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Native Son

Martinique is not, remarks its finest contemporary poet and novelist, ‘an island in Polynesia’.¹ Whilst this statement may appear to be so self-evident as to be redundant, anyone who has encountered the density of Edouard Glissant’s poetry and prose will be aware that he was not a man given to stating the obvious. The questions ‘Where is Martinique?’ and even ‘What is Martinique?’ are not idle ones, and they are far from irrelevant to any understanding of Frantz Fanon. Fanon became Algerian or, to be more accurate, recreated and defined himself as Algerian, but he could eradicate neither the influence of the time and place of his birth nor the circumstances in which he grew up. His relationship with the island where he was born was complex and tormented but he was born on and of that island. In some respects, Fanon remained Martinican to his death.

For official purposes, Martinique is in France and its capital is Paris. In French atlases, especially those used in schools, the sheet depicting France often features three insets showing small islands that appear to float in either the western Mediterranean or the Western Approaches to the English Channel. Certain maps, including some on display in classrooms, adopt the same convention.² Perhaps it was one such atlas or map which, in the 1970s, inspired a Martinican schoolchild to write in an essay that the island on which she lived was surrounded by ‘the Ocean, the North Sea and the English Channel’. Or perhaps it was the geography lesson in which she learned about the nature of promontories and peninsulas by studying the example of Quibéron, which is in Brittany, and not that of the spectacular Caravelle peninsula, which was clearly visible from the window of her classroom in La Trinité.³

The small islands depicted in the insets are, respectively, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion. Martinique and Guadeloupe are in the Caribbean; Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Since 1946, all three have been Départements d’Outre-Mer, or ‘Overseas Departments’, of the French Republic and they have, at least in theory, exactly the same status as the départements of Loire-Atlantique or Seine-et-Marne. The fourth DOM is Guyane, which, being part of the Latin-American land mass and lying between Belize and Brazil, cannot easily be depicted in this manner and tends literally to be off the map. Unlike Martinique, Guadeloupe or Réunion, it is not a popular holiday destination and very rarely impinges upon the metropolitan consciousness, except insofar as it is remembered as the home of Cayenne pepper, as the launch site for the Ariane rocket or as a training base for the Foreign Legion. It is probably best known for its offshore islands. These include Devil’s Island, once home to the hellish penal colony where Alfred Dreyfus spent the years 1895–99 after having been unjustly found guilty of treason, and from which ‘Papillon’ (Henri Charrière) escaped; first published in 1969, his account of his escape was one of the bestselling popular adventure stories of the 1970s.⁴ None of the DOMs is in Polynesia, but French Polynesia is a Territoire d’Outre-Mer (Overseas Territory) with a slightly different legal status.⁵

School atlases and geography lessons are not the only sources of the confusion as to just where Martinique lies. The covers of the brochures for exotic holidays on display in French travel agencies are often illustrated with photographs of a palm-fringed beach and over-printed ‘Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, Tahiti’. The beach and the palm tree could be in any of these places, and the casual browser could be forgiven for believing that Martinique is in Polynesia. If it does describe Martinique or Guadeloupe in any detail, the brochure may speak of emerald conical peaks, a sapphire ocean and rivers of crystal, pink and white villas and picturesque bamboo huts. It will certainly describe the humming birds shimmering amongst the magnolia flowers. All these clichés are borrowed from an exoticist novel of the 1930s,⁶ but they still figure in today’s enticing descriptions of exotic holidays.

The very fact that France has DOMs is, according to official discourse, proof that the existence of a nation implies neither territorial continuity nor ethnic uniformity; their ‘assimilation’ into France in 1946 marked ‘an important stage in the formation of the French nation’, and allowed France to ‘reassert its rejection of the racist theories that had recently cost humanity so dear’.⁷ Assimilation, or ‘departmentalization’, was viewed as an alternative to colonization, or even an alternative form of decolonization.⁸ The DOMs have long been French, but they have not always been part of France. Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane are the last remnants of the transatlantic Empire that was established by the France of the ancien régime and then lost to Britain in the eighteenth century. These were the ‘old colonies’. Under the terms of the Franco-British peace treaty of 1763, France ceded Canada to Britain, and most of Louisiana to Spain, and withdrew from her Indian possessions. Guadeloupe and Martinique were briefly under British control in 1762, but then reverted to France. Apart from a brief British occupation in 1794–1802, Martinique has been a French possession ever since. The concessions that were made elsewhere by France are an indication of the importance of her Caribbean possessions. They were a source of valuable commodities, especially sugar; Canada, in contrast, consisted of ‘a few acres of snow’, as Voltaire so famously wrote in Candide.

Insofar as it figures at all in the official record, Martinique tends to be subsumed into the general category of Départements d’Outre-Mer/Territories d’Outre-Mer. It does not merit a separate entry in the annual survey of world events published by Le Monde and Editions Gallimard. To find a trace of anything that occurred in Martinique means searching through all the entries for the DOM-TOMs. The search is all too often fruitless. One could read Le Monde or any other French newspaper for a long time without realizing that Martinique is in France. Inclusion goes hand in hand with exclusion. Bookshops classify works by Martinican authors in a category of not-quite-Frenchness that shelves them next to the ‘North African literature’, even though the authors in question are, unlike Algeria’s Rachid Boudjedra or Rachid Mimouni, French citizens. The Centre Georges Pompidou’s Bibliothèque Publique d’Information in Paris follows the same convention: West Indian literature is, like writing from Québec, North Africa and the former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, regarded as a subset of the literature of Francophonie, a generic term applied to French-speaking communities around the world. Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992 but it is not shelved in the same section of the library as the novels of metropolitan Goncourt winners.⁹

Even as it is insisted that Martinique is French, it is hinted that it is not quite in France. This is not a purely literary question. There is abundant sociological evidence that citizens from Martinique and the other DOMs are widely regarded as ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreigners’ when they visit what is supposed to be their own country.¹⁰ It is not uncommon for the Martinican who arrives in Paris and asks a policeman for directions to be asked to produce his residence permit. On stammering that he is a French citizen from a DOM and therefore the holder of a French passport, he will be told: ‘You should have said you were a West Indian. How am I supposed to know? OK, on your way.’ The policeman has just noticed an Arab who is a shade too dark to be honest and loses interest in the Martinican.¹¹ This was Fanon’s experience too: ‘We [Martinicans] have often been stopped by police officers who have mistaken us for Arabs, and when they find out where we are from, they quickly apologize: “We know very well that a Martinican is not the same as an Arab”.’¹²

Even the armchair traveller who never leaves Paris quickly senses that there is something particular about this integral part of France. The Institut Géographique National map (sheet 3615 of the Editions spéciales de l’IGN) he or she has bought from the specialist Le Vieux Campeur bookshop in the rue du Sommerard features a symbol that is not to be found on a map of any metropolitan département. It is a stylized cock, and signals the site of a ‘Gallodrome’, known in Martinique as a pitt (from the English ‘cock pit’). Cock-fighting is a popular entertainment, and the birds are sometimes also pitted against poisonous snakes. The bets are high and large sums of money change hands. This would be illegal in metropolitan France. Guidebooks also give the impression that Martinique is a rather strange part of France. No Parisian visiting Brittany or the south coast of France needs to be reminded that it is inadvisable to use the familiar pronoun tu – which is usually reserved for children, relatives and close friends – when addressing a waiter or barman. Guidebooks to Martinique do have to warn visitors from la métropole against infantilizing its black French citizens with an over-familiar tu. The guidebooks do not point out the other uses to which tu can be put; when the policeman asks the ‘Martinican who looks like an Arab’ for his papers, he addresses him as ‘tu’. When Fanon was completing his medical studies in Lyon, he was a decorated and wounded war veteran. He was also black. The examiner presiding over his oral examination initially addressed him as ‘tu’, and patronizingly asked him what topic he would like to be examined on. No white student would have been addressed in this fashion. Fanon chose a subject at random, and was awarded five marks out of ten instead of the nine he thought he deserved. He later told Simone de Beauvoir: ‘But he called me vous.’¹³

Martinique is one of the Windward Islands and part of the Lesser Antilles chain of islands stretching from Grenada to St Kitts. It is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and by the Caribbean Sea to the west. With a surface area of only 1,000 square kilometres, Martinique is so small that nowhere is more than sixty kilometres from the capital, Fort-de-France. This does not make for easy communications. The transport network centres on Fort-de-France and the easiest way to go from Le Robert on the Atlantic coast to Le Carbet on the opposite side of the island is to make a detour via the capital. When Fanon lived in Martinique, transport was poor and roads, especially in the north, were often blocked by landslips and mud slides. Despite its small size, the island’s terrain is very varied, and its flora rich and diverse. Its mammalian fauna is relatively poor, largely because of the predatory talents of the mongoose which was introduced in a vain attempt to control the snake population. The mongoose quickly learned that there were many easier things to kill than snakes, and the highly venomous fer de lance viper (Bothrops atrox.) reproduces with impunity in the damp forests despite the financial rewards on offer for bringing in a dead specimen. There is no truth in the story that the snakes, which are an endemic species, were introduced to dissuade slaves from running away from the plantations but, although rarely glimpsed, they are greatly feared, so much so that the fer de lance is not spoken of as such: it is ‘la bête longue’ (‘the long animal’).

