{"id":130993,"date":"2019-05-06T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=130993"},"modified":"2019-05-27T11:40:42","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T10:40:42","slug":"no-direction-home-the-journey-of-frantz-fanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/05\/no-direction-home-the-journey-of-frantz-fanon\/","title":{"rendered":"No Direction Home: The Journey of Frantz Fanon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Winter 2019 – <\/em>I was a teenager when I first saw a picture of Frantz Fanon, on the back of my father\u2019s hardcover copy of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, a 1967 Grove edition. He appeared in a tweed jacket, a freshly pressed white shirt, and a striped tie, with a five-o\u2019clock shadow and an intense, somewhat hooded expression; his right eye slightly turned up to face the camera, his left fixed in a somber gaze. He seemed to be issuing a challenge, or perhaps a warning, that if his words weren\u2019t heeded, there would be hell to pay.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Frantz Fanon.
Image by Pacha J. Willka\/CC licensed<\/p><\/div>\n

Who is this man?<\/em> I remember thinking. The jacket explained that he had been born in Martinique in 1925, had studied psychiatry in France, had worked at a hospital in Algeria during the French-Algerian War, and had eventually joined the Algerian independence struggle, becoming its most eloquent spokesman, before dying of leukemia at age thirty-six. I was intrigued by the way that Fanon connected different worlds\u2014France, the West Indies, North and sub-Saharan Africa \u2014and by the link that he forged between psychiatry, a discipline devoted to care and healing, and revolution, an attempt to transform the world by means of creative destruction.<\/p>\n

I was no less intrigued by where<\/em> I found Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> and The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, often described as the Bible of decolonization. In the small library of radical literature that my father kept in our basement, Fanon\u2019s books were sandwiched between The Autobiography of Malcolm X<\/em> and Isaac Deutscher\u2019s The Non-Jewish Jew<\/em>: the former a classic memoir of black nationalism, the latter an essay on socialist internationalism. This location may have been an alphabetical accident, but the more that I read Fanon, the more I became convinced that he belonged in between the political traditions broadly represented by Malcolm X and Deutscher; that he spoke to their questions, their tensions, and, not least, their internal contradictions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not come with timeless truths,\u201d Fanon writes in his introduction to Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>. But when I began reading him, in the late 1980s, during the death throes of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the eruption of the first intifada in occupied Palestine, his observations about the humiliation of colonial domination and the psychological dynamics of anticolonial revolt had lost none of their immediacy. Not surprisingly, his work was undergoing an extraordinary revival in the university, where he was being rediscovered \u2014 in a sense discovered<\/em> for the first time \u2014 as a major thinker of postcolonial modernity, rather than as a propagandist of violent revolution, or as the \u201ctheoretician\u201d of the Algerian Revolution.<\/p>\n

Since then, Fanon\u2019s work has made significant inroads beyond the academy. There are allusions to, and echoes of, Fanon in the writing of Kamel Daoud, Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Edgar Wideman, and Jamaica Kincaid; in the art of Glenn Ligon, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah; in the cinema of Ousmane Semb\u00e8ne, Raoul Peck, and Claire Denis; even in jazz and hip-hop. (The trumpeter Jacques Coursil, a Martiniquan trumpeter and linguist, draws on passages of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> in his haunting oratorio Clameurs<\/em>.) His name has also been invoked by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, in part for its talismanic aura, in part because Fanon\u2019s writings on the vulnerability of the black body apply with eerie power to the extrajudicial killings of young black men. In the aftermath of Eric Garner\u2019s death by chokehold, the contemporary resonance of Fanon\u2019s remark that \u201cwe revolt \u2026 because \u2026 we can no longer breathe\u201d hardly needs to be spelled out.<\/p>\n

The power of Fanon\u2019s writing lies not only in its perceptiveness or topicality, but in its unusual rhetorical force. Fanon was somewhat ambivalent about appeals to emotion. In this he was very much a product of the French schooling system. His mentor at the Lyc\u00e9e Victor Schoelcher in Fort-de-France was the writer Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, who had taken part in the creation of the N\u00e9gritude movement with his fellow poet L\u00e9opold Senghor, later Senegal\u2019s first president. But Fanon was skeptical of N\u00e9gritude\u2019s lyrical claims about a shared black consciousness that unified Africa and the diaspora, and he especially recoiled from Senghor\u2019s claim that \u201cemotion is Negro just as reason is Greek.\u201d He aimed, rather, to dismantle the edifices of racial prejudice and colonialism in a French of classical rationality. Yet for all his fierce disagreements with C\u00e9saire, Fanon remained his disciple, and both his first book, Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, and The Wretched of the Earth<\/em> contain passages of feverish prose poetry. As he explained to the philosopher Francis Jeanson, who edited Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> and would later become Fanon\u2019s ally in the Algerian liberation struggle, \u201cI am trying to touch the reader emotionally, which is to say, irrationally, almost sensually \u2026. Words have a charge for me. I feel incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading Fanon, one sometimes has the impression that mere expository prose cannot do justice to the impulsive movement of his thought. I use the word \u201cmovement\u201d advisedly: Fanon did not write his texts; he dictated them while pacing back and forth, either to his wife, Josie, or to his secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan (who has just published a memoir about the experience). This method of composition lends his writings an electrifying musicality: restless, searching, and, as he fell prey to the leukemia that would kill him, otherworldly in its call for a new planetary order, cleansed of racism and oppression. The black British filmmaker John Akomfrah set his remarkable portrait of Stuart Hall to the music of Miles Davis. Were he to make a film about Fanon, he would surely set it to Coltrane, whose classic quartet was formed the year that Fanon died, and who died just six years later. Fanon\u2019s sentences remind me of Coltrane\u2019s famous \u201csheets of sound\u201d: cascades of arpeggios, rapid, dense, ever in pursuit.<\/p>\n

