Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

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       1

       Martinique

      There were some who wanted to equate me with my ancestors, enslaved and lynched: I decided that I would accept this.

       —Black Skin, White Masks ¹

      Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, on July 20, 1925. Martinique is often a cipher in many studies of Fanon, treated merely as a place of origin. But its deep history fundamentally informed his identity and shaped his ambitions. A small island of approximately 1,128 square kilometers (436 square miles) located toward the southern reaches of the Lesser Antilles near South America (see map 1.1), Martinique’s size and geography suggest a peripheral status within the French Empire. However, contrary to these surface qualities, the island experienced the firm entrenchment of French rule and influence beginning in the seventeenth century. Local indigenous societies were quickly subsumed through conquest, with European settler and enslaved African communities defining Martinique’s political and cultural life. French control took hold in a way that reflected metropolitan concerns for maintaining authority and legitimacy in a geographically distant, yet economically important, territory.

      Map 1.1 The Antilles and the Caribbean.

      These long-standing conditions elucidate the complex search for political and cultural alternatives by figures like Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant, generating a particular Antillean discourse (discours antillais), to invoke an expression of Glissant’s.² Martinique remains a part of France to the present day—an overseas department (département d’outre-mer) like Guiana in South America, Mayotte and Réunion in the Indian Ocean, and Guadeloupe, also in the Caribbean. Indeed, it is a historical irony that Césaire and Fanon, as vocal critics of colonialism, originated from a place that did not ultimately achieve independence like other French territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Still, this basic fact and the deep-seated French-ness in Martinique also explain their motivations, underlining how and why such a small place produced vital thinkers who confronted the paradox of French rule that promised political and social equality in principle, but denied it in practice. Racism, based on a history of black enslavement, underpinned this contradiction.

       Slavery and Its Enduring Legacies

      As with many European colonies, the French acquisition of Martinique was prompted by competition with other imperial powers, as well as its economic potential. Originally occupied by indigenous Arawak and Carib communities, Martinique was identified and mapped by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) in 1493. France claimed it almost 150 years later in September 1635, when a group of French settlers established Saint-Pierre (or St. Pierre), having been pushed off the neighboring island of St. Kitts by the British. But Martinique’s political status remained uncertain during the next two centuries, with the British occupying the island on several occasions. Only after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) did French rule stabilize, lasting to the present day. Still, by the early eighteenth century, slavery had been established within the island’s economy, following the 1685 promulgation of the Code noir—the French legal decree by King Louis XIV (1638–1715) that formalized slavery and restricted the freedom of emancipated blacks. Coffee and especially sugar became the key commodities produced by slaves for export to Europe—an extremely lucrative trade, such that France gave up its sizeable Canadian possessions (including present-day Quebec and Ontario) at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) against the British, in order to retain the far smaller territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

      Though Fanon was born well after abolition, the history of slavery on Martinique is vital to understanding his personal origins, the racism he fought against, as well as the anticipatory role that slave emancipation had for ideas of anticolonial liberation. Enslavement incurred a form of social death, to use sociologist Orlando Patterson’s expression, which left enduring legacies of dehumanization and lower-strata status.³ The practice of slavery on Martinique took the particularly harsh form that characterized sugar production across the Caribbean. Its brutality would have lasting political, economic, and intellectual effects. First introduced to the Western Hemisphere by Columbus, sugar cultivation spread around the Caribbean over the next several centuries, sparking economic growth across the Atlantic world. Indeed, as argued by scholar-politician Eric Williams (1911–1981), this commodity generated enough surplus wealth to help initiate the Industrial Revolution in Europe during the nineteenth century.⁴ The triangle trade that sent slaving ships from Europe to West and Central Africa, slaves from Africa to the Western Hemisphere, and sugar and other slave-produced commodities—such as cotton, tobacco, and coffee—to Europe created a cycle of commerce that altered European consumer tastes, encouraged imperial expansion, and transformed the political histories of many African states, which both participated in and fell victim to the slave trade. No less significant, it fundamentally changed the demography of the Americas, bringing millions of African people north and south of the equator. African slaves in turn profoundly shaped the economies, cultures, and politics of the Western Hemisphere. But they did so in the wake of the Middle Passage—the westward journey of slave ships across the Atlantic—during which millions died from disease, malnutrition, and physical mistreatment.

      Violence and mortality continued to define the lives of those who arrived. The presence of death in its spectral and actual forms circumscribed the lifeworlds of those enslaved. Disease and the threat of corporal punishment caused constant anxiety. The backbreaking nature of cultivating, harvesting, and processing sugarcane weakened physical regimens and shortened the lifespans of many. Practices of commemoration subsequently emerged that sought to preserve cultural tradition and senses of African identity, in order to resist the overwhelming nature of enslavement, geographic dislocation, and colonial disempowerment.⁵ These customs also insured that slavery and its violent history would never be forgotten in popular memory. Although the abolition of slavery in Martinique in 1848—coincidentally, the same year France claimed control over the territory of Algeria—preceded Fanon’s birth by almost eighty years, the legacy of slavery and its dehumanization continued to ripple up through the twentieth century, marking Fanon’s history and social status as it did for so many other black men and women in Martinique and throughout the Americas. Fanon never addressed СКАЧАТЬ