In the north of Martinique, the rainfall is heavy and the slopes of the precipitous mountains are clad in the vestigial remnants of a rain forest; the west and particularly the south are much drier and water is in short supply. Most of the terrain is hilly and the rolling volcanic mornes are its most distinctive feature. The island is dominated by the peak of Montagne Pelée (1,250 metres). The volcano is dormant, but far from extinct. Although a child in La Trinité can still be asked to produce essays on ‘My Village in Autumn’ or ‘Christmas in the Snow’,¹⁴ Martinique has only two seasons: the dry and warm Carême (literally Lent) from December to June, and then a hotter season (hivernage) with heavy rain and occasional cyclones. Fanon does not describe his lessons in meteorology, but he does describe what happens when ten-to fourteen-year-olds in Martinique are asked to describe what summer holidays mean to them: ‘They reply like proper little Parisians: “I like holidays because I can run through the fields, breathe fresh air and come back with rosy cheeks”.’¹⁵

French representations of Martinique defy physical geography, and the syllabus taught in Martinique can ignore elementary climatology. The educational system treats history in cavalier fashion too. Unless a particularly committed teacher introduces an option in ‘local’ history, the history taught in schools is that of metropolitan France and its succession of revolutions and republics, and not that of Martinique itself.¹⁶ In ideological terms, this history has been described as serving mainly to legitimize the position of the tiny white minority by stressing the importance of their metropolitan origins, no matter how tenuous the links may actually be, whilst implying that the black majority has no history worth recording.¹⁷ Even locally produced histories tend to rely upon a Francocentric chronology.¹⁸ Fanon’s comments on history in colonial societies in Les Damnés de la terre refer to the Third World in general, but they echo the lessons he learned as a child in Martinique. It is the colonist who makes history and ‘The history he writes is not the history of the country he is stripping, but the history of his own nation as it plunders, rapes and starves.’¹⁹ An alternative history is being created in Martinique, but it is the creation of novelists and poets rather than professional or academic historians. Edouard Glissant proposes a chronology divided into seven periods: the slave trade; the world of slavery; the plantation system; the emergence of the elite and of towns; sugar-beet’s victory over cane-sugar; assimilation; possible annihilation.²⁰ Patrick Chamoiseau divides the history of Martinique into five ages: the age of ajoupas (shelters) and longhouses; the age of straw; the age of crate wood; the age of asbestos; and the age of concrete.²¹ Raphaël Confiant retells the story of Martinique during the Second World War in distinctly unofficial terms, and that of the serious riots that broke out in 1959 after an apparently trivial incident in which a white incomer’s car collided with the Vespa scooter owned by a black docker; the latter story is also told by Vincent Placoly.²² These were the riots that inspired Fanon’s final article on Martinique.²³

Martinique was ‘discovered’, as the Eurocentric tradition has it, by Columbus in the fifteenth century, but it was only in 1635 that it was claimed for France by Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, the conquistador whose heroic statue – erected in 1935 to mark the tricentenary of the French presence and not a masterpiece of public statuary – looks out to sea from Fort-de-France’s waterfront. The original European colonizers had shown little interest in Martinique, as it soon proved to have no reserves of precious metals. They were also wary of the inhabitants. The Caribs, who knew the island as Madinina,²⁴ were not the aboriginal people of Martinique. They had migrated from Latin America and decimated the earlier population of Arawaks. The Caribs had a reputation for being good warriors, and were also said to be cannibals. ‘Cannibal’ is derived from ‘Carib’, as is the name of Shakespeare’s Caliban. Although the flesh-eating Carib figures prominently in literary accounts of the region, no one ever met one. As Marina Warner, a specialist in cultural mythologies, remarked in her 1994 Reith Lectures: ‘Like the gold which he [Columbus] was certain was always around the next headland, it was always the tribe over the next ridge who were feasting on human flesh. Columbus left the myth of cannibalism thriving, but no account of the practice.’²⁵ Carib resistance was overcome by European weaponry, and according to legend many committed suicide by jumping from cliffs rather than be enslaved by the French. The cliff between St Pierre and Le Prêcheur on the Caribbean coast is still known by the alternative names of ‘The Coffers of Death’ or ‘Tomb of the Caribs’. Little trace or memory of the pre-colonial culture of Martinique remains. There are only some artefacts in museums, a few place names, and mysterious carved rocks in certain of the forests.

Under the colonial system that developed from the seventeenth century onwards, the role of the West Indian colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue (now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was defined with brutal clarity. Their sole raison d’être was to supply the metropolis with tropical produce. They were not expected to develop an economy of their own or to accumulate wealth in their own right. Trade with countries other than France was forbidden by law. The initial work of colonization was undertaken mainly by engagés, or indentured labourers, recruited from France’s Atlantic seaboard, who worked in conditions of near-slavery; it is no semantic accident that engagé can also refer to someone who has signed a pact with the devil and exchanges temporary wealth or material advantage for eternal torment. The economy based upon cotton, tobacco, indigo and coffee was not a success. Sugar, introduced in the late seventeenth century, was to prove the source of the wealth of Martinique’s planters, and the success of the island’s dependent economy was driven by the rising European demand for a luxury that was increasingly becoming part of everyday life. Like the British ports of Bristol and Liverpool, French cities such as Bordeaux and above all Nantes grew wealthy on the Atlantic trade and the traffic in slaves that supported it. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Martinique’s economy was based almost exclusively on sugar, but the industry began to decline in the fifth of Glissant’s ages, when it was faced with competition from the sugar-beet that was and is intensively farmed on the plains of northern France. Rum replaced sugar as the island’s prime export. Although it is still grown, sugar is now of minimal importance to the economy of Martinique, whose only real export crop is now the banana. Martinique’s plantations are relatively small and the island’s banana growers find it difficult to compete with the giant American-owned plantations in Latin America. The future looks grim.

Tobacco could have been easily produced by independent small-holders, but the production of sugar required both a high level of initial capital investment and a large labour force. The labour force came from West Africa. In 1664, it was estimated that Martinique had a white population of 2,904 and a black population of 3,158; by the middle of the next century, the total population was over 56,000.²⁶ It was not the white population that grew at this pace. In the eighteenth century alone, merchants from Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Le Havre and St Malo fitted out a total of 2,800 ships for the triangular trade that took European trade goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and sugar back to their home ports.²⁷ During that century, over one million black Africans were transported to the sugar islands. The casualty rate was high: a death rate of 5 to 15 per cent was regarded as commercially acceptable and calculations of profit were made accordingly. Malaria, yellow fever, poor food and bad water could take an appalling toll on the hundreds of slaves forced into the between-decks of a ship with a length of sixty-five feet and a beam of nineteen feet.²⁸ The memory of the slave trade has not faded. Writing of it in 1955, Glissant puts it thus: ‘They nailed a people to rated ships, sold, rented and bartered flesh. Old people for small change, men for the sugar harvests, women for the price of their children. There is no more mystery and no more daring: the Indies are a market in death; the wind proclaims it, blowing full on the prow.’²⁹ The plantation system required continual imports of new slaves, as the mortality rate in the French colonies was always higher than the birth rate; working conditions were so harsh, and nutrition so poor, that the slave population did not reproduce itself. A form of resistance may also have had an impact on demographic rates on the plantations, and folk memory recalls that some women would rather use abortifacents than give birth to children destined for slavery.

The slave economy was tightly regulated by the so-called ‘Code noir’, which was adopted in 1685 and revised in 1724; it remained in force until 1848.³⁰ The code was harsh and governed every aspect of daily life. The punishment for striking a master or a member of his family, assault on free men and the theft of livestock was death. A slave who ran away had his ears cropped and was branded with a fleur de lis on one shoulder; if he made another attempt to escape, his hamstrings were cut and he was branded on the other shoulder. The punishment for a third attempt to escape was death and no appeal against the sentence was possible. Slaves were commodities and did not enjoy property rights. The Code noir also gave slave-owners certain obligations. Under the terms of Article 22, every adult slave had to be given food rations including ‘two pounds of salt beef, three pounds of fish or its equivalent’. Relatively little land could be spared for stock-breeding and Martinique’s inshore fishing grounds were not rich. The island therefore began to import food. The staple of the slave’s diet was salt cod imported from Canada and New England. It was a good source of both protein and salt. The trade provided a new outlet for Martinique’s rum and molasses; fishermen in the far north were happy to accept rum in exchange for their lowest-quality cod, which they could never have sold in Europe. That this was technically illegal – the British Molasses Act of 1733 imposed heavy duties on molasses from the non-British islands – did little to prevent the flourishing trade.³¹ Supplemented by locally grown fruit and vegetables, this restricted diet was just enough to sustain life on the plantations. Salt cod – the ‘saltfish’ of the English-speaking Caribbean – is still an important ingredient in the Creole cuisine of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Sugar production was not a difficult process. Pieces of stalks from mature canes were placed in shallow holes, covered in earth and left to germinate in the rich volcanic soil. Within fifteen months, the new crop was ready for harvesting. The harvest involved everyone. The cane was cut by teams of men wielding machetes (the local name is coutelas, meaning cutlass, and this instrument of daily labour became a deadly weapon in times of revolt) and tied into bundles by women known as amarreuses (from the verb amarrer: ‘to tie down’, ‘to make fast’). Gangs of young children – the tibandes – cleared up anything that was left. The bundled cane was then taken to the mill to be crushed. The mills were driven by either animals, water or wind-power, and the cane was fed into rollers to extract the sweet juice. The juice was boiled a number of times to remove impurities and then left to crystallize; the final process of refining rarely took place in Martinique itself. The syrup was also distilled locally to produce an aromatic, and very strong, rum. A much cruder variety of white rum known as tafia was distributed to the slaves who produced it. All this is still part of Martinique’s collective memory and it was part of Fanon’s memory too.

For the planter, the beauty of the system was its simplicity and economy: the crushed stalks could be burned to fire the boilers, and the waste products could be fed to the animals that powered the mills. Although animals were gradually replaced by other forms of motive power, the actual production process has changed little. Small vans equipped with miniature mills (either operated manually or driven by portable generators) to crush cane and extract the sweet juice are still a common sight at the points where minibuses that serve as collective taxis (taxi-pays) congregate to wait for passengers. It is a refreshing drink and a popular one. The production of sugar posed no great technical problems, but the work in the fields was brutally hard, especially at harvest time. The fires lit to clear the undergrowth and to drive off snakes created a suffocatingly hot and dusty atmosphere. Some cane is still cut by hand. Unlike their ancestors, who worked barefoot, the modern cutters wear rubber boots, gloves and face-masks. As the shade temperature regularly reaches 30C in Fort-de-France, it is difficult to imagine what the temperature must be in a cane field that is exposed to the sun but sheltered from the wind, and where a fire is burning. It was the slave societies of the Caribbean that gave birth to the myth of the zombie, or the soulless corpse, that is revived by witchcraft and set to work in the cane fields. It is a fitting myth: working in the fields was a form of living death.

