Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ figure akin to the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948).⁴ Though this textual angle is understandable, given the range of Fanon’s ideas and the highly personal nature of his work, it has also frequently sanctified his writing, resulting in overwrought assessments and muted debate, with sharp criticism of Fanon typically played in a minor key—a situation that lends itself to hagiography.

      Grasping his life and its human limitations in detail provides a more acute sense of his ambition, the experiences that informed it, and why his books have offered continued resonance for different audiences. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a leading intellectual of African American studies, once noted the relative disregard for Fanon’s personal history in contemporary scholarship, which occasioned the anachronistic use of Fanon’s work that was too alienated from the specific colonial contexts and revolutionary spirit that influenced his thinking.⁵ The tendency toward mythmaking surrounding Fanon has often rendered him an uncomplicated universal symbol—an emblematic, and thus ahistorical, voice against colonialism in its varied forms across time and place, without attention to the reception and meaning of his work during his lifetime.⁶ When we remove him from history, we risk making him a cliché.

      This book offers a historical portrait of Fanon. It is written in the belief that it is essential to understand his life experiences in order to grasp the origins of his thought and its evolution over time. Indeed, the aura of destiny presents a constant challenge. Fanon is too often treated as a fully formed thinker, without granting him a period of apprenticeship that is indispensable to any political or intellectual life. As Alice Cherki, a former colleague of his, has forcefully argued, an “unrestrained idealization” of Fanon has created a “heroic image” that “cuts him off from history.”⁷ But the profile offered here is not a mere recounting of facts. His writing and biography are tightly interwoven. Understanding his life and the life of his philosophy at once not only serves to address the complex sources of his ceaselessly energetic thinking—what political theorist Achille Mbembe has called his “metamorphic thought”—but also underscores dramatic shifts in perspective over the course of his youth and adulthood, the improbability of his status as a revolutionary, and the intellectual and professional restlessness that carried him from Martinique, to France, and, finally, to Africa.⁸ Intellectual figures are often perceived as solitary, inhabiting a realm of thought and therefore existing primarily on the page. While textual engagement is integral to this book, understanding Fanon as a historical figure is central.

      In this regard, we must unthink Fanon. We must situate him in time, beyond the shifting vicissitudes of social and political theory. Fanon was profoundly shaped by the people he encountered and the social contexts and historical period in which he lived. He assumed a number of roles: being a son, a sibling among eight children, a husband, and a father, in addition to his better-known vocations as a psychiatrist, writer, and revolutionary activist. His philosophy was drawn from interacting with unnamed Algerian patients in his capacity as a medical doctor, as well as from relationships with such esteemed intellectual figures as Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). His history must also be anchored within a deeper history of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the Americas that touched his life in different ways. Fanon is part of the history of the Black Atlantic—a world of transatlantic connections between Africa, Europe, and the Americas—as well as the intellectual milieu of mid-twentieth-century European continental philosophy. Above all, Fanon witnessed the emergence of a new world order through European decolonization and political independence in Africa and Asia, achieved through strident public criticism and violent armed struggle. Fanon occupied several political, professional, and intellectual worlds that underwent profound shifts over the course of his brief lifetime—worlds that he himself helped define.

      The colonial and metropolitan settings Fanon traversed have also generated an intricate set of political and intellectual legacies that must be untangled—from the Caribbean, to Africa and the Middle East, to university settings in Europe and North America. His life presents a distinct historical problem, resisting conformity to many existing narratives of black intellectual history and the origins of revolutionary thought. David Macey, a biographer of Fanon, has written that despite the continued popularity of Fanon’s books and his widespread name recognition, he remains something of an enigma, a quality that can be attributed to his contingent cosmopolitanism: from his birth and childhood in Martinique, to his military service and early career in France, to his eventual activism in Algeria and North Africa. These contrasting contexts produced a sequence of identities that were geopolitical—Martinican, French, and Algerian—as well as occupational—soldier, student, psychiatrist, writer, and diplomat. They added layers of experience that both reinforced and unraveled his sociopolitical status as a black citizen of the French Empire, as he critically examined in first book, Black Skin, White Masks. This wide-ranging geography has also contributed to an uneven memory of Fanon that has been romanticized, contested, and, in some locales, nearly forgotten.

      In France the legacy of Fanon has largely been absent or ignored until recently, in step with a general French ambivalence toward Algeria. Representing a profound loss to France, the French government refused to call the Algerian War—known as the Algerian Revolution in Algeria—a war at all, since defining it as such would imply that Algeria was a separate territory apart from France, an idea antithetical to many French. Because of the French government’s preference for classifying it as a police action until 1999, it became popularly known, particularly among critics, as the “war without a name.”⁹ In contrast, Fanon’s intellectual contributions have been eulogized extensively within the field of postcolonial studies, as well as African American and African diasporic studies in North America. Engagement with his work by such scholars as Homi K. Bhabha, Ato Sekyi-Otu, Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson, and others has resulted in the canonization of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth as essential works for understanding the psychological impact of colonial racism and the politics of decolonization during the twentieth century. Such assessments have created a stronger Anglophone, rather than Francophone, tradition in Fanon studies. Indeed, there is an incongruity that Fanon’s reputation has reached its apex in the American academy, given his criticism toward the United States and his premature death there—the only occasion he visited the country. A more tragic irony is that his posthumous status in Martinique is a contested one and that his memory in Algeria has greatly diminished. Algeria has moved well beyond its revolutionary period, its politics more recently defined by civil conflict since the early 1990s that has pitted the government against Islamic insurgents, leaving as many as 200,000 dead. The places that meant the most to Fanon have treated the contributions of his life either with gradual forgetfulness or disregard.

      Fanon’s relative obscurity in Martinique until recently has been attributed to his permanent departure from there and his eventual burial in Algeria. Regarding his compatriot’s unsettled memory, the critic Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) once wrote, “It so happens that years go by without his name (not to mention his work) being mentioned by the media, whether political or cultural, revolutionary or leftist, of Martinique. An avenue in Fort-de-France is named after him. That is about it.”¹⁰ Joby Fanon has recalled that his younger brother Frantz was seen as a traitor for his radical politics against France, given that Martinique has remained a part of France to the present day.¹¹ But Martinique was ultimately a place of childhood. Fanon achieved his fame elsewhere. Martinican residents such as Césaire, Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau (1953–present) have contributed more to the island’s intellectual and political life. Albert Memmi (1920–present)—the Tunisian writer whose influential work The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) is often compared with Fanon’s—has suggested that Fanon developed an ambivalence toward his home, as witnessed in arguments made in Black Skin, White Masks.¹² At a 1978 United Nations (UN) conference held in tribute to Fanon’s legacy, the intellectual C. L. R. James (1901–1989) discussed how Fanon left the Caribbean in the same way that activist George Padmore (1903–1959) and James himself had once left, believing more fervently in Africa’s revolution than any political change in the Caribbean. However, James believed that Fanon would have returned.¹³ Indeed, this possibility is indicated in a late essay attributed to СКАЧАТЬ