Frantz Fanon

Philosopher of the Barricades

Peter Hudis

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783716852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Caribbean and African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose works, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are hugely influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism. His legacy remains with us today, having inspired movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, the US and South Africa. This is a critical biography of his extraordinary life. Peter Hudis draws on the expanse of his life and work - from his upbringing in Martinique and early intellectual influences to his mature efforts to fuse psychoanalysis and philosophy and contributions to the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria - to counter the monolithic assumption that Fanon's contribution to modern thought is defined by the advocacy of violence. He was a political activist who brought his interests in psychology and philosophy directly to bear on such issues as mutual recognition, democratic participation and political sovereignty. Hudis shows that, as a result, Fanon emerges as neither armchair intellectual nor intransigent militant.

1

The Path to Political and Philosophical Commitment

Mountains of smoking ruins, heaps of mangled corpses, a steaming smoking sea of fire wherever you turn, mud and ashes—that is all that remains of the little city which perched on the rocky slope of the volcano like a fluttering swallow . . .

And now in the ruins of the annihilated city on Martinique a new guest arrives, unknown, never seen before—the human being. Not lords and bondsmen, not blacks and whites, not rich and poor, not plantation owners and wage slaves—human beings have appeared on the tiny shattered island, human beings who feel only the pain and see only the disaster, who only want to help and succor . . . A brotherhood of peoples against nature’s burning hatred, a resurrection of humanism on the ruins of human culture. The price of recalling their humanity was high, but thundering Mount Pele had a voice to catch their ear.¹

So wrote Rosa Luxemburg on May 15, 1902, of the massive volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée that a week earlier reduced to ashes the city of St. Pierre, in Martinique. Frantz Fanon probably never knew that this pivotal figure in European radicalism— who shared so many of his values, even if they differed on many others—had written so movingly of this event. Would he have been surprised to learn that a Polish-Jewish woman living thousands of miles away had the sensitivity to recognize that victims of the disaster came together to help each other in response to such a tragedy? Did the sense of mutual aid and brotherhood that arose from that event leave a trace, however indirectly, upon the social conscience of later generations of Martinicans, including Fanon’s?

Before 1902 St. Pierre was the largest and most culturally developed city in Martinique, earning it the moniker “Athens of the Antilles.” It went into rapid decline after the eruption of Mount Pelée (40,000 perished in all—a quarter of the island’s population), and Fort-de-France soon replaced it as the center of Martinican urban life. It was to this city that Fanon’s parents, Casimir Fanon and Eléanore Médélice, moved by the early 1920s, after growing up in a rural area on the Atlantic coast. And it was in Fort-de-France where Frantz, the fifth of their six children, was born on July 20, 1925. As it turned out, he would devote his life to what Luxemburg called “a resurrection of humanism on the ruins of human culture.”

Growing up in Martinique

Martinique was a French colony (with intermittent periods of British rule) from the seventeenth century. Until the 1920s sugar cane was its leading export—thanks, initially, to the labor of African slaves. Slavery was abolished in 1848, but the subordinate position of blacks—the vast majority of the populace—continued largely unabated. Political and economic power remained in the hands of the békés—the descendants of white creoles, who numbered only 2,000 (out of a total population of 150,000) at the time of Fanon’s birth. Nevertheless, despite the privileged position of the békés, Fanon did not grow up in a society defined by the rigid segregation and brutal racial oppression that existed in other colonies or the U.S. South. As he later wrote

In Martinique it is rare to find hardened racial positions. The racial problem is covered over by economic discrimination and, in a given social class, it is above all productive of anecdotes. Relations are not modified by epidermal accentuations . . . In Martinique, when it is remarked that this or that person is in fact very black, this is said without contempt, without hatred. One must be accustomed to what is called the spirit of Martinique in order to grasp the meaning of what is said.²

This is reflected in the fact that until World War II blacks in Martinique did not refer to themselves as “Negroes.” Nor did they tend to identify with their African roots. If anything, they were encouraged to disparage anything connected with Africa for the sake of emphasizing their presumed connection with France and French culture. Fanon did not grow up in a society in which racial self-defi-nition—let alone “black pride”—was pronounced. In this sense, his experience very much coincided with that of Stuart Hall:

When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a child in Kingston [Jamaica], I was surrounded by the signs, music and rhythms of this Africa of the diaspora, which only existed as a result of a long and discontinuous series of transformations. But, although almost everyone around me was some shade of brown or black (Africa “speaks”!), I never once heard a single person refer to themselves or to others as, in some way, or as having been at some time in the past, “African.”³

Racism surely existed in Martinique, but at the time Fanon was growing up it was latent, taking the form of economic inequality and papered over by a large degree of self-denial. Gradations of skin color among those of African descent did not carry the same degree of social significance as found elsewhere. Fanon came from a middle-class family that generally had little everyday interaction with the békés, and his parents encouraged him to speak French instead of creole, the language of the “lower” classes, in his interaction with the larger society. It does not appear that experiencing overt racism from a very young age impelled him to eventually become a revolutionary.