Slavery was abolished by the French Convention in 1794 (at which date Martinique was in British hands) but was re-established by Napoleon in 1802. Abolition finally came in 1848. The abolition of slavery was commemorated in somewhat muted fashion in April 1998. Philately provides a curious index of just how quiet the celebrations were. A single stamp was issued to mark the 150th anniversary of abolition; a whole set was issued to mark the World Cup that was hosted by France that summer. President Chirac described abolition as a form of ‘integration’ and went on to state that the ‘open and generous attitude’ it implied had allowed France to ‘welcome and integrate into the national community successive generations of men and women who have chosen to settle in our land. In return, those men and women, who have a rich culture, a rich history and rich traditions, have given new blood.’³² There was no mention of the equally ‘rich history’ of slave revolts, and abolition was represented as France’s gift to her old colonies. It was forgotten that slavery had already been abolished in 1794. Towards the end of Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon defiantly states: ‘I am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.’³³ In 1998, his words were invoked by the French Ministry of Culture,³⁴ which presented 1848 as a radical break with a racist past. The posters on the walls of French cities depicted a ‘rainbow coalition’ of children and young people and the legend ‘All born in 1848’.³⁵ The whole point of Fanon’s book is that racism was not abolished in 1848. When he refused to be defined as the slave of the slavery that dehumanized his forefathers, he was not asking the white world to feel guilty about ‘the past of my race’,³⁶ but he was refusing to be defined by that past. Peau noire, masques blancs does not end with a plea for racial equality but with a Sartrean bid for total freedom as a radicalized consciousness leaps into a future that escapes all ethnic determinations.

The commemoration also marked another anniversary that could scarcely be celebrated. It was in 1848 that Algeria was officially declared to be an integral part of France. Victor Schoelcher was the architect of the decree that abolished slavery in the name of the republican principle of assimilation; he justified the annexation of Algeria by referring to the very same principle.³⁷ Colonization does not depend solely upon slavery; there are other ways of dehumanizing men and women. Nothing of this was mentioned – or could be mentioned – in April 1998.

The plantation system outlived the abolition of slavery, which was not accompanied by any land reform. Writing in 1843, the great liberal Aléxis de Toqueville had argued that: ‘Whilst the Negroes have the right to become free, it is undeniable that the colonials have the right not to be ruined by the Negroes’ freedom.’³⁸ The colonials’ ‘right not to be ruined’ ensured that they were compensated for the loss of their property, and that the plantations remained intact. Whilst some freed slaves acquired land of their own – usually on higher and less fertile ground – and some drifted into the expanding towns, many were obliged to become rural wage-earners working on the plantations. Martinique began to develop a dual and lopsided economy. The white-owned plantations produced sugar for export, while freed black slaves engaged in food production on a scale that made individual families self-sufficient but could not feed the whole population. Martinique continued to import food. From 1858 onwards, the labour of the black plantation workers was supplemented by that of bonded labourers brought in from France’s enclaves in India, most of them Tamils from Pondicherry.³⁹ Known as coulis, they and their descendants became the most despised sector of the population.

Born in 1928, Edouard Glissant is the son of a géreur (a ganger who organized the workers who cut the cane) and often accompanied his father to the plantations. Writing in 1958, he described the system he saw as a boy, and which still existed:

The agricultural workers are the prisoners of a system developed over a period of three hundred years. Each habitation is a social unit and is independent. The shacks belong to the owner, and he also owns a shop which has all the products anyone wants. The money that is given to the workers is immediately spent in the shop. The economy is a closed circuit. If a worker refuses to accept these working conditions, he is black-listed and cannot find work anywhere else.⁴⁰

The cyclical nature of sugar production means that it cannot provide employment throughout the year, and the regular periods of enforced semi-idleness encouraged reliance on credit and a neverending cycle of debt. A form of unofficial debt-bondage replaced institutionalized slavery. Even when work was available, the plantation worker of the 1950s had to work for up to four days to cover his most basic needs.⁴¹

The abolition of slavery made the freed slaves French citizens and gave them the right to vote, but not necessarily the ability to exercise that right. Many were indifferent to politics and economic insecurity made them all vulnerable to pressure. Those who rented land were in a particularly difficult position. Many families in Martinique have stories about the great-uncle or grandparent who was driven from his shack and kitchen garden because he had offended a planter by disobeying an order or voting the wrong way in a local election. The memory of the béké on horseback and with a whip in his hand is a powerful and intimidating figure in the Martinican imagination. And that memory is part of the Fanon family’s collective memory too. Fanon’s brother Joby still speaks bitterly of a grandfather who was driven off his patch of rented land by just such a figure.⁴²

A béké is a white Creole born in the Caribbean, or a descendant of one of the original settler-planters. ‘Creole’ derives from the Spanish criollo and was originally used to describe anyone born in Latin America or the Caribbean islands, regardless of their race. The origins of the word béké are obscure, but it is usually held to derive from an Ibo word meaning both ‘white’ and ‘foreigner’. The békés have been a small minority ever since slave times, and have never numbered more than 2,000. Writing in 1937, Victor Coridun, a minor poet and songwriter from Martinique, described their power, which was quite disproportionate to their numbers:

The whites of Martinique . . . own eight tenths of the land and all that it produces. In their deliberately closed and clenched hands, they in fact control every aspect of production and manufacture. Basically, they have their hands on all the control levers. The levers that control the economy: factories and shops, banks, bazaars and distilleries; the levers that control politics: parliamentarians and others, elected politicians, powerful men at the bottom and powerful men at the top; the levers that control society: the churches, charitable works and mutual aid organizations.⁴³

When he briefly visited Martinique in 1941, the surrealist poet André Breton met a béké named Aubéry: ‘the master of the biggest rum distillery in Martinique . . . the supreme expression of the feudal system that anachronistically prevails in Martinique: all the plantations, factories and shops are in the hands of a few families who have been there since the conquest; they make up a real de facto dynasty and jealously ensure that their prerogatives and privileges are preserved’.⁴⁴ The name Aubéry is still one to be reckoned with in Martinique.

In 1950, the anthropologist Michel Leiris estimated that some four-fifths of the land was owned by ‘big white landowners with a feudal mentality’,⁴⁵ and in a major study of contacts between civilizations in Martinique and Guadeloupe commissioned by UNESCO, he describes them as living in a closed, endogamous society, and as being both parochial-minded and clannish.⁴⁶ Their refusal to invite into their homes in the rich quarter of Didier, which is in the hills above Fort-de-France, the blacks with whom they worked quite happily during the day was legendary; marriage between a black and a béké was unthinkable.⁴⁷ A Martinican politician quotes a béké as saying that ‘If a mulatto married an English princess, we would be very happy for both him and the country; but we would be very upset if he married one of our girls. That really would be the end of an era.’⁴⁸ Needless to say, this did not prevent male békés from having sexual relations with black or mulatto women. According to Fanon, it was rumoured that the head of the Aubéry clan had had almost fifty children by such women.⁴⁹ Ownership of most of the best land was not the only key to continued béké dominance; the foundation of the privately owned Crédit Martiniquais bank in 1922 gave the ethno-class a stranglehold on credit and finance too. Like most of the sugar industry, it was – and is – controlled by a handful of families who intermarried over the generations to produce a tightly knit oligarchy.

The ideological self-perception of the béké is well expressed in two novels that appeared in 1989 and 1991. Marie-Jeanne de Reine is herself a Martinican-born békée, and her La Grande Békée and its sequel Le Maître-Savane tell the story of a woman’s struggle to recreate and preserve a plantation destroyed by the eruption of Montagne Pelée in 1902. They combine elements of family saga, romance, exoticism and popular history. The first volume is dedicated – quite possibly uniquely – to ‘All the great békés: those who have existed, and those who still exist.’ In the second volume, Fleur Mase de la Joucquerie, who is the eponymous grande békée, tells her French-born grandson: ‘Remember that the blood of your pioneer ancestors runs in your veins. They did not hesitate to leave their peaceful lands in Poitou three hundred years ago, and to come here to build a new world. We békés are like that, capable of dropping everything to go somewhere else to build something.’⁵⁰ As in so many myths of empire, the master – or in this case the mistress – simply forgets that it was the slave who laboured in the cane-fields. Fanon was to encounter the same mythology in Algeria: ‘The colon makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: “This land is a land that we have made”.’⁵¹

Jaham’s proud reference to blood and landed estates in France points to a major theme in béké mythology, but it is unlikely to be grounded in reality. Martinicans take a malicious glee in pointing out that the ancestors of the white minority are more likely to have been whores and vagabonds from the slums of the Atlantic ports than aristocrats.⁵² The existence of some békés-goyaves (guava-békés, or poor whites) also tends to undermine aristocratic pretensions, whilst the insistence on the metropolitan origins of the békés masks some odd contradictions. Pride in being French goes hand in hand with a resentment of metropolitan dominance and metropolitan institutions. The expression béké-France, as applied to metropolitans living in or visiting Martinique, is not a flattering one. Hostility to the ban on free trade with countries other than France during the early colonial period found expression in periodic planter revolts, and the békés have not always been averse to greater independence from France. They were not supporters of assimilation in 1946, and their enthusiasm for the wartime Vichy regime established on the island might be described as a final planter revolt intended to seize back the political power that had gradually been acquired by the black-mulatto middle class. The power of the béké has in fact always depended upon the existence of the French market, and sometimes on more direct intervention. In the mid-1990s, the Crédit Martiniquais found itself in serious difficulties as it was faced with a steep rise in bad debts. State intervention was necessary to save the private institution, which survived at the expense of French tax-payers.⁵³

