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Fanon: For Beginners
By Deborah Wyrick For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 1998 Deborah Wyrick
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-934389-87-4
CHAPTER 1
WHO IS FRANTZ FANON?
Philosopher and psychoanalyst, revolutionary and writer, Frantz Fanon has justly been called the voice of the Third World. Throughout his brief but extraordinary life, Fanon was passionately committed to freedom.
His words and his actions promoted human dignity, honor, and liberation—and unlike many intellectuals, he literally put his life on the line for his beliefs. To people throughout the world, particularly to people of color in both developed and emerging countries, Fanon remains an inspiration, a revolutionary hero, even a martyred saint.
His works continue to be studied because he is one of the 20th century's most powerful social philosophers. Occupying a position both inside and outside of dominant EuroAmerican culture, Fanon critiques earlier thinkers—such as Hegel, Freud, Marx, and Sartre—who have shaped our modern era. Through his writing, he also challenges us today. He asks us to reexamine our concepts of liberty, selfhood, humanism, equality, and nationalism.
Fanon for Beginners is framed by a biographical section and a chapter discussing Fanon's political and cultural influences. Its main portions follow the principle stages of Fanon's thought:
1. THE SEARCH FOR BLACK IDENTITY,
as presented in Black Skin, White Masks, the stunning diagnosis of racism that Fanon wrote while he was studying medicine and psychoanalysis;
2. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST COLONIALISM
as explained in A Dying Colonialism and Toward the African Revolution, essays Fanon produced when he was actively engaged in Algeria's war of independence;
3. THE PROCESS OF DECOLONIZATION,
as analyzed in The Wretched of the Earth, the book that extended insights gained in Algeria to Africa and the Third World.
I hope Fanon for Beginners will give readers with some knowledge of Fanon a useful overview of his life and works as a whole ... and that it will introduce a new generation of readers to a man who coupled a great mind with a great soul.
IN MARTINIQUE AND FRANCE
The fifth of eight children, Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, the capital of the French Caribbean colony of Martinique. His father, a customs official, and his mother, a shopkeeper, belonged to the island's relatively prosperous and often racially mixed (sang-méleé) urban middle class. The Fanons promoted French language and culture, discouraging their children from speaking Creole or participating in African-based folk traditions. Young Frantz was trained to adopt the values of the békés (descendants of white slaveholders) and the metropolitan French rather than to identify with the noirs (descendants of African slaves).
THE COLONIAL HISTORY OF MARTINIQUE
1502: Columbus landed on Martinique, inhabited by Carib Indians. The Caribs called the island Mandinina, or Island of the Flowers.
17th century: The French began colonizing Martinique and introduced sugar cane; Caribs completely exterminated; Louis XIII authorized the African slave trade to the Antilles.
18th century: Plantation system established; struggles between white planters and French administrators; England challenged French domination; French and Haitian revolutions caused unrest on Martinique; the future Josephine Bonaparte born near Trois Ilets.
19th century: Slave revolts; emancipation process stalled, perhaps due to Josephine's urging; French abolished slavery in 1848; deputy Victor Schoelcher fought for political and educational reform.
20th century: Eruption of Mt. Pelée, destruction of the city of Saint-Pierre; Martinique under Vichy control during World War II and consequently blockaded; later rallied to the Free French cause.
1946: Martinique's status changed from colony to overseas department of France.
According to his older brother Joby, Frantz was a mischievous, headstrong boy who sneaked into movie theaters without paying and engaged in minor vandalism ... as well as playing soccer and excelling in school. He was admitted to the prestigious Lycée Schoechler, then the French Antilles' only secondary school, where the great poet Aimé Césaire taught language and literature.
Fanon wrote later about the tremendous impact Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, published in 1939, had on his fellow Martinicans:
For the first time a lycée teacher ... was seen to announce quite simply to Antillean society ëthat it is fine and good to be a Negro. To be sure, this created a scandal. It was said at the time that he was a little mad ... Neither the mulattoes nor the Negroes understood this delirium. (AR 21-22)
Although Fanon later disagreed with many assumptions behind Césaire's philosophy of Négritude, Césaire's work opened space for a profound reassessment of racial identity.
In 1940, another event occurred that affected Martinican identity—the German defeat of France. Martinique became subject to collaborationist Vichy rule, so the Allies blockaded the island and a good part of the French Atlantic fleet that had harbored there. The island found itself flooded with 10,000 French sailors, increasing the white population by 500% and bringing overt racism to Martinique.
Before World War II, Martinicans had considered themselves French. "Race" was neither an essential category nor a hardened position, in part because the vast majority of Martinicans have African ancestors. Much more important than skin color were economic status and social class. But the French sailors saw the islanders through the lens of racial prejudice. To them, Martinicans were Negroes, indistinguishable from Africans, undifferentiated among themselves, at best second-class citizens and at worst savages. Fanon called this confrontation with institutionalized racism the Martinican's "first metaphysical experience." They questioned their values and, inspired by Césaire, began to reverse them.