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A Dying Colonialism, 1959.<\/p><\/div>\n

Forged in perpetual movement, Fanon\u2019s writing holds up a mirror to his peripatetic life. He was not, by profession, a writer. He was a doctor, and later a revolutionary spokesman and diplomat. Yet nothing, arguably, mattered to him more than writing. For someone who left Martinique at twenty-one, never to return; who was expelled from Algeria, his adoptive country, at thirty-one; and who spent his last five years as a revolutionary exile roaming throughout North and sub-Saharan Africa, writing was his only home.<\/p>\n

It was his way of wrestling with the problems he confronted in his difficult, dangerous life. Albert Memmi, a Tunisian-Jewish psychologist and critic of colonialism who was in many ways Fanon\u2019s foil, described Fanon\u2019s life as \u201cimpossible.\u201d Perhaps it was. But there is no doubt that Fanon chose his life, as much as it is possible to do so. In that sense, Fanon\u2019s life bore little resemblance to those of his contemporaries and friends, anticolonial patriots like Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Felix Moumi\u00e9 of Cameroon, and Abane Ramdane of Algeria, all of whom sought to liberate their countries from foreign domination. Fanon, by contrast, never considered returning to Fort-de-France, and felt disappointed, even betrayed, that C\u00e9saire, his mentor, had campaigned for Martinique to become a department of France, rather than an independent country. Not long before he died, Fanon confessed to Simone de Beauvoir that he dreaded becoming a \u201cprofessional revolutionary,\u201d and spoke movingly of his desire to set down roots. But where? That was the problem. He was a man without a country\u2014except a country of the future, or of the imagination. As painful as this must have been to Fanon, his statelessness, the migratory nature of his life, has lent his writing a uniquely global relevance that the speeches of Lumumba and Moumi\u00e9 noticeably lack, and that not even the work of his great Martiniquan peers, C\u00e9saire, Edouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau, can match.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s career as a revolutionary psychiatrist has given his writing an irresistible allure, but this peculiar intimacy of life and work has also been the cause of considerable misunderstanding. Healer, soldier, martyr: much of the literature on Fanon amounts to little more than a praise song. As an icon of \u201cThird World\u201d resistance, Fanon has been adopted by groups as various as the Black Panthers, Palestinian secular guerrillas, Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, and the alienated banlieusards of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the metropole. Lost in this process of sanctification have been the complexities of Fanon\u2019s life; the unfinished, ambiguous, sometimes agonized nature of his writing, particularly its relationship to the Western tradition; and, not least, the ironies and contradictions that history would impose on his words. Lost, too, has been the central thrust behind Fanon\u2019s life and work: not the struggle against French rule in Algeria, but the struggle for what he called \u201cdis-alienation,\u201d the emancipation of people\u2019s repressed capacities and the achievement of a humanism worthy of the name.<\/p>\n

Fanon bears some responsibility for the abuse of his writing. He contributed many of the jingles that would later provide Third World liberation struggles with its exhortatory soundtrack. The slogan for which he is best known, however, is one that he did not write, the claim that \u201ckilling a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.\u201d It was Jean-Paul Sartre, not Fanon, who wrote this, in his famous preface to The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, a powerful critique of Eurocentrism that, alas, did no service to Fanon\u2019s reputation by exulting in self-flagellation and celebrating terrorism as a kind of Dionysian carnival of the oppressed.<\/p>\n

In fact, violence was never Fanon\u2019s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage for colonized communities and individuals who had become mentally ill as a result of the settler-colonial project, itself saturated with violence and racism. His clinical work was the practice that underpinned his political thought. He considered colonialism a deeply abnormal relationship; the colonizer and the colonized were locked together\u2014and constructed\u2014by a fatal dialectic. There could be no reciprocity, only war between the two, until the latter achieved freedom. But this was no more a \u201ccelebration\u201d of violence than Hegel\u2019s account of the master and the slave, which inspired it.<\/p>\n