The main effect of the békés’ concern with the supposed purity of their blood line has been on the non-white population. In the eighteenth century, Moreau de St.-Méry, a white planter with philosophical leanings, elaborated a taxonomic table that distinguished between no fewer than 128 categories of ‘mixed blood’.⁵⁴ The heritage of such taxonomies is the extraordinary ‘shadism’ that is part of everyday life, and the problems with identity that are so central to Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. Complex distinctions made on the basis of degrees of pigmentation are still commonplace: a chabin has reddish hair, and sometimes blue eyes; a câpresse is a woman with long wavy hair and cinnamon-coloured skin. A mulatto woman has long silky hair, whilst an ‘African’ has crinkly hair and will, if he is particularly dark-skinned, be said to be ‘blue’. A sociometric study of the racial attitudes of school-children carried out at the beginning of the 1970s showed that there was a close correlation between skin colour and perceived social status. Children who assumed that one of their fellows was of higher social standing regularly described him or her as lighter-skinned.⁵⁵ The children’s perception of skin colour was found by this study to intersect with a sharp sense of socio-economic differentiation which can distort the stereotyping; as proverbial wisdom has it, a rich negro is a mulatto, but a poor mulatto is a negro.⁵⁶ This ‘shadism’ was originally overdetermined by economics and property relations: wealthy mulattos owned black slaves and treated them no better than the béké. In 1998, both Le Monde and Libération sent journalists to Martinique to investigate the ‘heritage’ of slavery. The eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds they interviewed told stories that could have been told by Fanon. A young woman identified as ‘Jeanne’ said that it was commonplace for parents to warn their daughters against going out with black boys because their ‘babies would have crinkly hair’. The twenty-year-old Jean-Philippe, who described himself as a métis (‘half-caste’), complained that he often had the impression that the girls who went out with him did so only because they could not find a white boy.⁵⁷

The Martinique described by Fanon in Peau noire is obviously not today’s Martinique, but some things have not changed. Even though the rate of unemployment runs at about 30 per cent (and reaches 60 per cent in some areas), subsidies from France ensure a level of prosperity that is higher than that of the other islands of the Eastern Caribbean. Yet underlying attitudes seem surprisingly constant. Just like the heroines of Mayotte Capécia’s novels, which were so despised by Fanon, the adolescent girls interviewed by Michel Giraud still dreamed of marrying white husbands, and saw such a marriage as a form of social promotion. In that sense, they were still negrophobic.⁵⁸ The use made of the terminology of shadism is complex and even confusing. Terms like nègre can be used both as a compliment and as an insult, depending on who is speaking, and to whom. To complicate matters, the Creole equivalent (nèg) can be used to mean simply ‘man’ or even ‘friend’, as in Awa nèg (‘Don’t count on me, man’) or Sé nèg-an-mwen (‘He’s my pal’).

It is by no means easy to trace the genealogy of a black or mulatto family from Martinique.⁵⁹ Family trees that can be traced as far back as the abolition of slavery in 1848 disappear into the relative anonymity of servitude and then into the lost African past that preceded it. Names and dates become confused. Documents in the possession of Fanon’s uncle and research carried out by his brother Joby make it possible to trace an outline family history back to the 1840s, but no further. The origins of the very name ‘Fanon’ are obscure, but it can be reasonably assumed that it was given by a master to an African slave brought to Martinique at some forgotten date. This would not have been unusual. Fanon’s friend Marcel Manville was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that his surname derived from ‘Mandeville’, which is the name of both a village in Normandy and a family from that region.⁶⁰ The Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, Le Havre, Nantes and La Rochelle were the main centres for the slave trade, and many Martinican names do appear to originate in Normandy and Brittany. There does not, however, appear to be any great concentration of Fanons there. The family history therefore begins in Martinique in the 1840s.

Fanon’s great grandfather was the son of a slave of African origins and was said in 1842 to be a nègre à talent, or in other words ‘a negro with a trade’. He owned some land in the area around Le Robert on the Atlantic coast, where he grew cocoa, and must therefore have been a free man. In 1848, his wife stated to the authorities that she was a ‘free negress’, and she was therefore either the daughter of manumitted slaves or had herself been granted her freedom prior to abolition. Their son Jacques-Bernardin was born in La Trinité, another small settlement on the Atlantic coast, and married Françoise Vindil, born in 1857. They too were small farmers, and had six children. Born in 1891, Félix Casimir married Eléanore Médélice, who came from Le Vauclin, some thirty kilometres to the south of La Trinité. Eléanore’s origins were, according to the Fanon family’s collective memory, more exotic than her husband’s. She was, it is said, an illegitimate child of mixed race, and her white ancestors came from Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, having been forced to leave their native Austria as a result of religious persecution. The name ‘Frantz’ is believed by members of the family to allude to the distant Alsatian strand in his ancestry. Like many of their generation, Casimir and Eléanore drifted away from the land. After working at a number of different trades, he entered the customs service as an inspector in Fort-de-France; she opened a shop selling hardware and drapery. This was not unusual; civil servants had regular salaries, but were not well paid and the small retail sector was largely a female province.⁶¹ The upward social mobility of Frantz’s parents was parallelled by that of his two uncles: Edouard became a schoolteacher, whilst Albert worked for the Office des Eaux et Forêts, which is France’s equivalent of the Forestry Commission.

If there is a dominant image of a childhood spent in pre-war Martinique, it is probably that enshrined in Joseph Zobel’s popular novel La Rue des cases-nègres (Black-Shack Alley; the US title is Sugar-Cane Alley), first published in 1955 and long banned because of its brutal portrayal of rural Martinique. Often described as a classic of Francophone literature, the novel gained a new popularity – and an international audience – thanks to Euzhan Palcy’s cinematic adaptation, which won both a French ‘César’ and four prizes including Best First Film and Best Actress at the 1983 Venice Film Festival. The novel and film tell the story of José, a young boy born on a sugar plantation who succeeds against the odds in acquiring the education that will spare him a brutally harsh life in the cane fields and the ‘black shacks’ of the title, thanks largely to the self-sacrificing efforts of the grandmother who brings him up. The portrayal of rural poverty is eloquent; that of the relationship between José and M’man Tine, or ‘Grandma Tine’, touching (in the film adaptation, M’man Tine is played by the wonderful Darling Legitimus, who, as a young woman, once danced in Paris with Josephine Baker’s troupe).

La Rue des cases-nègres is in many ways a classic novel of education, but it describes an education that is also an alienation. An unresolved dilemma faces José: if he obtains a grant, he may be able to study in France like the ‘sons of modest civil servants or small shopkeepers’ who obtained grants ‘because their fathers were used as front men by députés’.⁶² Those boys will be able to enter a higher social class, but they will be forced to deny their origins. José’s only real alternative is to enter the competitive examination that will give him a modest position in the local civil service. José’s years at school confirm his intuitive realization that ‘the inhabitants of this country really are divided into three categories: Negroes, Mulattos and Whites (not to mention the sub-divisions), that the former – by far the most numerous – are belittled, like tasty wild fruits that need no attention; the second might be regarded as varieties that have been produced by grafting; and the rest are the rare, precious variety, even though most of them are ignorant and uneducated’.⁶³ As a result, many black Martinicans suffer from an ‘inferiority complex’ that inspires a forlorn desire to ‘whiten their race’.⁶⁴ Zobel’s analysis and even his vocabulary here are obviously similar to those of Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. It is not that Zobel was influenced by Fanon: both are writing of the same reality, and writing within a specific tradition going back to at least the 1930s, when René Ménil, who taught at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, wrote of the ‘tragic history of a man who cannot be himself, who is ashamed and afraid of what he is’.⁶⁵

Fanon’s early experience was not that of Zobel’s fictional José. He was one of the sons of modest civil servants and small shopkeepers, though there has never been any suggestion that his father was anyone’s ‘front man’, and rural poverty was at least a generation away. Unlike José, Fanon was the descendant of the ‘free men of colour’, who, by the end of the eighteenth century, were equal in numbers to the white population.⁶⁶ Their descendants developed into a Martinican middle class as the ‘Old Colony’ was gradually ‘assimilated’ into France during the nineteenth century and particularly under the Third Republic (1871–1940). By the time Fanon was born, Martinique’s institutions – schools, courts and the civil service – were all modelled on their French equivalents. Martinique had an appointed Governor with far-reaching powers, but also an elected ‘Conseil régional’ responsible for running its day-to-day affairs. It was democratically represented in both the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate. The existence of a black and mulatto middle class was no threat to the békés, who clung to their economic power and subtle political power: ‘Being in the numerical minority, that landed aristocracy does not provide Parliament with representatives. It buys them ready-made. The representatives are chosen mainly from the coloured bourgeoisie.’⁶⁷ It was this combination of a black middle class and a seemingly quiescent plantocracy that led a normally perceptive British travel writer to conclude in the 1950s that there was little evidence in Martinique of a colour bar or of racial discrimination.⁶⁸ Both existed but they were not written on the streets of Fort-de-France.