During this time, Fanon developed a racial consciousness quite different from that taught by his parents. The following incident illustrates his growing activism in the cause of racial justice.
In downtown Fort-de-France, Fanon and his companions saw two French sailors beating up a young Martinican. Without consulting his friends, Fanon jumped into the fight to rescue his outnumbered countryman. He wasn't bothered to learn later that the Martinican had stolen money from the sailors: to him, the incident demonstrated a clear, racially motivated injustice that called for an immediate remedy. Even as a teenager, then, Fanon showed the readiness to back up principles with action that became the hallmark of his adult life.
Fanon demonstrated a similar conviction in 1943 when he joined the Free French forces assembling on the neigh boring island of Dominica. Before he left Martinique, he shared his intentions with a philosophy professor at the lycée. The professor claimed that the war was not theirs, that aiding the effort to liberate France reinforced colonized black people's chains of servitude. To this, Fanon replied:
"Each time liberty is in question, we are concerned, be we white, black, or yellow; and each time freedom is under seige, no matter where, I will engage myself completely."
Behind this youthful idealism lies the outrage at oppression, the love of justice, and the commitment to human dignity that guided Fanon until his death.
Fanon was attached to the 5th battalion and sent to Morocco, where he served with white Frenchmen, white North African colonists, and other black Antilleans. Also stationed there were African units like the Senegalese, who wore distinctive uniforms and were treated as less civilized partners in the war effort. Being able to observe how French colonialism operated in North Africa enlarged Fanon's view of racial, economic, and cultural oppression. It also revealed some of the more absurd ambiguities of racial thinking.
For example, when the Moroccan-based soldiers were needed in Alsace, military commanders decided to "whiten" the battalion. Senegalese troops were left in Africa with the excuse that they could not endure the cold North European climate. However, the Antillean soldiers—raised in a similar tropical climate and having the same dark skin— were officially considered "European." Their reward was the privilege of nearly freezing to death during the brutal winter campaign in Alsace.
It was in France that Fanon became truly disillusioned with the war, particularly with what he saw as cowardly conduct by French soldiers and civilians. A moving letter to his parents explains why:
Despite his premonitions, Fanon did survive World War II and return to Fort-de-France. He was wounded in combat, however, and received the Croix de Guerre. (The officer who personally awarded the medal, Raoul Salan, would lead the French offensive against the Algerian freedom fighters a decade later, when Fanon was fighting for Algeria's liberation). In Martinique, Fanon finished his lycée examinations and was awarded a veteran's scholarship to study abroad. In 1947, he went back to France.
Some of his Martinican friends attended university in Paris, and they expected Fanon to join them. He did enroll in dental school, but he soon declared that "there were too many Negroes in Paris," and he would go to Lyons in search of "lactification." Leaving his companions puzzled by his sarcasm, Fanon enrolled in Lyons' Medical School, pursuing a course in psychiatric medicine.
He found time to edit Tom-Tom, a newsletter for black students, and he wrote three plays; he continued his readings in philosophy, becoming engaged with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the existentialism of France's leading intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre. Fanon prefaced his 1952 thesis with an ironic quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:
"I speak only old things, and I don't represent intellectual processes."
It was during this period that Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks, a very new and intellectual thing indeed.
Fanonís first professional employment took him back to Martinique, where he found the lack of resources there (and the political climate) deplorable. He returned to France and entered residency at the Saint Alban-de-Lozere hospital, where he trained under François Tosquelles, a pioneer in social psychiatry. After passing a demanding battery of examinations, Fanon gained the rank of chef de service and was qualified to be director of any French or French colonial psychiatric hospital.
His initial posting was to Normandy, but he was committed to working among people of color. He wrote to Senegalís poet-politician Leopold Sedar Senghor (friend of Aimé Césaire and co-founder of the Négritude movement) requesting a post in West Africa.
Receiving no reply, Fanon decided to go to Algeria, where he was appointed medical chief of the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in 1953. This was the same year he married a white French-woman, Marie Josephe (Josie) Dublé, whom he had met in Lyons.
IN ALGERIA AND BEYOND
The Blida-Joinville hospital was Algeria's largest. Described by contemporaries as an almost medieval institution, it housed 2,000 patients in a space designed for less than half that number. European patients were segregated from Algerian ones, and despite a months-long waiting list for admission, French people with relatively minor problems were taken in well before Arabs with serious mental conditions. Only six doctors supervised the institution, and the nursing staff was overworked and underpaid. It's not surprising that therapy often consisted of restraining, even locking up patients. Dr. Fanon had a lot of work to do: he quickly learned to exist on only four hours of sleep a night.