So what did propel him to a life of political engagement? Why did he respond to his experienced conditions with a desire to ultimately change the world, while others who encountered the same or similar ones did not? This is a difficult question to answer about anyone, but it is made harder by the fact that Fanon rarely spoke about his past. He never gave an interview about his personal life and refrained from being drawn into discussing it when urged to by his friends. As he once told Marcel Manville, one of his best friends from Martinique, “One should not relate one’s past, but stand as a testimony to it.”⁴

What we do know is that when he was ten years old, in 1935, Fanon had a life-altering experience upon visiting the monument to Victor Schoelcher on a school trip. Schoelcher was a white Abolitionist who authored the decree of April 27, 1848 that abolished slavery in the French colonies. Fanon was suddenly struck by the thought of why was Schoelcher being honored while the slaves that he “freed” were not. He later told his colleague Alice Cherki

It was the first time I saw that the history they were teaching us was based on a denial, that the order of things we were being presented with was a falsehood. I still played and took part in sports and went to the movies, but everything had changed. I felt as though my eyes and my ears had been opened.⁵

Perhaps this experience was one of those shocks of recognition from which a questioning and critical mind is born. It surely did not escape Fanon’s attention that both the library he began visiting as a teenager (the Bibliotèque Schoelcher) and the school he attended (the Lycée Schoelcher) were named after this same figure— while the blacks who worked the sugar plantations under slavery, endured the “Black Codes,” and suffered discrimination ever since remained invisible.

World War II: The Turning Point

The critical turning for Martinique and Fanon, both objectively and subjectively, was the year 1939. In October—shortly after the outbreak of World War II—a French military fleet commanded by Admiral Georges Robert arrived in Martinique. It was sent there by the French government to ensure that the fleet would not face a possible German attack. Along with the ships came 10,000 white French sailors—many of them virulent racists who took advantage of every opportunity to lord it over the native population. For the first time Fanon, like many others, had the opportunity to experience overt and systematic racist discrimination up close. After Germany defeated France in June 1940, Robert threw his lot in with the Marshall Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime—an action that further exacerbated tensions with the black population, which largely identified with Republican France. Curiously, the U.S. recognized Robert’s authority over the island in exchange for his agreement to keep the French ships under U.S. supervision; the U.S. still had formal diplomatic ties with Vichy France at the time, despite its collaboration with the Nazis (and it would continue to maintain them long after the U.S. actively entered the war).

Fanon later noted that in response to Robert’s occupation “the West Indian underwent his first metaphysical experience”⁶—he began, for the first time, to see himself as black. The France to which many Martinicans had looked began to appear very different when it took the form of 10,000 white racist sailors abusing and demeaning them. As a result, the Martinicans began looking very differently at themselves. A new sense of self emerged. A cultural phenomenon—the formation of a black identity—was actually part of a social reflux, a response to the sudden influx of large numbers of white Europeans who vilified the Martinicans as “black.” What Fanon later developed in his philosophical works— “It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject.”⁷—was initially confirmed for him right here, in his lived experience following the arrival of the French fleet in 1939.

In that same year a critical subjective development occurred—the publication of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Césaire, who by 1939 was also living in Fort-de-France and taught at the Lycée Schoelcher (which Fanon attended), broke new poetic, cultural, and political ground by not only declaring that Martinicans were black, but that they had every reason in the world to be proud of the fact. For Martinique, at least, this assertion of black pride marked something of an intellectual revolution—one that in time took the name of negritude. The colonial imposition of a black identity corresponded with an effort on the part of the colonized subject to invest it with liberatory content and significance. Fanon later wrote

[B]efore ten thousand racists, the West Indian felt obliged to defend himself. Without Césaire this would have been difficult for him. But Césaire was there, and people joined him in chanting the once-hated song to the effect that it is fine and good to be a Negro!⁸