On 20 July 1925, Frantz Fanon was born into a relatively prosperous middle-class family living in the capital of Martinique. The Fort-de-France where he was born was effectively a new town.⁶⁹ In 1890, the town’s wooden buildings had been largely destroyed when a fire broke out after a child upset a cooking stove in the rue Blenac. Rebuilding had scarcely got under way when, a year later, a cyclone swept through the town and destroyed the remaining buildings. Fort-de-France was rebuilt to its original pattern of a grid of narrow streets flanked by two- and three-storey houses with wrought-iron balconies. Despite the risk of fire, most houses were rebuilt in wood; Fort-de-France stands on swampy ground and the unstable subsoil made it difficult to build in stone. A third natural disaster now accelerated the growth of the town. Originally known as Fort Royal (the name was condensed to ‘Foyal’; its inhabitants are still known as ‘Foyalais’), Fort-de-France has always been Martinique’s administrative capital, but was not its first social or cultural capital. For much of its history, Fort-de-France’s importance was eclipsed by that of St Pierre. Built entirely of stone, the so-called Athens of the Antilles stood on a bay on the Caribbean coast, and at the foot of Montagne Pelée. Even though the lack of port facilities meant that ships had to ride at anchor in the bay and be loaded and unloaded by lighters, St Pierre was a more important port than Fort-de-France at the turn of the century. Sugar and rum were its principal exports. The population was more mixed than that of the administrative capital and the influence of the rich békés was much more noticeable. Unlike Fort-de-France, St Pierre had a vibrant cultural life and was home to Martinique’s first theatre – a scaled-down replica of that in Bordeaux.⁷⁰ At eight in the morning on 8 May 1902, Montagne Pelée erupted and a nuée ardente (a burning cloud) of gas and volcanic dust engulfed the town, leaving an estimated 30,000 dead in little over ten minutes. The sea itself burned as the rum and sugar in the holds of the ships at anchor were ignited. The eruption shifted the ethnic balance of Martinique’s population: the majority of the dead were békés. St Pierre never recovered its ascendancy, even though it was rebuilt. The ruins of the theatre and other buildings now make it a popular, if somewhat melancholy, tourist attraction.

The destruction of St Pierre worked to the advantage of its old rival, which now expanded rapidly. In 1902, Fort-de-France had a population of 14,000; by the mid-1930s, 43,000 people lived there, many of them seeking an alternative to the harsh conditions of the habitations, others driven there by the agricultural downturn as sugar became less and less profitable. Although the port and its associated facilities – the dry dock, the ship-repair facilities, the major coaling depot and the naval base – employed a large workforce, the capital never became a manufacturing centre. Its only sugar mill was burned down in 1890 and was never rebuilt. The centre of Fort-de-France was home to a population of shopkeepers, minor officials and members of the liberal professions, most of them living in the narrow streets between the Canal Levassoir to the west, the park known as the Savanne to the east, the boulevard de la Levée (now the boulevard du Général de Gaulle) to the north and the sea to the south. The town centre was flat – it is in fact one of the very few flat places in Martinique – and hemmed in by an amphitheatre of steep hills. It was also small and covered an area of little more than forty-two hectares. Central Fort-de-France was a predominantly black and mulatto town. White officials and békes tended to live in the spacious colonial-style villas of Didier, an exclusive district in the hills above the town. A declining number of planters still lived on their self-sufficient habitations and rarely visited Fort-de-France.⁷¹ The poorer black population was largely confined to the Terres-Sainville area beyond the boulevard de la Levée, which followed the course of the old drainage canal that once marked the town’s boundary. From the 1920s onwards, little wooden houses were constructed here on small plots, many of them without running water or electricity.

Although Fort-de-France was a new town in 1925, it was not a modern town. It was ‘a little town in the Caribbean, with no châteaux and no seigneureries, no ruins and no monuments’.⁷² It had few public buildings of any note, and still fewer cultural amenities. Sanitation was not good, and the open drains – home to thriving populations of rats and land crabs – were not a pretty sight, whilst the Canal Levassoir served as an open sewer as well as an anchorage for fishing boats. Fort-de-France is at sea level, and a rising tide would drive sewage back up the drains into the town. It was only in 1951 that Fort-de-France began to build a proper sewage system; until then, ‘organic waste’ was simply dumped in the open drains and rivers. The same year saw the beginning of a serious campaign, co-ordinated by Aimé Césaire, against typhoid.⁷³ Sheltered from sea breezes by the headlands of the Pointe des Nègres to the west (once the site of the slave market) and the Pointe des Carrières to the south-east, Martinique’s capital could be stiflingly hot as well as dusty. Aimé Césaire described it in unflattering terms:

An old life with a lying smile, its lips open with disaffected anxieties; an old poverty rotting silently in the sun, an old silence dying of warm pustules . . . This flat town – sprawling, tripped from its right direction, inert, breathless under the geometric burden of a cross that is constantly being reborn, rebellious against its destiny, frustrated in every way, incapable of growing along with the sap of this soil, ill at ease, clipped, diminished, at odds with its fauna and flora.⁷⁴

Fanon found this description ‘magnanimous’.⁷⁵ Both Césaire and Fanon described Martinique as disease-ridden, and it was. For Césaire, the Antilles were ‘pitted with smallpox . . . an old silence bursting with warm pustules’, and Fort-de-France was an inert town with ‘leprosies, consumption and famines’.⁷⁶ He goes on to describe ‘the parade of risible and scrophulous buboes, a fattening ground for very strange microbes, poisons for which there is no known alexiteric, pus from very old wounds, the unpredictable fermentations of putrescible species’.⁷⁷ These are no metaphors. Diseases like elephantiasis were still endemic during Fanon’s childhood. Tuberculosis and even leprosy were still being fought in the 1950s. It was only then that malaria was eradicated as the swamps around Le Lamentin were drained and cleared to allow the construction of Martinique’s airport.⁷⁸ A visitor from the metropolis describes his feelings on landing in Martinique in 1952, the year in which Peau noire was published:

When I landed at Fort-de-France, I was ashamed. Ashamed of the wretched airport. Ashamed of the sloppy policemen and customs officers in their tattered uniforms. Ashamed of what I saw on the road from the airport: shacks of rusty corrugated iron, barefoot children dressed in brownish rags, worn-out adults dragging their deformed legs in the dust: I could see the ulcers through the holes in their shirts and trousers.⁷⁹

Extreme rural poverty was far from unknown during Fanon’s childhood. It was common for agricultural labourers to wear roughly cut garments made from guano sacks and known as ‘Aubéry khaki’.⁸⁰ In 1937, Victor Coridun wrote of the ‘termite hills of thatch’ that had grown up around the colonial mansions of Martinique’s lords and masters and of the ignorant, misbegotten children who still worked in the cane fields ‘sunburned, burned and cooked by the murderous sun, bent over at their thankless, interminable task from morning to night’ and wore loincloths of jute and skirts of straw. Their legs were deformed and their faces were lined with premature wrinkles.⁸¹ This was what lay behind the exotic façade of ‘the isle of eternal sun, with its sweet-smelling tuberoses, its giant ferns, picturesque gorges and smiling creeks, and its intoxicating women, who really are like living flowers’.⁸²

Both Césaire and Fanon were relatively insulated from the grimmest aspects of Martinican reality, though they were clearly aware of their existence. Fanon did not, however, live in a shack built from rusty corrugated iron. The Fanon family home and Eléanore’s shop were in the rue de la République, which ran from the waterfront to the boulevard de la Levée. The house no longer exists, and the site – 33 rue de la République – is now occupied by a branch of Tati, a chain store specializing in cheap clothing and household goods. There is nothing to indicate that Frantz Fanon once lived here. Just a few doors down, on the corner with the rue Lamartine, stands what is claimed to be Martinique’s oldest bookshop – the Librairie Papet, founded in 1910. The central location was convenient: Fanon’s father lived a few minutes’ walk away from the customs office where he worked. The state primary school attended by Fanon and his brothers in the rue Périnnon was even nearer. Its proximity was actually a disadvantage in the eyes of the Fanon brothers: their mother could hear the school bell and expected her sons home minutes after it rang. They therefore had to forgo the pleasures of football on the dusty little playground – now a baseball court – outside the school. On getting home, the rule was that they had to kiss their mother and then go to their bedroom to do their homework. The school has now been demolished to make way for another of the car parks that appear to do nothing to control Fort-de-France’s interminable traffic jams.

The Fanons’ dual income made them relatively prosperous – prosperous enough to afford servants and music lessons for the girls. In January 1945, Frantz Fanon wrote to his mother to tell her what he wanted when he got home from a war with which he was increasingly disillusioned: ‘A big meal. Menu: punch (in the plural), blaffe, rice, chicken, red beans. Mangoes.’⁸³ This was not the diet of a poor family, and not many Martinicans ate chicken on a regular basis. As a student in Lyon in 1947, Fanon would nostalgically recall Sunday mornings at home – the sound of his father’s slippered footsteps on the stairs, his mother scolding the servant who had just announced that lunch would be late, and the piano recitals given by his sisters Marie-Flore and Marie-Rose. The ability to hire servants was a prized symbol of social status and the family were acutely aware of their status as recent recruits to the urban middle class. The Fanons were careful to avoid the trap that snared so many middle-class families: debts occasioned by conspicuous consumption and the acquisition of the outward signs of relative prosperity. They treated their country cousins with amused if slight condescension and, being self-consciously new recruits to their class, were very punctilious about observing the social conventions. Church-going was something to be taken seriously, and so were the unwritten rules that prevented the sons of customs officials from playing with the sons of lawyers or doctors. The girls attended the private Pensionnat Colonial (now the Collège Ernest Renan) on the grounds that fee-paying schools were better than state schools at inculcating the social graces. Such considerations were important to respectable families whose rural past was long behind them and who would have been insulted to have been reminded that they were only two generations removed from slavery.