The other charge often leveled against Fanon is that he was a defender of what, today, we call \u201cidentity politics,\u201d a black nationalist who insisted upon the irreducible \u201cfact of blackness,\u201d the supposed life force of black authenticity. In fact, Fanon saw blackness not as a fact but as the phantasmagoria of a racist white society: \u201cthe fact of blackness\u201d was a misleading translation of l\u2019experience v\u00e9cue du noir<\/em>, \u201cthe lived experience of the black man.\u201d Fanon regarded N\u00e9gritude as a \u201cblack mirage,\u201d a flight into an imaginary, mystical past, a retreat from a future that remained to be invented. The solution to being forced to wear a white mask was not, for Fanon, proudly adopting a black mask. As a student he was so determined to overcome C\u00e9saire\u2019s shadow that his first writings, allegorical plays deeply indebted to Sartre, altogether avoided the topic of race. Even as he became an advocate of revolutionary struggles in the Third World, he remained highly critical of nostalgic attempts to revive traditional African culture.<\/p>\n

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Frantz Omar Fanon<\/p><\/div>\n

That Fanon has been so widely misread makes a kind of poetic sense. For mis-recognition, and the violent alienation it produces, is the plot on which most of his work turns. His first important psychiatric paper, published in 1952 in Esprit, described the psychosomatic distress experienced by North African workers in France. Perplexed by their accounts of pain without lesion, French doctors had concluded that these men suffered from cerebral and cultural deficiencies. Fanon saw their illness very differently: \u201cthey have had France squeezed into them wherever, in their bodies and in their souls,\u201d only to be told, \u201cThey are in \u2018our\u2019 country,\u201d a reproach that the French-born descendants of these men are still hearing today.<\/p>\n

Nor was Fanon himself immune from racism, as he discovered not long after arriving in Lyon in 1947. Raised by middle-class parents in Fort-de-France, he had fought and nearly died serving in the Free French Forces, and received the Croix de Guerre with a bronze star. He had worn the same uniform as the metropolitan French, unlike the Senegalese members of his battalion, the so-called tiralleurs s\u00e9n\u00e9galais<\/em>. As far as he was concerned, he was a West Indian French man, from a respectable home. \u201cNegroes\u201d were Africans, and he wasn\u2019t one of them. He had even made a point of studying in Lyon, rather than in Paris, one of the capitals of the Black Atlantic, since he wanted to be somewhere \u201cmore milky.\u201d<\/p>\n

In milky Lyon, however, a little white boy saw him pass by and cried out: \u201cLook, maman, a Negro! I\u2019m afraid.\u201d The experience of seeing himself being seen\u2014of being fixed by the white gaze \u2014 provided Fanon with the primal scene of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>. Although he found his life partner in a left-wing, white French woman \u2014 Marie-Jos\u00e8phe Dubl\u00e9, known as Josie \u2014 he described his life in Lyon as a series of what, today, we would call microaggressions, from patronizing compliments on his French to well-meaning praise of his mind.<\/p>\n

What Fanon suffered in his encounter with the little boy on that \u201cwhite winter day\u201d was, as Louis Althusser puts it in his classic essay on ideology, the experience of being \u201chailed\u201d or \u201cinterpellated.\u201d That this primal scene takes place outdoors is crucial to its power. As Althusser writes: \u201cwhat \u2026 seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanon was not a follower of Althusser, much less a philosophical antihumanist, but in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> he attempts to do something that Althusser might have appreciated, namely demonstrate the way that ideology interpellated French West Indians as racialized subjects. Black Skin, White Masks is not a memoir, but it is obviously the product of Fanon\u2019s time in Lyon, his first experience as a member of a black \u201cminority.\u201d Interestingly, two of the chapters explore how racial ideology disfigures interracial relationships, a subject that would have been of acute personal concern to Fanon.<\/p>\n

The problem of \u201clove\u201d in a racist society lies at the heart of Black Skin, White Masks, nearly as much as it does in the work of James Baldwin, who in 1956 would hear Fanon address a conference of black writers organized by Pr\u00e9sence Africaine<\/em> in Paris. Baldwin, who sailed to Paris a year after Fanon arrived in Lyon, does not mention Fanon in his report on the conference, but he would later invoke Fanon in his 1972 book No Name in the Street<\/em>. The title of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> could have been Notes of a Native Son<\/em>, for Fanon, like Baldwin, was grappling with the obstacles to black citizenship in a white-dominated society. His principal quarrel in the book is not with colonial domination and exploitation, but with the racial limits of French republicanism: it is a Frenchman\u2019s hopeful protest for inclusion, not a bitter repudiation of the m\u00e9tropole<\/em>. Fanon seems confident of his ability to achieve \u201cnothing short of the liberation of the man of color\u201d not only from white supremacy, but from the restrictive conceptions of N\u00e9gritude: \u201cThe Negro is not. Anymore than the white man.\u201d Fanon\u2019s language here should be familiar to anyone who has read Sartre\u2019s 1946 essay Anti-Semite and Jew<\/em>, which argues that the idea of \u201cthe Jew\u201d as the Other was an invention of the anti-Semite. For Fanon, a person of African descent became black, became a \u201cn\u00e8gre,\u201d through and only through the white gaze. The so-called black problem was no less a phantasm than the Jewish question.<\/p>\n

