An author needs to comprehend a staggering number of things to write a biography of Frantz Fanon: the histories of Martinique and the West Indies, of France and Europe, of Algeria and Africa; of psychiatry, existentialism, and Marxism; of racism, imperialism and decolonisation. It is Adam Shatz’s understanding of all these things as well as of Fanon as an individual that makes his book such a superb example of historical biography. Shatz also makes a compelling case for Fanon’s significance as “Few writers have captured so vividly the lived experience of racism and colonial domination, the fury it creates in the mind of the oppressed – or the sense of alienation and powerlessness that it engenders.”
Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique, the son of middle-class parents of African descent. As a young man he believed so strongly in the principles of “liberty, egality and fraternity” that he joined the French Resistance. But his wartime experience disillusioned him. Far from embodying equality, the French army was rigidly segregated by race.
After the war, Fanon studied psychiatry in Lyons. There he became further disenchanted with France. Though he was a decorated war veteran who spoke impeccable French, he was constantly treated as other simply because of his skin colour. In treating North African migrants, he also grew disgusted with the predominant medical diagnosis of them as suffering from “North African syndrome” – laziness or complaining instead of real illness. Instead Fanon saw that their ailments were symptoms of the system that subjugated them. Fanon’s 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks, drew from these experiences to offer a pioneering and still relevant analysis of the psychological harms done to those subjected to racism.
As a doctor, Fanon rebelled against the psychiatric tradition of patient confinement. He allowed his patients to move around the hospital, encouraged them to engage in social activities, and invited them to participate in decision-making. He learned this radically democratic approach at the experimental Saint-Alban hospital in the South of France and brought its methods with him when appointed in 1952 to head a psychiatric hospital in Algeria.
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Though Fanon did not know it, he had moved to a country on the verge of revolution. Algeria, which had been brutally colonised by the French in the 1830s, was then a French department. But its majority Muslim population was oppressed by the white settler population, which monopolised political and economic power. Fanon had been in Algeria less than a year when the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched an armed struggle that commenced a long and bloody war. As the FLN resorted to terrorism, the French employed torture and extrajudicial murder (“disappearings”) and forced peasants into concentration camps.
As a doctor, Fanon witnessed the traumatic effects of the war. He treated both the torturers and the tortured. But he also found the great political cause of his life. His disillusionment with French racism led him to instinctively side with the rebels. His hospital soon became a haven for FLN fighters.
In 1957, Fanon fled to Tunisia along with other FLN leaders. There he created Africa’s first psychiatric day clinic: patients returned home at the end of each day. He also became a leading spokesperson for the Algerian revolution. Taking advantage of his black skin, he became the FLN’s unofficial ambassador to sub-Saharan Africa and thereby evolved into an advocate of pan-African revolution.
Fanon portrayed the Algerian struggle as liberating men and women from patriarchal rule as well as colonialism. He favoured the establishment of a democratic, multiethnic state in which all could be citizens. But these were not the aims of most FLN leaders, who were religious populists, not secular leftists. The FLN was also a secretive and authoritarian organisation. Fanon lived in fear of his life should he resist its discipline.
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Shortly before Algeria obtained its independence in 1962, Fanon died of leukaemia at the young age of 36. But his legacy lived on in his posthumous publication of The Wretched of the Earth, a classic anticolonial text still widely read today. Fanon remains best-known for the text’s advocacy of anticolonial violence as offering the colonised psychological freedom from the colonisers. Yet, as Shatz points out, Fanon also demonstrated the long-term psychological damage of such violence on its perpetrators and insisted that “hatred is not an agenda”.
While Fanon excoriated colonialism in Wretched, he also presciently warned that establishing independent states would not ensure liberation. Political independence would not eliminate economic exploitation by global capitalists. And he foresaw the danger that leaders employing anti-colonial rhetoric would usurp power and economic resources for themselves.
For Shatz, Fanon must be criticised as well as admired. And his writings must be contextualised within the different historical epoch in which he lived. But Fanon is still relevant because “the racial divisions and economic inequalities that he protested were not so much liquidated as reconfigured”. It is no wonder, then, that Fanon is an icon for many anti-racist activists today. Fanon speaks to us because he sought to create a new world free of the domination of the old.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott associate professor in American history at Trinity College Dublin