Thanks to the income generated by Eléanore’s shop – and her acute business sense – the family was able to build a second house, which was originally used for weekends and holidays. Redoute is now a middle-class suburb of Fort-de-France but it was a separate community in the 1930s. The solidity of the houses – and the presence of the best pâtisserie in Martinique – testify to its contemporary prosperity, as do the well-kept graves in the cemetery behind the church of Notre Dame du Rosaire, a peaceful place with spectacular views of the conical Pitons du Carbet to the north. A number of Fanons are buried there, including Albert, the generous uncle who always had small change and sweets in his pockets for his nieces and nephews. Fanon’s uncle Edouard, who was born in 1907, calmly informs interested – and suddenly disconcerted – visitors that he will soon join his brother in the family grave. Like most of Fort-de-France’s outer suburbs, Redoute is built on a steep ridge and straggles along the main road leading north to St Joseph. The Fanon house was off the main road on an unpaved lane (now the rue François Rustal) that plunged steeply down towards the Madame river. The plot of land faced north and stood on a slope above one of the river’s minor tributaries. If the purchase of the plot was testimony to Eléanore’s business acumen, its development was testimony to her tenacity. Bringing in water and electricity meant crossing a neighbour’s property and caused quarrels; in order to provide vehicular access, the boys had to pave the lane as best they could with local stones and gravel. The house itself was a single-storeyed wooden construction built in a traditional style designed to provide shade and to keep out the heat. For the children, the large garden was a greater attraction than the house itself. There were no gardens in the rue de la République, and this was a paradise with a profusion of breadfruit trees, mangoes and coconut palms and views across the bay to the Lamentin plain. This was a place to watch the darting humming birds, the spectacled thrushes and the enormous butterflies. Each child had their own mango tree, where they could read or doze, perched in the branches. Left in the care of servants while their parents were at work, they experienced a wild freedom in the garden that they could never have in Fort-de-France itself. Like so many traces of Fanon’s childhood, the house has disappeared. After Eléanore’s death in 1982, it was sold to speculators and demolished to make way for two small blocks of flats built in the ugly concrete that covers so much of modern Martinique. Fanon never speaks of this side of his childhood.

Whilst it was a status symbol, domestic help was also something of a necessity: Frantz was the fifth of eight children: Mireille (who was also his godmother), Félix, Gabrielle, Joby, Marie-Flore, Marie-Rose and Willy. There were often twelve to fifteen members of the extended family present for meals in the rue de la République. Eléanore was the central authority figure and has been described by Manville as a ‘strong-minded intellectual woman’ whose malicious irony masked an enormous generosity,⁸⁴ and by her son Joby as une maîtresse-femme, meaning a competent woman with a firm belief in her own authority, and not one to be trifled with. There appears, on the other hand, to be no basis for the suggestion made in Irene Gendzier’s Critical Study of Fanon that she was ‘of rather difficult temperament’, ‘not overly affectionate’ and ‘favoured her daughters’.⁸⁵ She was ambitious for her children and anxious to see them succeed. No child of hers was going to go back to rural poverty. Family loyalty was, in her view, the cardinal virtue and she liked to tell her children that: ‘Unity is the one thing that saves the family, and every one of us. So long as you are friends, you are strong. What belongs to one of us belongs to all of us, and that way we are all rich.’ So strong was the sense of loyalty and unity that the family effectively excluded anyone who was not a blood relative. Marrying into the Fanon clan was conditional upon a demonstration of worthiness and a promise of loyalty.

Casimir Fanon was not an active participant in the day-to-day activities of his family and appears to have taken little interest in his children. He worked long hours, and then kept his distance. To that extent, he was, recalls Joby, a typical father in a matrifocal society. The domestic authority wielded by Eléanore was as typical as Casimir’s non-involvement. Significantly, there are very few positive father-figures in Martinican fiction, but there is an abundance of devoted mothers and grandmothers. Whilst Joby Fanon shrugs off his father’s passivity as an effect of Martinican society, Frantz seems to have resented it bitterly, as is evident from the harsh letter he wrote in 1944:

Papa, you really have sometimes failed to perform your duty as a father. I allow myself to judge you in this way because I am no longer of this earth. These are the reproaches of someone living in life’s beyond. Sometimes Maman has been unhappy because of you. We made her unhappy enough. In future, you will try to return to her one hundredfold all she has done for the equilibrium of the family. The word now has a meaning that was previously unknown. If we, the eight children, have become something, Maman alone should take all the glory. She was the spirit. You were the arm. That is all. I can see the face you will pull when you read these lines, but it’s the truth. Look at yourself. Look back at the years that have passed, lay your soul bare and have the courage to say: ‘I deserted’. And then, repentant parishioner, you will be able to return to the altar.

The apocalyptic tone, and Fanon’s claim that he was no longer of this earth, reflect his conviction that he was about to die in a war he no longer perceived as his own, but the sense of bitterness must have gone further back than that.

Alliances were formed within the tightly knit family. Frantz was closer to Gabrielle (born in 1922) than to his other sisters, and closer still to Joby, his elder by two years. They shared a bed, played the same sports and had the same friends. Their strong mutual affection remained unspoken: overt displays of affection were to be avoided at all cost. One of their shared passions was football. This was not unusual: Martinique had many teams, and the 1930s have been described as the golden age of Martinican football.⁸⁶ While they were at primary school, the Fanon brothers were too young to play league games, but they took an active role in the informal matches that were played on the Savanne on Sunday mornings. There were no pitches marked out on the Savanne so these were impromptu affairs, but Fanon, an outgoing personality with an easy ascendancy over others of his age, created ‘his’ club, which he called ‘Les Joyeux Compagnons’. It was on the football field that Fanon first met long-standing friends like Pierre Marie-Claire Mosole, Marcel Manville and Charles Cézette, the son of a grocer living in the rue Périnnon. All three would fight alongside him in the Second World War.

In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon describes the Savanne in jaundiced terms: ‘Imagine a space two hundred metres long and forty metres wide, with its sides bounded by worm-eaten tamarind trees, with the immense war memorial, the fatherland’s gratitude to its children at one end, and the Central-Hôtel at the other; an unevenly paved and tortured space, with pebbles that roll under your feet.’⁸⁷ There are strategic reasons why Fanon describes the Savanne – and the rest of Fort-de-France – in such negative terms,⁸⁸ but for the boy who played football there it was a space of freedom and offered a welcome escape from the choking grid of narrow streets. The negative description is intended to counter the ‘exoticist’ descriptions given in books like Sonson de la Martinique, a very poor novel published in 1932:

Who hasn’t heard of Fort-de-France’s Savanne? It must be as famous as the Cannebière and the place des Quinconces. Well, Martinicans think so at least. They say that it is so famous because sailors from all over the world have always been in the habit of mentioning it when they get home: its welcomingly tree-lined walks, cooled by the breeze that comes from the far horizon, the Pitons du Carbet whose sharp teeth stand out against the blue of the sky, its huge sandalwood trees and its shady little wood which shelters children accompanied by their das by day and, by night, homeless vagabonds and lovers.⁸⁹

Other pastimes were rather less innocent than football. When they could escape their mother’s supervision, Joby and Frantz were also members of a juvenile gang known as ‘la bande raide’, whose territory extended from the abattoir on the banks of the canal Levassoir to the Pont de chaines in the Terres-Sainville. For reasons that no one can now explain, Frantz – as always, the dominant figure and organizer – was known as ‘Kabère’, whilst Joby was ‘Pipo’. Although they were from time to time involved in scuffles with rival gangs like the Terreur de la Grosse Roche, the boys’ activities were usually confined to minor mischief. Writing to his mother in 1947, Fanon recalled with some amusement how a teacher called Madame Philoctète had had to write to his father to complain about the ‘infamies’ committed by ‘his rascal of a son’. The boys stole marbles from shops, and found their mother’s shop an irresistible target. When they could, they sneaked into cinemas and sporting events without paying. Such activities did not pass unnoticed in the closely knit society of Fort-de-France and were quickly reported to the boys’ parents, who were convinced that they would end up in prison. The high point of their criminal career was, however, a piece of childish devilry which caused annoyance and scandal but no real harm. Using stolen safety-pins they fastened together the best dresses of a group of ladies in church, and then watched the chaos that ensued when they tried to stand up to take communion. Imbued with the prim values of the Pensionnat Colonial rather than those of the street, the Fanon sisters were as scandalized as their parents.

Fanon’s talent for mischief and football went hand in hand with a remarkable degree of self-possession. One incident, which reportedly occurred when he was eight, was potentially serious. The fourteen-year-old Félix had a friend called Kléber Gamess, and one day he ‘borrowed’ his father’s revolver to impress the Fanon boys. Félix was out on an errand, and Kléber went to wait for him in Frantz’s room. Slipping off the safety catch, he began to clean the gun, not realizing that it was loaded. Accidental pressure on the trigger realized a shot that could have killed Frantz, but the only injury was to Kléber’s finger. Shouting down to his mother that the noise had been caused by a toy car backfiring, Frantz bandaged the boy’s finger with a torn sheet and then took him to hospital, telling Eléanore that they were just going out for a walk. Forty years later, Félix commented: ‘It was in his nature to be like that. Playing soccer, it was the same thing. He never got excited; he was always very efficient.’⁹⁰

As he reached his teens, the footballer and apprentice juvenile delinquent began to spend less time on the Savanne and the street, and took to reading in the Bibliothèque Schoelcher. The library is Fort-de-France’s strangest public building. Built of cast-iron and glass, designed to resemble a pagoda, decorated with coloured mosaics and surmounted by a glass dome, it was first erected in the Tuileries gardens in Paris in 1887 and then dismantled and shipped in pieces to Martinique, where it was re-erected on a swampy patch of ground adjacent to the Savanne in 1893. The entrance lobby is emblazoned with the name of the philosophers of the age of enlightenment: Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire. The library originally held the estimated 10,000 volumes from the personal library of Victor Schoelcher. Most of the Schoelcher bequest was destroyed by the disastrous fire of 1902, and the library acquired a rather sinister reputation. In the late 1940s, an English visitor was warned by a local lady not to touch any of the books because they were all ‘infected with leprosy germs’.⁹¹ Neither the comparative poverty of the library’s holdings nor talk of leprosy germs deterred Fanon from spending hours in this polychrome building, where he read as widely as possible, concentrating on the classical French literature and philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Outside the library, books were not easy to come by and one of the reasons why Peau noire is so replete with quotations and references is simply that its author spent his youth in a book-poor town, and then found himself in the book-rich culture of a major French university. He had been let loose in a large library, and he took advantage of it.