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The Wretched of the Earth, 1961.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet Fanon was not content simply to dispatch with race as an analytic concept, and to prove that it is a mere construction, unlike, say, class. This argument has had its liberal defenders, including the political philosopher Mark Lilla, who, in a widely cited New York Times<\/em> op-ed article (later expanded into a book, The Once and Future Liberal<\/em>), belittled what he called \u201cdiversity discourse\u201d as an \u201cidentity drama\u201d that \u201cexhausts political discourse\u201d and divides a polity that could otherwise be unified around supposedly real things like \u201cclass, war, the economy, and the common good.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Fanon\u2019s view, however, race is always already a refraction of ideas, fears, and anxieties about \u201cclass, war, the economy, and the common good.\u201d It is a fiction, yet one so pervasive and so powerful as to produce profound real-world effects. It may seem to be \u201ca very trivial thing, and easily understood,\u201d as Marx wrote of the commodity, but \u201cit is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.\u201d Like the commodity, race is the ghost in the machine of an apparently disenchanted society, never fully exorcised, a tribute not only to enduring inequities but to the enduring power of the gaze, of unreason and ressentiment. And its worst injuries, for Fanon, are psychological: violations of dignity, especially the \u201cshame and self-contempt\u201d it implants in its victims. Even a relatively privileged, \u201cassimilated\u201d black man like himself was \u201cdamned\u201d: \u201cWhen people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.\u201d But how was he to liberate himself from this infernal circle and \u2014 as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it in Between the World and Me<\/em> \u2014 \u201clive free in this black body\u201d?<\/p>\n

Looking to free himself from the white gaze, Fanon was briefly drawn to the racial romanticism of Senghor, tempted, he says, to \u201cwade in the irrational,\u201d as the N\u00e9gritude poets had urged him. When he read Sartre\u2019s introduction to Black Orpheus, a 1948 anthology of N\u00e9gritude poets, he was taken aback by the condescension: Sartre defended black consciousness as an \u201cantiracist racism\u201d\u2014what Gayatri Spivak would later call \u201cstrategic essentialism\u201d \u2014 but downgraded it to a \u201cweak moment in a dialectical movement\u201d toward a society free of race and class oppression. Yet by the end of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, Fanon has come to agree. The \u201conly solution,\u201d he declares, is to \u201crise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me\u201d and \u201creach out for the universal,\u201d rather than seeking refuge in some \u201cmaterialized Tower of the Past.\u201d If anyone is making that leap, he adds, it is not the N\u00e9gritude poets, but the Vietnamese rebels in Indochina, who are taking their destiny into their own hands.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s dissatisfaction with the political moderation of the N\u00e9gritude movement, and with his mentor C\u00e9saire, who had become a senator in the overseas department of Martinique and an opponent of independence, may help to explain one of the great mysteries of his life: his decision not to return home to Fort-de-France after completing his residency at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in the Massif Central. Fran\u00e7ois Toscquelles, Fanon\u2019s mentor at Saint-Alban, was both a doctor and a resistance fighter, having headed the Spanish Republican Army\u2019s psychiatric services before crossing the Pyrenees in 1939. He had pioneered institutional or social therapy, which tried to turn the hospital into a recognizable microcosm of the world outside. The idea underlying social therapy was that patients were socially as well as clinically alienated, and that their care depended on the creation of a structure that relieved their isolation by involving them in group activities.<\/p>\n

In 1953, after more than a year at Saint-Alban, Fanon took up his post at Blida-Joinville, a psychiatric hospital about forty kilometers south of Algiers. He was responsible for 187 patients: 165 European women and 22 Muslim men. He found some of them tied to their beds, others to trees in the park. They lived in segregated quarters, with the women in one pavilion and the men in another. The hospital\u2019s former director, Antoine Porot, the founder of the so-called Algiers School of colonial ethnopsychiatry, had justified this segregation on the grounds of \u201cdivergent moral or social conceptions.\u201d Several of Fanon\u2019s colleagues shared Porot\u2019s view that Algerians were essentially different from Europeans, suffering from primitive brain development that made them childlike and lazy, but also impulsive, violent, and untrustworthy. As a West Indian atheist who was neither a Muslim \u201cnative\u201d nor a white European, Fanon stood at a remove from both the staff and the residents at Blida. Since he spoke no Arabic or Berber, he relied on interpreters with his Muslim patients. His closest friends in Algeria would be left-wing European militants, many of them Jews.<\/p>\n