He immediately challenged conditions in which psychiatry was practiced in Algeria. Believing that one cannot regain mental health and emotional strength in a sick and threatening social context, Fanon initiated a number of changes.
Fanon saw the asylum as a community rather than as a prison. Therefore, he removed straitjackets and chains; he opened previously closed wards; he organized group projects to serve patients' daily needs. He replaced the murals of the Virgin Mary and of the history of French colonization, as they seemed a perverse, racist decoration for an institution sheltering Moslem Arabs.
Needless to say, government administrators were scandalized by Dr. Fanon's reforms.
Once the Algerian War of Liberation began in November, 1954, revolutionaries sought help from the rebellious young psychiatrist. For over two years, Fanon secretly provided medical supplies to the FLN (National Liberation Front) and trained Algerian nurses to serve the revolutionary effort. In his capacity as a doctor, he treated more and more victims of torture ... and the French officials who had administered torture.
When the hospital administration decided to punish all Moslem employees after a violent general strike, Fanon himself resigned. He explained his reasons in a letter to Robert Lacoste, the French minister who spearheaded the reign of terror against Algerians:
"If psychiatry technique that is the medical aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization ...
The events in algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people ... A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced." (AR 53-54)
Officially expelled from Algeria, Fanon dedicated the remaining years of his life to replacing a sick, colonial society with a healthy, free society.
After a short stay in France, Fanon returned to North Africa as a full-fledged member of the FLN. While he continued to practice psychiatry in Tunis, he also worked as an editor of El Moudjahid (The Warrior), the FLN newspaper. His fiery editorials and articles lashed out at French colonial practices, explained FLN goals and tactics, shamed ineffective French intellectuals, and called for the liberation of the entire African continent Many of these essays were collected after Fanon's death in the volume entitled Toward the African Revolution.
Fanon's FLN activities were not confined to words. He helped establish supply lines through the Sahara, negotiating with other African leaders and scouting the terrain itself. During one of these missions in 1959, his jeep hit a landmine and he suffered severe injuries.
Seeking treatment in Rome, Fanon noticed a newspaper item mentioning his presence in the hospital, so he prudently changed rooms. That night, assassins shot up the bed he had vacated. Later, the car that was to take him to the Rome airport was sabotaged, exploding prematurely before Fanon had entered it but killing two children in the process. 1959 was also the year he published A Dying Colonialism, his study of the Algerian Revolution.
In 1960, the Algerian Provisional Government appointed Fanon Ambassador to Ghana. He continued to work for the Algerian cause and to expand his interests to Third World decolonization. During a long reconnaissance mission, he narrowly escaped kidnapping by French intelligence agents in Liberia: alerted by a suspiciously friendly Air France flight crew, Fanon and his friends fled the Monrovia airport; their plane was subsequently diverted from Guinea to the Ivory Coast, where Fanon was to have been arrested—or murdered.
Fate accomplished what French spies could not. Fanon had contracted leukemia and was growing weaker and weaker. His sense of urgency, however, increased; as he told an Antillean friend,
"It was necessary that I Hurry to say and do the maximum." (QTD. Caute 69)
He wrote his powerful analysis of world-wide decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, in the throes of fatal illness. He received the page proofs just days before he died.
Although Fanon believed the United States to be a loathsomely racist society, he traveled to Washington D.C. as a last resort, on the advice of Soviet doctors who found his illness too advanced for treatment in the USSR. Persistent rumors hold that the CIA, which apparently helped his transfer to the U.S., arranged for him to be isolated in a hotel room without any sort of medical treatment for eight days, thus hastening his death.
When he finally entered the National Institute of Health facility outside Washington, he underwent massive blood transfusions, yet he contracted double pneumonia in December, 1961. One morning he awoke and said, "Last night they put me in the washing machine." He died that day, at the age of thirty six, his wife and six-year-old son at his side. His body was taken to Tunisia, then smuggled across the border to Algeria, where he was buried in an FLN cemetery. Three months after his death, Algeria became an independent nation.
CHAPTER 2
BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS
Fanon calls this book a sociodiagnostic—that is, a clinical study of group racial identity. Its fundamental assumption is that the juxtaposition of the black and white races has created a very real form of collective mental illness. Both races are locked within the constraints of color, but Fanon's emphasis here is on the formation, meaning, and effects of "blackness."
"The white man is sealed in his whiteness. "The black man in his blackness." (BS 9)
Black identity, Fanon believes, is marked by self-division. The black man behaves and speaks with whites differently than he behaves and speaks with blacks. Such bifurcation, a direct result of colonial subjugation, causes profound, pathological ALIENATION.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fanon: For Beginners by Deborah Wyrick. Copyright © 1998 Deborah Wyrick. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
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