Fanon, Frantz (1925—61)
Psychiatrist, activist, and revolutionary theorist. Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique. He attended the prestigious Lycée Victor Schoelcher, where one of his teachers was the great poet and activist Césaire, Aimé, who would be an influence for the rest of his life (he admired Césaire’s theory of négritude, but rejected its appeal to racial authenticity). During World War II he experienced directly the violence he would later become famous for advocating in his writing. He fought with the Free French Forces in Europe and was wounded in 1944. After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyons, graduating in 1951. His time in the army, then as a student in Lyons, was formative because it was his first experience of racism as an endless series of psychologically damaging micro-aggressions. In an essay written for Esprit, published in 1952, Fanon argued that racial marginalization is a danger to the mental health of people forced to endure it. Fanon’s entire career would be spent exploring this nexus between politics, psychiatry, and violence. His first position as a psychiatrist was at a hospital in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, where he had the opportunity to work with François Tosquelles, one of the founders of institutional psychotherapy (an important influence for Guattari, Félix). Tosquelles’ idea was that psychiatric patients were doubly isolated, both clinically and socially, and therefore the clinic should try to replicate the routines and patterns of life outside the asylum. Fanon adopted and elaborated upon these ideas when he moved to French-controlled Algeria in 1953 to take up the position of chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. His patients there were a mixture of European women and Muslim men, living in conditions that he later described as a mirror of the compartmentalized world of colonialism. He built a traditional teahouse for his Muslim patients, creating a space for them to socialize. He brought in Arab musicians and storytellers to entertain them, much to the distaste of his fellow physicians. His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), translated as Black Skin, White Masks (1986), was originally intended as his medical thesis, but it was rejected. Written while he was in France, but also drawing on his experiences in Martinique where he grew up, and Algeria where was stationed during the war, it sought to capture and account for the ‘lived experience of a black man’. It is a study of the psychological damage caused by colonialism and racism combined. Theoretically it draws on Sartre, Jean-Paul, particularly his analysis of anti-Semitism, and the psychoanalysis of Lacan, Jacques, in a bid to analyse what he saw as a debilitating inferiority complex amongst his black peers. He also recognized that there was a superiority complex at work in white people that also needed to be addressed if progressive change was to be made. Over the next few years he concentrated on the practical matters of psychiatry, developing therapeutic strategies that Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix would later acknowledge as a precursor to what they called schizoanalysis. Fanon ceased to focus exclusively on the psychosexual history of the individual and began to factor in sociocultural concerns. His extensive writings on this subject have not been fully studied or anthologized. However, a large selection has recently been made available in a collection edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa entitled Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (2015), translated as Alienation and Freedom (2018). When the Algerian Revolution erupted in 1954, Fanon got to see at first hand the effects of colonial violence. He joined the Front de Libération Nationale (ANT) almost immediately, and used his position to assist the revolution. He was expelled from Algeria in 1957, after which he move to Tunis, where he continued his involvement with the FLN. He joined the editorial collective of the journal El Moudjahid and attended conferences on decolonization throughout Africa and reported on these for the journal. Some of these pieces are collected in Pour la révolution africaine (1964), translated as Toward the African Revolution (1994). It was in this period, too, that Fanon wrote the work which made him internationally renowned: Les Damnés de la terre (1961), translated as The Wretched of the Earth (1965). This work became infamous for its discussion of the necessity of violence, not just to win power, but also to imprint the minds of the revolutionaries with the significance of their undertaking. Its message reverberated throughout the Third World, which was then in the throes of a radical process of decolonization, but its legacy is ambivalent. Fanon was aware that violence is not without cost, and he foresaw a long period of healing being necessary following the overthrow of colonial regimes. He thought that violence would lead to solidarity amongst the colonial nations, but in this respect he was sorely mistaken. He was diagnosed with leukaemia in his early thirties. At first he sought treatment in the USSR. When this did not work, he tried his luck in the US. But it was all to no avail. He died at Bethesda Hospital, Maryland, at the age of 36. Little known in his own lifetime, particularly in France, where his books sold hardly at all (not helped by the fact they were frequently banned for discussing the war in Algeria, which the French government did not want to admit to or discuss), Fanon has become a symbol of collocation struggle. His work inspired Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Steve Biko among many others. His life has inspired at least one novel, John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon (2008), and at least one film, Isaac Julien’s 1996 documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask. But by far the most important tribute to his work is the film The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, which drew heavily on Les Damnés de la terre in filming. Virtually all the major postcolonial theorists from Bhabha, Homi to Gates, Henry Louis Jr pay homage to his work. Further Reading: N. Gibson Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003). L. Gordon Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995). D. Macey Frantz Fanon: A Life (2000). A. Sekyi-out Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996).