To instill a sense of community among the staff\u2014and perhaps to break out of his solitude\u2014Fanon created a weekly newsletter. In a striking article published in April 1954, he questions the spatial isolation of the modern asylum, anticipating Foucault\u2019s 1961 Folie et d\u00e9ra\u00edson: Histoire de la folie \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e2ge classique<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Future generations will wonder with interest what motive could have led us to build psychiatric hospitals far from the center. Several patients have already asked me: Doctor, will we hear the Easter bells? \u2026 Whatever our religion, daily life is set to the rhythm of a number of sounds and the church bells represent an important element in this symphony \u2026. Easter arrives, and the bells will die without being reborn, for they have never existed at the psychiatric hospital of Blida. The psychiatric hospital of Blida will continue to live in silence. A silence without bells.<\/p>\n

Restoring the symphonic order of everyday life was the goal of social therapy, and Fanon pursued it with his usual vigilance, introducing basket weaving, a theater, ball games, and other activities. It was a great success with the European women, but a total failure with the Muslim men. The older European doctors told him, \u201cwhen you\u2019ve been in the hospital for fifteen years like us, then you\u2019ll understand.\u201d But Fanon refused to understand. He suspected that the failure lay in his use of \u201cimported methods,\u201d and that he might achieve different results if he could provide his Muslim patients with forms of sociality that resembled their lives outside. Working with a team of Algerian nurses, he established a caf\u00e9 maure<\/em>, a traditional tea house where men drink coffee and play cards, and later an \u201cOriental salon,\u201d as he put it, for the hospital\u2019s small group of Muslim women. Arab musicians and storytellers came to perform, and Muslim festivals were celebrated for the first time in the hospital\u2019s history. Once their cultural practices were recognized, Blida\u2019s Muslim community emerged from its slumber.<\/p>\n

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Black Skin, White Masks- Fanon. L\u2019arte di Laurie Cooper<\/p><\/div>\n

Fanon\u2019s curiosity about Algeria led him far outside the hospital gates. Deep in the bled<\/em> of Kabylia, the Berber heartland, he attended late-night ceremonies where hysterics were healed in \u201ccathartic crises,\u201d and learned of women using white magic to render unfaithful husbands impotent. He discovered a more merciful attitude toward mental illness: Algerians blamed madness on genies, not on the sufferer. In his writings on these practices, Fanon never uttered the word superstition<\/em>. Yet even as he insisted on the specificity of North African culture, he was careful to avoid the essentialism of the Algiers School. He wanted to pierce the frozen, apparently natural surface of reality, and to uncover the ferment beneath it.<\/p>\n

On 1 November 1954, that ferment erupted, when the Front de Lib\u00e9ration Nationale (FLN) carried out its first attacks, launching a war of independence that would last for nearly eight years. The FLN was a small organization that had grown out of a split in the banned Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, a group led by the founding father of modern Algerian nationalism, Messali Hadj. Winning over the Muslim majority to its cause, and, not least, persuading them that they had a chance against one of the world\u2019s most powerful militaries, required no small effort and no little coercion. Their case would partly be made for them by massive French repression: the razing of entire villages, the forced relocation of more than two million to \u201cregroupment\u201d camps, widespread torture, and thousands of summary executions and disappearances; as many as three hundred thousand Algerians died during the war. Fanon, however, needed little convincing. When the rebels contacted him in early 1955, he had already chosen his side; according to his biographer David Macey, his first thought was to join them in the maquis.<\/p>\n

Fanon took great risks to help the rebels, opening the hospital to FLN meetings, treating fighters at the day clinic, and forbidding the police from entering with their guns loaded. At the same time, he was treating French servicemen who were involved in torturing suspected rebels. He did not hand over their names to the FLN for they, too, were victims of a colonial system whose dirty work they were required to perform. Eventually, however, Fanon concluded that he was helpless to effect change at Blida: Algeria\u2019s Muslims had been subjected to what he called \u201cabsolute de-personalization,\u201d and to remain in his position was to perpetuate a spurious normalcy. He resigned from his post in a protest letter to Resident Minister Robert Lacoste in December 1956; a month later he was expelled from Algeria. But before he left, he had a brief meeting with Abane Ramdane, an FLN leader from Kabylia who powerfully shaped his vision of the Algerian struggle. Ramdane, sometimes described as the Robespierre of the Algerian revolution, was a kindred spirit: a hardliner opposed to any negotiations prior to France\u2019s recognition of independence, and a genuine modernizer with progressive, republican values.<\/p>\n