This adolescent initiation into French classicism was the culmination of a process which had begun long ago. At primary school, Fanon had made good progress but he had done so at a price. Like any other child, he was discouraged from speaking the Creole that is in effect the first language of any Martinican. Creole is a rich mixture of French, African survivals and fragments of the many European languages spoken in the eastern Caribbean by planters, traders, slavers and merchants. It developed out of the lingua franca that allowed white masters to communicate with black slaves on the plantations, and is spoken by békés and blacks alike. The use of Creole can at times create a feeling of Martinican identity that transcends the usual divisions. It is said that when violent riots hit Fort-de-France in 1959, some local békés escaped physical assault or worse by addressing the rioters in Creole; metropolitans who could speak only French were not so lucky. Fanon’s own attitude towards Creole was ambivalent and even contradictory. In 1952, he agreed with Michel Leiris that it would gradually die out or be reduced to residual status by the spread of (French) education;⁹² six years later, he argued that Creole was an ‘expression of the Antillean consciousness’ and that it might even provide the linguistic basis for a West Indian Federation to which Martinique could belong.⁹³

Syntactically, Martinican Creole resembles a simplified form of French, but its vocabulary is a rich gumbo of many things. Fanon had been taught that it was not a language, but a patois that was midway between petitnègre (literally ‘little-negro’, this is the French equivalent to pidgin English) and French. Lessons learned at school were reinforced at home, where children who lapsed into Creole were told by their mothers that they were tibandes, or no better than the children who worked in the cane fields.⁹⁴ The shift from Creole to French is an important aspect of the donning of the white mask that covers the black face, and it is one of the major themes of Fanon’s first book: ‘The black West Indian will become all the whiter, or in other words come closer to being a true man, to the extent that he makes the French language his own.’⁹⁵ Fanon does not speak of his schooldays in very specific terms, but education in Martinique was – and is – an induction into linguistic and cultural schizophrenia. The novelist Patrick Chamoiseau was born in 1953, but his account of a Creole childhood has a lot in common with Fanon’s allusions to his education.⁹⁶ Part of the problem arises from the centralizing and Jacobin tradition within the French educational system, which has never been tolerant of diversity or particularisms. Within metropolitan France, schoolchildren were, within living memory, forbidden to speak Breton and were punished if they did so.⁹⁷ In Martinique, the ban on speaking Creole resulted in a conflation of linguistic and racial problems. The middle classes of Fort-de-France did not want to be reminded of the slave time that produced Creole: ‘In its desire to be equal with the Whites, the mulatto class did everything to erase its negro origins, and using Creole seemed to be the ignominious stigma of those origins. It even forbade its children to speak it; even the békés did not go to such extremes.’⁹⁸ To remind a child of its negro origins was a harsh reproach; a child who was misbehaving would be told: Ja nègre (‘You’re already becoming a negro’).⁹⁹ A senior politician describes Martinican Creole as a ‘rich and subtle’ instrument for the expression of ‘our states of mind and daily needs’, but insists that the claim that it is a national language is either pure snobbery or militant illiteracy: ‘It was the French language that brought Martinicans out of the darkness of obscurity and into the light of a universal culture.’¹⁰⁰ This was the lesson learned by Fanon, who spoke Creole with Martinican friends but wrote in standard French.

The lessons of school and home were reinforced by other media. When Fanon and his gang crept into cinemas without paying, they were not going to watch the art-house classics of the golden age of French cinema. Fanon’s mother used to sing him French songs which never mentioned negroes,¹⁰¹ but he watched films in which he could see them. They were Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan films, and he identified with the white lord of the jungle, not with his black inferiors.¹⁰² Films like this served to teach children what nègres really were, and to instil in them the idea that they were not nègres. French West Indians did not even think of themselves as black; they were simply West Indians, and everyone knew that blacks lived in Africa.¹⁰³ Fanon had encountered nègres. In either 1938 or 1939, a group of tirailleurs sénégalais stationed in Guyane briefly visited Martinique.¹⁰⁴ Fanon and his friends had heard of these famous colonial troops and their colourful uniforms, and went looking for them in the streets. He knew what he had been told about them by veterans of the First World War: ‘They attack with the bayonet and, when that does not work, they charge through the bursts of machine-gun fire, machete in hand. They cut off heads and collect ears.’¹⁰⁵ The tirailleurs also had a reputation for looting, brutality and especially rape. To Fanon’s delight, his father brought two of them home, providing concrete confirmation that he and his family were not nègres, but Martinicans. Ironically, and quite spontaneously, the Fanon family behaved in just the way that a white family in France might have done: they charitably entertained the troops from the black African colonies.¹⁰⁶

Fanon sums up his situation as follows: ‘I am a negro – but I naturally do not know that, because that is what I am.’¹⁰⁷ It would take a brutal encounter with a white ‘other’ to destroy the unthinking naturalness of Fanon’s perception of himself. It came in the form of a brush with a child in France who said: ‘Look a negro . . . Mum, look at the negro, I’m frightened.’¹⁰⁸ Fanon himself dates his first experiences of overt racism in Fort-de-France to the Second World War, when the sailors of the French navy revealed themselves to be authentic racists and when the békés began to take back the political power that had been largely lost to the black-mulatto ethno-class. He does not describe prewar Martinique as a non-racist society, but nor does he describe it as overtly or aggressively racist. Although there was a family – and collective – memory of the béké on horseback with a whip in his hand, the 2,000 Europeans in pre-war Martinique were, he thought, ‘integrated into social life, involved in the economy of the country’.¹⁰⁹ As a teenager, Fanon had minimal contact with the minority white population. He would obviously see white officials, white soldiers and white policemen in their colonial uniform of shorts and knee-length socks, but had few real dealings with them; there was no reason for a boy, black or otherwise, to come into direct contact with, say, the white owners of the Crédit Martiniquais. Still less did he have any reason to meet the white plantocracy. The young Edouard Glissant had a much more direct knowledge of the plantations than Fanon, but he had no direct contact with the békés himself.¹¹⁰ What he did experience was the depersonalization born of what colonial France had been saying to Martinicans for hundreds of years: ‘No, no. You’re like us. You’re French, completely European.’¹¹¹

The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to both Fanon’s delinquency and his studies in the Bibliothèque Schoelcher. He was now attending the Lycée Schoelcher. This too was an indication of the family’s status and relative prosperity: fees ensured that poor blacks did not attend the lycée. The same system ensured that few working-class children in France attended the lycée either. One of the stranger myths that circulates through the extensive literature on Fanon is the story that he attended ‘a segregated black lycée which had a religious atmosphere’.¹¹² It would be difficult to miss the point more widely. Like any other school in the French system, the Lycée Schoelcher was militantly secular, and displays of any religious belief were forbidden by law. A ‘lycée with a religious atmosphere’ is simply a contradiction in terms. If any of the Fanon children received religious education at school, it must have been the girls at their private school. And whilst colonial Martinique was certainly a racist society, its racism did not take the form of apartheid. The békés sent – and still send – their children to religious schools like the Collège Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, but this does not mean that the lycée was officially segregated. ‘Separate development’ was not the policy of the old colonies. On the contrary, the difficulties experienced by the lycée’s pupils stemmed from the fact that it took no account of ethnic differences and taught them that they were Europeans. That Fanon’s teachers and fellow pupils were from the mulatto ethno-class is a reflection of economic realities rather than institutionalized segregation.

The lycée, built in the late 1930s on the site of the old Governor’s Residence, was one of Fort-de-France’s first reinforced concrete buildings. It still squats heavily and somewhat ominously on the steep hill across the Canal Levassoir, and seems to echo the forbidding military architecture of the Fort Saint-Louis which dominates the eastern side of the Savanne. A few months into the war, it was empty and deserted. The declaration of war had caused panic in Martinique. Trenches were dug on the Savanne in anticipation of some improbable invasion from the sea. Fort-de-France’s schools were closed in preparation for air raids that never came. The trenches were never used, and quickly became stinking open latrines. Abandoned to their own devices, Frantz and Joby were running wild. In desperation, their mother dressed them in their sisters’ dresses to try to keep them at home. In November 1939, she took the extreme measure of exiling Joby to Le François. Edouard Fanon taught there, and the school was still open. Returning from work to find that his son was missing, Casimir Fanon turned on his wife in anger, demanding that she bring Joby home and pointing out that she had no right to send his children away without his express permission. In legal and even constitutional terms, he was perfectly right and his paternal authority was absolute, but he was no match for his wife. Eléanore announced before the whole family that Joby was not coming back and, what was more, Frantz was going to join him. She was tired of him returning home only for meals and then disappearing again. She won the argument and Frantz and Joby spent the next year in Le François. Accustomed to eating with a large and closely knit family, they now found themselves living in the little town’s one hotel and taking lonely meals with their bachelor uncle. Eléanore’s one piece of advice to them as they left was typical: ‘Be irreproachable.’

Only twenty-four kilometres from Fort-de-France, Le François was a small town dominated by the sugar industry and surrounded by fields of cane. It had a sugar mill which has now been demolished. There was also some fishing, though the town is slightly inland and cut off from the sea by a dusty plain, the fishing boats anchored in a tidal canal. Edouard Fanon was quite a prominent citizen with connections on the Conseil Général that could later be exploited to his nephew’s advantage. The school where he taught did not have the prestige of the lycée in Fort-de-France, but he was an able and committed teacher. He was also the founder of a literary, cultural and sporting society known as Le Club franciscain – the football team still exists and, to its founder’s great satisfaction, still performs well in the island’s junior league. Frantz played occasionally, but was too young to become a regular member of the team. Edouard Fanon was strict with his nephews, kept them to a tight timetable and insisted on disciplined schoolwork. They responded well to the regime he imposed and their work improved greatly, perhaps because they knew that any misbehaviour would be immediately reported to their formidable mother. Joby recalls that Edouard had a good influence on him and his brother and, at least for a while, he acted as their true father. It must have helped that there were few distractions in Le François. There were very few shops to steal from, and no cinema to sneak into without paying. Frantz’s behaviour did not occasion much cause for reproach, but there was one untoward incident. One day in late 1939, he failed to return to school after lunch. Eventually, he did reappear, but looked distinctly ill. At first, Edouard thought he was drunk, and he almost struck him in anger. It was not until years later that he found out what had happened. Frantz had slipped out of school, behind the church and into the mairie, a pleasant colonial style building whose upper storey is constructed in wood. Somehow, he had heard that a post-mortem was going to be performed on the victim of a drowning and he was determined to be present. Creeping unobserved into the room where the autopsy was to take place, he watched the dissection from beginning to end, and then staggered back to school feeling nauseous. As a medical student in Lyon, Frantz would never be good at dissection.

