by David Macey. (Published by Granta Books, London, 2000 (paperback
edition, 2001)).
In the late 1960s, the name of Frantz
Fanon became associated with the idea of an armed revolution in the 'Third
World'. In the words of his biographer, David, Macey, in his new book, 'Frantz
Fanon: A life', "Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence,
the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater
threat to the West than communism", and "the spokesman of a Third
Worldism which held that the future of socialism - or even the world - was no
longer in the hands of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, but in
those of the dispossessed wretched of the earth".
For a period, Fanon was a well-known
figure and his ideas had significant influence. Today, Fanon is not well
remembered, though his writings sell moderately well and have become the
subject of a minor industry in academia. Macey’s biography may help to change
that. It is an excellent and exhaustive account of Fanon, the psychiatrist, the
revolutionary, and the writer - a man who asked questions.
Formative years
Fanon was born on 20 June 1925 on the
Caribbean island of Martinique. Martinique was a French colony and was
dominated by a minority of white settlers. Fanons’ family were reasonably well
off however, and could afford to send him to the local lycee, an opportunity
only available to 4% of black children at the time.
Whilst at the lycee Fanon came under the
influence of Aime Cesaire, a proponent of the concept of "negritude"
(a black revolutionary consciousness). Cesaire later joined the Communist
Party, before moving to the right and forming the Party Populaire Martinique.
In time, he became the dominant political figure on the island and remained so
for some decades.
At the age of 17 years, Fanon left
Martinique, now under the control of pro-Vichy forces, and made his way to
Dominica in an open boat. He joined the Free French forces and fought in North
Africa and France, where he was wounded in action and decorated. His experience
of racism, in Martinique, in the army, and on the streets of the France he
helped to liberate, shaped his political outlook.
Fanon the psychiatrist
After leaving the army Fanon trained as a
doctor before specialising as a psychiatrist. During his training in France he
came under the influence of the Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles.
Tosquelles had been a support of Catalan nationalism as a young man but by the outbreak
of the Spanish Civil War was an active member of the Partido Obrero de
Unifacion Marxista or POUM. He served on the Aragon front, where he helped to
organise a psychiatric service, and selected soldiers for machine-gun and tank
units. From early 1938 he was responsible for psychiatric services for the
whole of the Republican Army. After the Republican defeat Tosquelles fled Spain
to France, crossing the Pyrenees on foot.
It appears that Fanon was a diligent
student and an idealistic and hard working doctor. He participated in
innovative movements that were leading towards more humane treatment of
psychiatric patients.
Fanon primarily employed medical
approaches to the treatment of mental illness but was well able to place
symptoms in their social context, not something all doctors or psychiatrists
can do easily to this day.
He did not adopt the fashionable approach
of the time, based on Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud and his followers
traditionally "observed" politics (Freud famously gave this advice to
his adherents in Germany on the coming to power of the Nazis). Passivity did
not sit easily with Fanon’s character. By this time he was becoming
increasingly disenchanted with France, with mainstream medicine and psychiatry.
Partly by design and partly by accident he took up a post in the then French
colony of Algeria in 1954.
There he continued his pioneering work -
he helped found the first psychiatric day hospital in Africa and attempted to
introduce social treatments. Soon, however, Fanon was distracted by the outside
world. When he arrived in Algeria the war of independence was already raging,
and at first in clandestine fashion, and then openly, Fanon became involved
with the Front Liberation Nationale (FLN), the main Algerian nationalist
grouping.
The Algerian War
The Algerian war of independence
officially started in 1954. In reality it had begun much earlier. An Algerian
novelist describes Victory in Europe Day in 1945 in this way:
"8 May means two different things.
In France, it means the jubilation of the Liberation. In Algeria, it means the
horror of repression. Between 25,000 and 40,000 victims in three days, in three
small towns in the east of Algeria. With the charming and exotic names of
Setif, Evelma, Kherrata...People were thrown, dead or alive, into deep
crevasses"
This savagery was a consequence of the
deaths of some two hundred European settlers, massacred by the nationalists.
Released Italian POWs in the "Arab hunt" joined police, troops and
armed settlers.
The episode went largely unreported in
France. The French Communist Party (PCF) paper, L’Humanite, reported only that
"fascist provocateurs" had opened fire on Muslims who then
retaliated, leaving perhaps one hundred dead.
In the aftermath of this terrible
repression a few guerrilla groups formed in the mountains but it would be 1954
before full-scale conflict erupted. This undeclared war was to last for eight
years and took a terrible toll. One million French conscripts served in
Algeria, 27,000 of whom never returned. The number of Algerians killed is
unknown. The French admit that 141,000 combatants died; the Algerians claim one
million dead.
Fanon began by treating wounded FLN
fighters and then became a journalist in the FLN press. He was soon forced to
resign his medical position and to leave the country as his life was in danger.
He became a sort of roving ambassador for the struggle in a number of African
capitals and a FLN spokesman at international conferences.
He survived at least one assassination
attempt (in Rome) but ultimately was to die prematurely of natural causes. He
developed leukaemia and passed away in Washington on 6 December 1964.