After a stop in Paris \u2014 his last visit to France \u2014 Fanon settled in Tunis, where the FLN\u2019s external leadership was based. He divided his time between the Manouba Clinic, where he resumed his psychiatric practice under the name \u201cDr.\u00a0Fares,\u201d and the offices of El Moudjahid<\/em>, the FLN\u2019s French-language newspaper, which he helped edit. As the FLN\u2019s media spokesman in Tunis, he cut a glamorously enigmatic figure. Living in an independent Arab country sympathetic to Algeria\u2019s struggle, Fanon no longer had to conceal his loyalties. Yet, paradoxically, he learned to tread even more carefully than in Blida. For all its claims to unity, the FLN was rife with factional tensions, and Fanon was a vulnerable outsider with no official position in the leadership. His most powerful ally in the movement was Ramdane, the leader of the \u201cinterior,\u201d but Fanon was now on the other side of the border, working for the FLN\u2019s \u201cexternal\u201d forces, who saw Ramdane as a threat to their interests.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s contributions to El Moudjahid<\/em> were not always appreciated by his colleagues in the FLN, particularly his fiery denunciation of the \u201cbeautiful souls\u201d of the French left who denounced torture but refused to support the FLN because of its attacks on civilians. The FLN\u2019s leaders in Tunis were pragmatic nationalists, and their goal was to intensify the divisions in France over Algeria, not condemn France as a nation. Unlike Fanon they didn\u2019t have to prove that they were Algerians. There is no doubting the sincerity of Fanon\u2019s writing for El Moudjahid<\/em>: he tended to gravitate to the most militant positions, and he had an old account to settle with the French intelligentsia. But his fervor also expressed a longing to be accepted as a fellow Algerian. According to the historian Mohammed Harbi, a left-wing FLN official who crossed paths (and swords) with Fanon in Tunis, Fanon \u201chad a very strong need to belong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanon upheld the FLN line even when he had very strong reasons for doubting it, as in the case of the Melouza massacre. In a small hamlet outside Melouza, the FLN had killed hundreds of sympathizers of a rival nationalist group, and then tried to blame the massacre on the French. In his first public statement in Tunis, made at a press conference in May 1957, Fanon denounced the \u201cfoul machinations over Melouza,\u201d insisting that the French army was responsible.<\/p>\n

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Black Skin, White Masks, 1952<\/p><\/div>\n

He exercised a similar discretion, when, a year later, El Moudjahid announced that his friend Abane Ramdane had died \u201con the field of honor.\u201d In fact, Ramdane had been dead for five months, and he was not killed on the battlefield. His erstwhile comrades had lured him to a villa in Morocco, where he was strangled to death. The external leadership had long wanted to seize control of the revolution, and Ramdane, the figurehead of the internal struggle, stood in the way. Real power now lay with the external elements of the FLN and the so-called army of the frontiers. Fanon, who was close enough to the intelligence services to know the truth of his friend\u2019s murder, said nothing. Shaken by Ramdane\u2019s death, he made his peace with the army of the frontiers, both for the sake of the revolution\u2014the military leadership, in Tunisia and Morocco, was increasingly the dominant force\u2014and to protect himself: according to Harbi, his name was on a list of those to be executed in the event of an internal challenge to the FLN leadership.<\/p>\n

He was scarcely more secure in his medical work at the Manouba Clinic, where he began to introduce the social therapy he had practiced in Blida. The clinic\u2019s director, Dr.\u00a0Ben Soltan, called him \u201cthe Negro\u201d and accused him of being a Zionist spy and of mistreating Arab patients on Israeli orders. The proof was his denunciation of anti-Semitism in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, and his close friendships with two Tunisian-Jewish doctors. Dr.\u00a0Fares managed to hold on to his position, but shifted his energies to the H\u00f4pital Charles-Nicolle, where he created Africa\u2019s first psychiatric day clinic.<\/p>\n

He was most at ease, as ever, when he was writing\u2014or rather, dictating. His first book on the Algerian struggle, L\u2019An V de la r\u00e9volution alg\u00e9rienne<\/em> (translated as A Dying Colonialism<\/em>), was composed over three weeks in the spring of 1959. It is a passionate account of a national awakening, as well as a document of the utopian hopes it aroused in the author, who had come to think of himself as an Algerian after three years in Blida. I don\u2019t think it is an exaggeration to say that Fanon had fallen in love with the Algerian people. As John Edgar Wideman writes in his novel Fanon<\/em>, \u201cFanon is not about stepping back, standing apart, analyzing and instructing others but about identifying with others, plunging into the vexing, mysterious otherness of them, taking risks of heart and mind, falling head over heels in love whether or not there\u2019s a chance in the world love will be requited or redeemed.\u201d<\/p>\n

L\u2019An V<\/em> is Fanon\u2019s love letter to the Algerian revolution, and it often feels like an expression of Ramdane\u2019s views \u2014 or fantasies \u2014 about postindependence Algeria. In L\u2019An V<\/em>, the Algerian revolution is not simply an anticolonial uprising, but a social revolution against class oppression, religious traditionalism, and patriarchy. For all the appeals to Islam, Fanon argued, Algerian nationalism was a nationalism of the will, rather than of ethnicity or religion, open to anyone willing to join the struggle, including European democrats who renounced their colonial status and the country\u2019s Jewish minority.<\/p>\n