The only other notable incident known to have occurred in Le François came when Edouard took his class of twenty-three boys on an educational visit to the ‘château’ near Monnerot, a few kilometres to the north. The ‘château’ was in fact a typical plantation house, and the trip was an exercise in local history. The topic for the next day’s work was, predictably enough, ‘our day out’. Frantz handed in a carefully written essay centred on the story told to the class by the guide who had shown them around. It was one of the Caribbean’s many tales of buried treasure, but also a reminder of the violence of slave-time: long ago, the béké who owned the château buried his gold in the cellar with the help of a slave. He then murdered his slave and buried him beside the gold to ensure that his ghost would protect the treasure from would-be robbers. Edouard was impressed with his nephew’s work, and began to think that he might have some literary talent.

After almost two years in Le François, the brothers returned to Fort-de-France, which had not been invaded after all, and to the re-opened lycée. A very self-confident Frantz had decided that it was time to sit his baccalauréat a year earlier than he had been expected to. He was successful in the written papers that made up the first part of the examination at this time. Events ensured that it would be some time before he sat the oral and was awarded the qualification that would allow him to go to university in France. The examination scripts were marked by teachers from Guadeloupe, and their visit provides another example of the young Fanon’s sense of self and perception of others. One of the teachers, a philosophy specialist identified by Fanon only as ‘Monsieur B.’, was reputed to be ‘excessively black’, or ‘blue’ in local parlance, and Fanon and friends pursued him to his hotel to see just how black he was.¹¹³ Their curiosity was no doubt stimulated by the common belief, which Fanon admitted to being unable to explain, that Martinicans were superior to, and ‘less black’ than, Guadeloupeans. Guadeloupe had traditionally been less prosperous than Martinique, and its white population smaller. The historical explanation is that, whilst the British occupation of 1794–1802 meant that the Convention’s abolition of slavery in 1794, which proved to be temporary, did not apply in Martinique, it also spared the island the Terror instituted in Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues, the Jacobin commissioner. Unlike its sister island, Guadeloupe was quickly retaken by the French and 865 people were guillotined for having collaborated with the British. Many of the heads that fell belonged to white planters; a lot more whites fled the island, leaving Guadeloupe with a much ‘blacker’ population than Martinique.¹¹⁴ Fanon’s curiosity about a ‘blue’ philosopher from Guadeloupe, and the assumption of Martinican superiority that was its sub-text, was deeply rooted in colonial history.

It was on his return to Fort-de-France that Fanon first came into contact with Aimé Césaire.¹¹⁵ Césaire was not yet the politician who was to become the most important man in Martinique for almost fifty years. And he was not yet the most famous poet to be associated with negritude. The first version of his great Cahier d’un retour au pays natal had appeared in the Parisian journal Volontés in August 1939 – not the most auspicious moment to publish that scream of rage – but it cannot have been widely read even in France let alone Martinique. It was the second edition of 1947 that was to make him famous. In October 1939, Césaire was a twenty-six-year-old teacher who had failed to pass his agrégation after three years at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and four years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Césaire was born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe, a small settlement on the north Atlantic coast. The name means ‘low point’ and the village is on a low promontory that breaks the high cliffs of that dangerous coast. It was not a beautiful spot. The Corbière river flowed through it and across the volcanic beach – ‘the sand is black, funereal, you’ve never seen such black sand’¹¹⁶ – where dead cats and dogs were washed up from the sea: ‘heaps of garbage rotting away, furtive rumps relieving themselves’. Basse-Pointe was at the heart of the plantation system of the north. With a surface area of up to 200 hectares, the plantations here were bigger than those in the south and they produced sugar on a large scale (with the decline in the sugar industry, the plantations have now diversified into the production of bananas and pineapples). During Césaire’s childhood, the traditional plantation system was still largely intact and the sugar was cultivated by descendants of the Indian bonded labourers who replaced the old slaves from 1858 onwards. Basse-Pointe was (and is) home to Martinique’s largest concentration of Indians, or ‘coulis’. Césaire’s father was an économe (steward) on the Eyma plantation, which was within walking distance of Basse-Pointe itself, and the future poet’s early childhood was spent there. A line from the Cahier is presumably a memory of walking to school in Basse-Pointe: ‘Me on a road as a child, chewing a sugar-cane root’.¹¹⁷

The Cahier gives a poetically overstated account of a childhood spent in rural poverty, but the degree of personal exaggeration does not make it an unrealistic account of other Martinican lives:

At the end of the early morning, another little house that smells very bad in a very narrow street, a minuscule house which shelters in its entrails of rotten wood tens of rats and the turbulence of my six brothers and sisters, a cruel little house . . . and my mother whose tireless legs pedal, pedal day and night for our insatiable hunger, even at night I am woken up by those tireless legs pedalling by night and the bitter biting into the soft flesh of the night of a Singer that my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger day and night.¹¹⁸

Césaire’s mother did take in sewing, but the family was not especially poor. When he was twelve, Césaire won a scholarship to the Lycée Schoelcher and the entire family moved to Fort-de-France, where they lived in the rue Antoine Siger. The boy, whose father had now studied to gain a post in the tax service, made excellent progress at school; in 1934 he won a scholarship that took him to Louis-le-Grand, one of Paris’s most prestigious schools, and then on to Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS).

Césaire may not have passed the agrégation that might have given him a university career, but he was a good teacher. The post at the Lycée Schoelcher was his first and he taught there for only four years before going into politics, but his own immodest account of what he achieved as a teacher is not an inaccurate one: ‘I was a teacher. I gave courses on literature to une classe de première [equivalent to an English sixth form] . . . I had some disciples. That was very important. I trained a lot of young people – they’re men now – and some became friends, others enemies, not that that matters much. They all came out of me, out of my teaching. I was a teacher, and quite an effective one it seems, and I undoubtedly influenced a whole generation.’¹¹⁹ Many of his pupils, who included Edouard Glissant as well as Fanon, would have endorsed this self-appraisal. Marcel Manville speaks of Césaire’s ‘flamboyant’ teaching, and of the impact of his introduction to Lautréamont, the surrealists, Malraux and Rimbaud. This was, he recalls, ‘a literature charged with powder and contestation’.¹²⁰

In 1958, Glissant paid tribute to his old teacher: ‘For my generation, he was an exemplary pedagogue, a man who awakened consciences and taught us everything that was not normally taught in lycées: Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Malraux.’ Glissant also recalled that he and his classmates would copy out Césaire’s lessons, and then re-copy them in their best writing into expensive notebooks. The hand-copied texts circulated through the lycée like clandestine documents.¹²¹ Césaire could begin a class by entering the room and saying: ‘Rimbaud: the power of revolt’, and would declaim classical verse as he stood perched on a chair. His pupils dubbed him ‘the green lizard’ because he wore a green checked suit. This was a sign of affection; the green anoli lizard (anolis carolinensis) is a popular little creature.

Césaire has said little about his former pupil. The tribute to him that he published in Présence Africaine celebrates Fanon’s revolutionary virtues in an almost florid rhetoric, but gives little sense of any personal affection, or indeed of any great personal acquaintance with its subject.¹²² Césaire’s one contribution to the 1982 Mémorial International held to honour Fanon, which his Parti Populaire Martiniquais did nothing to support, was a poem published in the PPM’s paper Le Progressiste, but not included in the collected Poésie. It ends

par quelques-uns des mots obsédant une torpeur

et l’accueil et l’éveil de chacun de nos maux

je t’énonce

FANON

Tu rayes le fer

Tu rayes le barreau des prisons

Tu rayes le regard des bourreaux

guerrier-silex

vomi

par la gueule du serpent de la mangrove¹²³

[I speak your name

FANON

with some words that obsess a torpor

the welcome and awakening of all of our ills

You lash the iron

You lash the prison bars

You lash the gaze of the torturers

Silex-warrior

spat

from the mouth of the snake in the mangrove swamp]

Although he would always be able to cite from memory long passages from the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Césaire’s other poems, Fanon’s attitude towards Césaire and the negritude with which he is associated was complex and ambivalent, and would change considerably between their first encounters and the publication of Peau noire in 1952. For the moment, the astonishing thing about Césaire was that: ‘For the first time, we saw a lycée teacher, and therefore an apparently respectable man, saying to Antillean society that it is fine and good to be a nègre.’¹²⁴ It was a rare voice that dared to say this in late 1939, and attempts would soon be made to still it through censorship. The atmosphere in Fort-de-France had changed during Frantz and Joby’s stay in Le François. The stinking trenches were still there on the Savanne, but the feverish panic of 1939 had given way to a sullen mood of depression. Martinique was now living ‘An Tan Robè’, as the saying went in Creole. It was living ‘in Robert time’.

It had, on the whole, been an unexceptional boyhood, typical of a child of the Martinican middle classes. Fanon was at times unruly and a worry to his parents, but he could also work hard and he did well at school. He enjoyed the usual pleasures of sport and going to the cinema. He had experienced no major traumas and, like any other child, perceived his own existence as perfectly normal. He was French and identified with the French culture in which he had been brought up and educated. There was nothing in his background to suggest that he would become a major icon of revolutionary Third Worldism. Although his father is said to have been a freemason – which, in French terms, made him a supporter of the secular left – his family had no history of political activism, or even of any interest in politics. When Fanon returned to Fort-de-France from Le François, the major traumas were still ahead of him. Life in Tan Robè would bring his first serious encounter with racism and would teach him a lesson that would be reinforced in the army and then again by life in metropolitan France: whilst he thought he was French like any other French person, many of his fellow French nationals saw him as simply one more nègre.