On the day that news of his death reached
Paris his most famous book ‘Les Damnes de la Terre’ (‘The Wretched of the
Earth’) was seized by the police on the grounds that it was a threat to
national security. His body was flown back from America and carried across the
militarised border between Tunisia and Algeria for a secret nighttime burial on
occupied territory.
The ideas of Frantz Fanon
In his short life Fanon produced an
impressive body of work. His first book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ was an
exploration of the psychology of colonialism. ‘A Dying Colonialism’ or ‘Year
Five of the Algerian Revolution’ followed and a collection of pieces, ‘Towards
the African Revolution’, was published posthumously.
‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is his most
famous work, partly because of a fierce preface penned by Jean-Paul Sartre. It
is this work which has cemented his reputation as a proponent of violent revolution.
The US translation appeared in 1965 and was reprinted seven times in the course
of a year. It has since been translated into seventeen languages.
Whilst Fanon has been lauded since his
death the reality is that he had little influence over the direction of the FLN
when he was alive. His writings were more influential after his death, and then
outside Algeria and France. For a period in the late 1960s his name and ideas
were invoked by a bewildering variety of causes and groups.
In the US, Black Panther leader Stokely
Carmichael claimed Fanon as one of his "patron saints" and Eldridge
Cleaver boasted that "every brother on a roof top" could quote Fanon
(despite this Fanon could certainly not be described as a black nationalist).
In 1968, a journalist noted Fanon’s book, ‘Les Damnes de la Terre’ piled up
with ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’ and works by Regis Debray, when
visiting Palestinian militants in Jordan. In the late 1960s, a Cuban ‘Movimento
Black Power’ developed and for a brief period its Afro hairstyled members
discussed Fanon and other black writers until the suppression of the group in
1971. In 1968, a spokesman for the separatist Front de Liberation Quebecois
(FLQ) defined himself as a "Quebecois proletarian, one of America’s white
niggers, one of the "wretched of the earth"".
The late 1960s and the early 1970s were a
time of revolutionary upheaval and political turmoil. A host of "new"
ideas jostled for position with "orthodox" Marxism. For a period
Algeria, like Cuba, appeared to offer an alternative model to the fossilised
‘communism’ of the Soviet Union and its satellites.
At the time, the forces of genuine
Marxism, as represented by those who were seriously seeking a way to the
organised working-class, were small and lacked influence. In this context, it
is not surprising that all sorts of alien ideas came to the fore. Maoism became
a mass or semi-mass force in a number of countries, 'Guevarism' (or
guerrillism) lead a generation of Latin American militants out of the cities and
into the mountains, and ‘Third Worldism’ misled tens of thousands.
Fanon had very clear views as to which
classes in society would lead the revolution, ideas that are entirely at odds
with Marxism. He had certainly read Marx, and quoted him occasionally, but his
work was much more influenced by the existentialist phenomenology of Sartre.
Third Worldism exaggerated the role of the peasantry and the dispossessed of
the colonial and ex-colonial world (the lumpenproletariat) whilst downplaying
the role of the working-class or proletariat.
Fanon, whilst he was mistaken, drew his
conclusions from bitter experience. The PCF and the French Socialist Party
played a negative role as the Algerian revolution unfolded. When Algerian
separatists demonstrated in May 1945, the PCF and the Parti Communiste Algerian
(PCA) issued a joint leaflet condemning the organisers as "Hitlerite
provocateurs". They maintained a hostile attitude to the Algerian
revolutionaries for many years. When the Algerian War exploded in 1954 the French
Interior Minister was the future ‘socialist’ President Francois Mitterand, who
stated baldly that Algerian was French soil and would remain French.
Fanon’s legacy
Fanon would have been gravely
disappointed by the results of the Algerian struggle. The Algerian revolution
did not usher in a new era of democratic socialism and today the country is
racked by violence as Islamic fundamentalists battle a military regime.
Ironically, the fundamentalist Islamique de Salut (FLS) use Fanon’s writings on
revolutionary violence to justify the savagery with which they attack the
Algerian regime.
Whilst the Revolution did not deliver for
the poor neither will the FIS. Like Islamic fundamentalism everywhere, the FIS
represents reaction and has only gained a social base as a result of the
betrayal of the mass communist and socialist parties of the Islamic world. The
solution to the misery faced by the masses lies with genuine socialism, not
with Islam.
After his death, Fanon’s French wife
Josie stayed on in Algeria. In 1988, she watched from the balcony of her flat
as the army shot down demonstrating workers and youth in the street below. She
reportedly sighed, "Ah Frantz, the wretched of the earth again". Her
despair at the path the Algerian revolution had taken is said to have
contributed to her suicide a short time later.
If Fanon’s life and work have taught us
anything it is that a life of passive observation is not a life lived fully. He
was both a thinker and an activist. In a letter written a few days before his
death he outlined his philosophy: "We are nothing on this earth if we are
not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the people, the
cause of justice and liberty".
His ideas may have been flawed but he was
above all else a fighter. We would all do well to take note of the final line
of Fanon’s first book: "My final prayer: oh my body, make me always a man
who asks questions".
By Ciaran Mulholland,
30 April 2002 The reviewer is a member of the Socialist Party (CWI section in
Ireland)
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