In fact, Ramdane\u2019s vision was rapidly losing out, partly because the French army had crushed the FLN\u2019s interior leadership during the Battle of Algiers. After independence, women in the maquis would experience a painful regression, and the pied noirs<\/em> would flee en masse to France, along with Algeria\u2019s Jews. Those who envisaged a multiethnic Algeria were always a minority, and their numbers diminished with every *pied-noir( or army atrocity. The single consensual demand inside the FLN \u2014 aside from independence itself \u2014 was the reestablishment of Algeria\u2019s Islamic and Arab identity. Fanon was correct that France\u2019s attempt to \u201cemancipate\u201d Muslim women by pressuring them to remove their veils had only made the veil more popular; what he failed (or refused) to see was that influential sectors of the nationalist movement were keen to reinforce religious conservatism. We know from a letter that Fanon wrote to a young Iranian admirer in Paris\u2014the revolutionary Islamist Ali Shariati\u2014that Fanon viewed the turn to Islam as a green mirage, a \u201cwithdrawal into oneself\u201d disguised as liberation from \u201calienation and de-personalization.\u201d But he shied from expressing these views in public, and leftists within the FLN were furious that Algeria\u2019s pious bourgeoisie had, in Mohammed Harbi\u2019s words, \u201cfound in Fanon a mouthpiece who presented its behavior as progressive.\u201d Fanon \u201cthe Algerian\u201d saw what he wanted to see \u2014 or what Ramdane wanted him to see. Nevertheless, he brilliantly captured the psychological impact of revolt on an oppressed people, their transformation into historical subjects. In effect, the revolution was achieving what he had hoped to do inside the walls of Blida: the \u201ctense immobility of the dominated society,\u201d he wrote, had given way to \u201cawareness, movement, creation,\u201d freeing the colonized from \u201cthat familiar tinge of resignation that specialists in underdeveloped countries describe under the heading of fatalism<\/em>.\u201d Revolution, it turned out, was the cure for the \u201cNorth African syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time L\u2019An V<\/em> appeared, Fanon had been pushed aside as the FLN\u2019s media spokesman in Tunis. His replacement was the information minister of the newly formed Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), M\u2019hammed Yazid, a suave diplomat with strong ties to the French left, which Fanon had scornfully lectured. Fanon became a traveling ambassador and in March 1960 was appointed to Accra as the FLN\u2019s permanent representative. The United Kingdom of Libya supplied him with a vrai faux passeport<\/em> that identified him as Omar Ibrahim Fanon. He took to his new assignment with characteristic zeal.<\/p>\n

Algeria\u2019s liberation, he wrote in El Moudjahid<\/em>, would be \u201can African victory,\u201d a \u201cstep in the realization of a free and happy humanity.\u201d Fanon saw Algeria\u2019s war of decolonization as a model for all of Africa and first made his case \u2014 against the more conciliatory positions of his host, Ghana\u2019s leader Kwame Nkrumah \u2014 at the 1958 All-African People\u2019s Conference in Accra, where he led the FLN delegation and gave an electrifying speech advocating armed struggle as a uniquely effective route to national liberation. Few of Africa\u2019s leaders were prepared to sign up. Most were cultural nationalists like Senegal\u2019s president L\u00e9opold Senghor, who advocated African unity while accepting French interference in defense and economic policy \u2014 and siding with France at the UN against Algerian independence. Fanon was infuriated at having to argue the merits of the Algerian cause to Africans, and in one speech he nearly broke into tears.<\/p>\n

Africa, Fanon believed, needed unyielding militants like his friend Ramdane. He was impressed by S\u00e9kou Tour\u00e9, the ruthless dictator of Guinea, and once confessed that he had a \u201chorror of weaknesses\u201d; Tour\u00e9 appeared to have none. Fanon\u2019s closest allies at the conference in Accra were Patrice Lumumba, soon to be the first prime minister of independent Congo, and F\u00e9lix Moumi\u00e9, a revolutionary from Cameroon. In September 1960, Lumumba was overthrown in a Belgian-sponsored coup, a prelude to his assassination. Two months later Moumi\u00e9 was poisoned in Geneva. \u201cAggressive, violent, full of anger, in love with his country, hating cowards,\u201d Fanon wrote of his murdered friend. \u201cAustere, hard, incorruptible.\u201d<\/p>\n

In November 1960, hard on the heels of Moumi\u00e9\u2019s death, Fanon undertook a daring reconnaissance mission. The aim was to open a southern front on the border with Mali, so that arms and munitions could be transported from Bamako across the Sahara. He was accompanied by an eight-man commando unit led by a man named Chawki, a major in the Algerian Army of National Liberation (ALN). They flew from Accra to Monrovia, where they planned to pick up a connecting flight to Conakry. On arriving they were told that the plane to Conakry was full and that they would have to wait for an Air France flight the following day. Suspecting a trap by French intelligence, they drove two thousand kilometers into Mali; later they learned that the plane had been diverted to C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire and searched by French forces. The drive to Mali took them through tropical forest, savannah, and desert. Fanon was beguiled; in his notes on the journey, he sounds like a man possessed. \u201cWith one ear glued to the red earth you can hear very distinctly the sound of rusty chains, groans of distress,\u201d he wrote. The gravest threat to Africa\u2019s future, he said, was not colonialism, which was dying its inevitable death, but the \u201cgreat appetites\u201d of postcolonial elites, and their \u201cabsence of ideology.\u201d It was his mission, Fanon believed, to \u201cstir up the Saharan population, infiltrate to the Algerian high plateaus \u2026. Subdue the desert, deny it, assemble Africa, create the continent.\u201d Unlike Algeria, Africa could not create itself; it needed the help of men with energy and vision. He was calling for a revolutionary vanguard, but his rhetoric of conquest was not far from that of colonialism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

