Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ Martinican society unquestionably informed his political outlook, as indicated by the epigraph for this chapter.

      Balancing this history of racial oppression was an overlapping history of rebellion. The French Revolution (1789–99) affected the Caribbean, with the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) being the most significant political outcome in the region—a world-shattering revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803) along with other former and rebel slaves, who embraced the rights of liberty, equality, and fraternity as espoused by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). The meaning of the Haitian Revolution should not be underestimated. Not only did it signify the global reach of the French Revolution, but it vividly underscored the capacity of African slaves to resist their bondage and establish a new political order, to the shock and fear of slave owners throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian Revolution remains the only slave revolt in history to result in the founding of a new sovereign state. This overwhelming fact generated immediate anxieties that similar uprisings could be staged north in the United States and south in Latin America. But the meaning of Haiti has equally extended to the twentieth century, becoming an early symbol of anticolonial revolution as argued by the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James.⁷ For Martinique, the French Revolution resulted in citizenship rights being extended to persons of color, with slavery itself abolished in 1794. However, a British takeover of the island the same year and the Napoleonic Wars prolonged slavery’s slow death until 1848. Nevertheless, Martinique, similar to Haiti, experienced tension and debate over slavery and citizenship rights. This regional political tradition of resistance informed the views of Martinicans.⁸

      Yet, unlike Haiti, the end of slavery in Martinique did not spell the end of colonial rule. It did grant legal citizenship rights to the island’s inhabitants—Fanon was a French citizen by birth. But this political failure and the continuities between enslavement and colonialism were not overlooked by Martinique’s intellectuals, including Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, he deftly insinuates this perspective, writing, “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.”⁹ Fanon instead felt indentured by his racial status and the cultural chauvinism he faced under French colonial control. This prejudice was both local and imperial in its dimensions. The basic structure of inequality in Martinique along lines of race and class was forged in the crucible of slavery and continued up through the early twentieth century—a hierarchy reinforced by demographic numbers and white political and economic control.

      The population of slaves in 1696—roughly a decade after the Code noir decree—approximated 13,126 people out of a total population of 20,066. By the time of emancipation in 1848, slaves numbered 67,447 people out of an overall population of 120,357.¹⁰ Slaves therefore remained in the majority for more than 150 years. But while these figures indicate a stable population ratio over time, they do not reflect the full magnitude of racial difference on the island. Many of those in the nonslave minority were also of African descent, either as freed slaves or gens de couleur libres (“free people of color”), a group principally comprised of métis (persons of multiracial background) born from relationships between European men and slave women. Though tensions of race and status emerged between these different groups, an overwhelming nonwhite majority existed, persisting to the present. Approximately 90 percent of Martinique’s population today is of African descent.

      This racial demography combined with the social hierarchy that slavery and colonialism constructed—with a white minority occupying the top tier—set the stage for Fanon’s worldview: a perspective defined by belonging to a majority, yet one unjustly limited by racial discrimination. Landownership stayed in the hands of a ruling white plantation class after emancipation. Labor continued to be provided by black Martinicans, augmented by indentured immigrants from India, primarily Tamils from French-controlled Pondicherry. As a result, political power remained among elite whites and békés—Creole whites who descended from the original French settler community.¹¹

       Middle-Class Life in Fort-de-France

      The recorded history of the Fanon family starts in the 1840s with his great-grandfather, who was the son of a slave but himself a free man. Fanon’s great-grandparents and grandparents owned small farms. His parents, Félix Casimir Fanon (1891–1947) and Eléanore Médélice Fanon (1891–1981), lived in urban Fort-de-France, working as a civil servant and shopkeeper, respectively (map 1.2). They had eight children, Frantz being the fifth. His mother was métisse—which may have granted Fanon some status, due to Martinique’s racial politics—with part of her family being from Strasbourg in the Alsace region along the border of Germany and France. The Germanic name “Frantz” is understood to be a gesture toward this familial past. Given the professional occupations of his parents, Fanon was born into relative privilege—a first-generation, middle-class milieu—even if the degree of affluence possible in Fort-de-France at the time was limited.¹²

      The population of Fort-de-France approximated 43,000 people during the 1930s, a decade after Fanon’s birth, signaling the small scale of its economy and urban life generally. While it maintained all the essentials of a Caribbean port city with commercial facilities and a French naval installation, business activity was minimal and largely local after the decline of sugar’s profitability at the end of the nineteenth century. Fort-de-France had long been Martinique’s center of government, but the historical and cultural hub of the island had been its first settlement, Saint-Pierre, once known as “the Paris of the Caribbean.” Saint-Pierre experienced a cataclysmic downfall in 1902 with the volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée that emitted a cloud of toxic gas, killing 30,000 people in its wake. Fort-de-France consequently swelled in size in the decades that followed. Urbanization delivered a mix of benefits and drawbacks. The promise of work and financial opportunity for Martinicans without land competed with everyday problems of poor living conditions, inadequate sanitation, and disease due to an expanding urban population. Smallpox, leprosy, and tuberculosis were common.¹³

      Map 1.2 Martinique.

      Fanon himself escaped the worst of these conditions. His family accrued enough wealth for household servants, private schooling, and a second home. Fanon never wrote about or discussed this relative affluence. Indeed, Alice Cherki, in her memoir of Fanon, recalls his persistent privacy, writing, “Every time Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to know some particular concerning Fanon’s life, Fanon avoided answering by dismissing the information as extraneous.”¹⁴ Though Sartre, as a strong admirer of Fanon, was undoubtedly interested in the origins of his philosophy, Fanon’s youth sharply contrasted with the lives of those he advocated later in his adulthood, particularly in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon was not an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, emerging from a lower-strata milieu.¹⁵ He instead grew up in comfort with his attention focused on school, sports, and play. His family was not overtly political and, from a cultural outlook, French. Though his father maintained a certain distance from his children, Eléanore was an active presence, cultivating a rich family life. Fanon played soccer and frequented the local public library—the Bibliothèque Schoelcher—as a teenager. Joby Fanon, his older brother, recalled him being something of a mischievous troublemaker—a quality that portended of his future, as well as undermining a common caricature of Fanon as the angry man, humorless in disposition.¹⁶ Most significant, Frantz Fanon attended private school at the Lycée Victor Schoelcher—which, like the library, was named after the famous French abolitionist—where, as a student, he fortuitously crossed paths with Martinican poet, intellectual, and politician Aimé Césaire.¹⁷

      Césaire was born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe to the far north of the island. His family moved to Fort-de-France after he himself received a scholarship to study at the Lycée Schoelcher. Raised in lower middle-class circumstances—his father a government worker, his mother a seamstress—Césaire excelled academically СКАЧАТЬ