Negritude was still an emerging literary movement as of 1939. It was launched through the efforts of Césaire and other blacks from French-speaking colonies, such as Léon-Gontran Damas of Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal. Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance as well as the literacy activity of blacks living in Paris in the 1930s, it became the foremost expression of self-assertion among French-speaking blacks in the years following World War II. For perhaps the first time in the Lesser Antilles, it proclaimed the need for a return to African sources and indigenous consciousness. In doing so, it sought to produce a social as well as psychological revolution among the victims of anti-black racism.⁹ Although Fanon would develop a number of differences with the leading figures of negritude over the years, it would be no exaggeration to say that its two-fold concern with a social as well as psychological revolution was the humus from which his own distinctive approach to the critique of racism and colonialism would emerge. Fanon did not have to wait until the early 1950s, when he became a practicing psychiatrist, to become attuned to the psycho-affective dimension of race and racism. The idea was already in the air in the late 1930s, largely thanks to the poets of negritude.

In 1939, the 14-year-old Fanon was still too young to attend Césaire’s courses at the Lycée. But he was already an avid reader, especially of literature and European philosophy. He appears to have developed a particular interest in Nietzsche as a teenager—an influence that will show up in much of his later published work. And he was taking in the work of Césaire, who began issuing the literary and artistic journal Tropiques in 1941 (eleven issues were to appear between then and 1945).

Fanon’s Moment of Decision

The mid-1940s were not, for Fanon, a time for quiet intellectual reflection. The world was aflame in World War II and its impact reached even into such distant backwaters as the French West Indies. Increasing numbers of young Martinicans were leaving the island to join the Free French Army and fight the Nazis in Europe. In January 1943, Fanon—only 17 at the time—decided to do the same. He slipped out of Martinique during his brother’s wedding and headed to the island of Dominica to meet up with other would-be resisters. Not long afterwards, a mass uprising—largely of urban workers— erupted in Martinique against Robert’s administration. It marked the emergence (as Fanon later put it) of a new political consciousness— “the birth of the [Martinican] proletariat” as a revolutionary force.¹⁰ Robert was forced out and Martinique’s links to the Vichy regime were broken. Charles de Gaulle appointed Henri Tourtet as the new man in charge, and shortly afterward Tourtet organized a battalion of West Indians to fight with the Free French Army. Fanon enthusiastically returned to Martinique to join it.

Not all Martinicans were thrilled with the idea of joining De Gaulle’s campaign to fight in Europe. Césaire denounced the whole idea on the grounds that blacks had nothing to gain by fighting in “a white man’s war.” Fanon thought differently. As one of his friends later recalled, he held that “whenever human dignity and freedom are at stake, it involves us, whether we be black, white or yellow. And whenever these are threatened in any corner of the earth, I will fight them to the end.”¹¹ The sentiment is typically Fanonian. Less than a decade later, in his first published book, he emphasized the same concept by way of citing Karl Jaspers:

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.¹²

After undergoing basic training, Fanon was shipped off to North Africa in March 1944. All of those on board were black, except the commanding officers—who were white Frenchmen. Neither this nor the conditions he witnessed upon his arrival in Casablanca, Morocco escaped Fanon’s attention. He was stunned to discover the extent of the strict racial hierarchy in the “Free” French Army. At the bottom were the Arabs, despised and discriminated against; then came the African troops (mainly from Senegal), segregated from other troops by distinct dress and in separate battalions; and then the West Indians, called “Europeans” by the French but under the command of white officers. Things were no better when the troops arrived in Algeria, where he saw at first hand the depth of hatred that many French settlers exhibited for native Jews and Muslims. Their animus had become even more accentuated during war, since many of the pied noir settlers enthusiastically embraced the racist and anti-Semitic laws adopted by the Vichy regime. This war for “human dignity” was beginning to wear somewhat thin.

Fanon nevertheless took part in the invasion of southern France in the fall of 1944. Sometime after the American forces secured the beaches, Fanon’s battalion came ashore near St. Tropez. Fanon’s unit later encountered heavy fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Fanon in Our Time
• 1 The Path to Political and Philosophical Commitment
• 2 Self and Other: The Dialectic of Black Skin, White Masks
• 3 The Engaged Psychiatrist: Blida and the Psychodynamics of Racism
• 4 The Engaged Philosopher: The FLN and the Algerian Revolution
• 5 The Strategist of Revolution: Africa at the Crossroads
• 6 Toward a New Humanity: The Wretched of the Earth
• Notes
• Index