exist with the crude empirical errors that put Martinique under ‘Nazi occupation’. Psychoanalytic readings of Fanon may or may not be valid in their own terms, but it is futile to try to turn Fanon into the psychoanalyst he was not or, like Bhabha, to read him as a black Lacan in the making. He was a psychiatrist working in a very specific and important tradition and in purely quantitative terms his papers on psychiatry greatly outweigh his scattered (and often muddled) allusions to psychoanalysis. Bhabha’s claim that there is no ‘master narrative’ in Peau noire, masques blancs has surely to be countered by the argument that there is most definitely a master narrative at work in L’An V de la révolution algérienne and Les Damnés de la terre. It is the narrative of the Algerian Revolution. It may be difficult to believe in it at the beginning of a new millennium, but Fanon did believe in it and died for it.
The ‘post-colonial Fanon’ is in many ways an inverted image of the ‘revolutionary Fanon’ of the 1960s. Third Worldist readings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs; post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that text and studiously avoid the question of violence. The Third Worldist Fanon was an apocalyptic creature; the post-colonial Fanon worries about identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity, but he is no longer angry. His anger was a response to his experience of a black man in a world defined as white, but not to the ‘fact’ of his blackness. It was a response to the condition and situation of those he called the wretched of the earth. The wretched of the earth are still there, but not in the seminar rooms where the talk is of post-colonial theory. They came out on to the streets of Algiers in 1988, and the Algerian army shot them dead. They have subsequently been killed in the thousands by authoritarian Algerian governments and so-called Islamic fundamentalists. Had he lived, Fanon would still be angry. His readers should be angry too.
Despite the inversion, there are constants in the presentations of Fanon, and not least a tendency towards hyperbole. The editors of Blackwell’s Critical Reader opine that Fanon was ‘one of the most influential figures in Third World revolutionary thought – equalled in influence only, perhaps, by Karl Marx’.124 Faced with such inflated claims, one can only wonder what became of Fidel Castro, Amilcar Cabral, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, General Giap and so many others. Hyperbole such as this does Fanon no favours and does not do him justice. It is exaggerations of this kind that prompted one of Fanon’s Algerian comrades, Mohammed Lebjouai, to remark: ‘Fanon is one of the greatest revolutionaries that Africa has ever known, and yet almost none of his theories proved to be accurate.’125 Lebjouai exaggerates too, but it is quite true that Fanon was often wrong – disastrously so when it came to analysing developments in Angola. Recognizing that Fanon could be – and often was – wrong is part of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called ‘the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon’.126 Resisting the temptations of hagiography, to which Fanon’s first biographer certainly surrendered, is part of the same process.127 A biography of Fanon must begin with the reconstruction of a dimension that has been erased from almost all accounts of his life.
The eradication of the specifically French and Martinican dimension of Fanon’s colonial experience has been a gradual process, and it began with Charles Lam Markmann’s seriously flawed translation of Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon refers at three points to an image of a grinning Tirailleur sénégalais (a black colonial infantryman) who is eating something from a billy can. He is saying ‘Y a bon Banania’, which is an advertising copy-writer’s idea of how an African says ‘C’est bon, Banania’. In the English translation, this becomes ‘Sho’ good’ and then ‘Sho good eating’.128 The tirailleur has become the caricatured black of the Deep South, and he is supposedly eating ‘some chocolate confection’.129 In the original, he is actually eating something very specific, and with specific connotations. Banania is a ‘breakfast food’ made from banana flour, cocoa and sugar that was first marketed in 1917. Posters of the tirailleur and his dish of Banania were still a familiar sight in the France of the 1940s and 1950s; the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor wanted to rip them down from all the walls of France.130 Such posters helped to convince the Fanon who went to study in France that he was not, as he had been taught to believe, a French citizen from Martinique who was just like any other French citizen, but a nègre who was no better than a colonial black. The Americanization of Fanon wrought by the translation thus erases a very specific dimension of his text. It also creates the categories of ‘the almost white, the mulatto and the black’; Fanon himself speaks of ‘la békaille, le mûlatraille et la négraille’.131 There were white colonialists in France’s black African colonies and in North Africa, but there were no békés there. The béké, the island-born white Creole descended from the original French planters, is unique to the French West Indies. Fanon’s Americanization can also take the grotesque form of the projection on to Europe of ‘racial’ categories specific to the United States, as when Lewis R. Gordon observes that ‘Arabs and North Africans are defined in the racial constructions that dominate the European world as Caucasian’.132 ‘Caucasian’ is not simply used in its American sense (i.e. ‘white’) in France; the Petit Robert dictionary defines caucasien as ‘from the Caucasus, the family of languages from the Caucasus region, including Georgian’. Arabs and North Africans are called many things in French – most of them appallingly insulting – but they are never called ‘Georgians’ or ‘Caucasians’.
The ‘Banania’ example relates to an aspect of colonialism that is specifically French and that can be incorporated into a broader colonial experience only at the cost of a serious loss of focus. A Senegalese like Senghor could react to the Banania poster with the same anger as a Martinican like Fanon. But Peau noire also contains phrases that no Senegalese could have written. Martinican mothers did not, as the translation would have it, ‘ridicule’ their children for speaking Créole; they called them ‘tibandes’ to remind them that they were ‘better’ than the little gangs ([pe]tites bandes’) of children who worked in the sugarcane fields, and should behave accordingly.133 At one point, Fanon uses the adverb ‘souventefois’,134 which looks to a French reader like either a misprint or a strange combination of souvent and maintes fois; it is simply the Creole version of souvent, or ‘often’. The Anglo-Americanized Fanon asserts, ‘And to declare in the tone of “it’s all my fault” that what matters is the salvation of the soul is not worth the effort’; the Martinican Fanon states that it is pointless to adopt ‘a “crabe-ma-faute” attitude’.135 In fairness to Markmann, it has to be said that the expression is almost untranslatable. Its literal meaning is ‘a my-fault-crab’, but in English the beast is known as a fiddler crab. Martinique’s fauna includes an extraordinary variety of crabs, and the crabe-ma-faute is a denizen of the mangrove swamps and other wet places that resembles a miniature armoured vehicle. One of its claws is much larger than the other, and the creature appears to be beating its chest and saying a mea culpa. Only a Martinican, or possibly a Guadeloupean, would use this expression. Fanon ‘lived, fought and died Algerian’, but he was also a product of French culture and French colonialism. He was also born a native son of Martinique.