After all, violence is the prerogative of empire. [AP]<\/p><\/div>\n

The reconnaissance mission came to nothing: the southern Sahara had never been an important combat zone for the FLN, and there was little trust between the Algerians and the desert tribes. Reading Fanon\u2019s account, one senses that his African hallucinations were born of a growing desperation. This desperation was not only political, but physical. He had lost weight in Mali, and when he returned to Tunis in December, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Claude Lanzmann, who met him shortly after his repatriation to Tunis, remembers him as \u201calready so suffused with death that it gave his every word the power both of prophecy and of the last words of a dying man.\u201d Fanon pleaded with the FLN to send him back to Algeria. He wanted to die on the field of honor, and he missed the fighters of the interior, whom he described to Lanzmann as \u201cpeasant-warrior-philosophers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The request was denied. Still, he made himself useful to the soldiers in Tunisia. At an army post he gave lectures on the Critique of Dialectical Reason<\/em>, in which he devoted special attention to Sartre\u2019s analysis of \u201cfraternity-terror,\u201d the feelings of brotherhood that grow out of a shared experience of external threat. He had experienced this sort of fraternity in Blida and with Major Chawki in the desert, and he saw it again in the soldiers of the ALN. Many were from rural backgrounds, uncompromising people of the kind he trusted to maintain the integrity of the revolution throughout the Third World. It was to these soldiers that he addressed The Wretched of the Earth, dictated in haste as his condition deteriorated.<\/p>\n

In The Wretched of the Earth<\/em> Fanon characterized decolonization as an inherently violent process, a zero-sum struggle between settler and native. Albert Memmi had made a similar argument in his Portrait du Colonis\u00e9<\/em>, published in 1957 with a preface by Sartre. But Fanon dramatized this struggle with unprecedented force, as an inexorable, epic battle whose outcome was not only the destruction of the Western-dominated colonial world, but the destruction of the culture and values that sustained it. The future of world history was being written in blood by the peoples without history, the \u201cblacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians\u201d who had made Europe prosperous with their \u201csweat and corpses.\u201d The initial stages of decolonization would be cruel and fumbling, as the colonized adopt \u201cthe primitive Manichaeism of the colonizer\u2014Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel.\u201d But eventually, he predicted, they would \u201crealize \u2026 that some blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and their interests.\u201d The war of national liberation, he said, must transcend \u201cracism, hatred, resentment\u201d and \u201cthe legitimate desire for revenge,\u201d and evolve into a social revolution.<\/p>\n

The arguments in The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, particularly its romantic claims about the \u201crevolutionary spontaneity\u201d of the peasantry, were deeply influenced by Fanon\u2019s relationship with the ALN. The ideal of a rural utopia was, as Harbi notes, a \u201ccredo of the army,\u201d which depicted itself as the defender of Algeria\u2019s peasantry, and Fanon had persuaded himself that, unlike the proletariat, the peasantry were incorruptible because they had nothing to lose. In fact there was something to Fanon\u2019s claims about Algeria\u2019s peasantry: while the people who joined the maquis were not farmers, many of them were country people who had maintained their political and cultural traditions, and who had always regarded the French as invaders who would eventually be forced to leave. But Fanon\u2019s depiction of the peasantry as a population uncontaminated by French culture would help to underwrite a project he had always dreaded, the nostalgic \u201creturn to the self.\u201d Houari Boumediene, the leader of the external forces in Tunisia and later Algeria\u2019s president, may have dismissed Fanon as \u201ca modest man who \u2026 didn\u2019t know the first thing about Algeria\u2019s peasants,\u201d but he grasped the usefulness of Fanon\u2019s position. Like his arguments about the veil, Fanon\u2019s celebration of peasant wisdom provided the army with \u2014 in Harbi\u2019s words \u2014 a \u201crationalization of Algerian conservatism,\u201d and a populist card to play in its power struggles with the urbane, middle-class diplomats of the GPRA, and the Marxists within the FLN.<\/p>\n

The same was true of Fanon\u2019s claim that violence alone would lead to victory. By the late 1950s, the FLN understood that it could never defeat the French army, and that there would eventually be a negotiated settlement. International opinion became a critical battlefield, and the principal fighters on it were representatives of the GPRA: as the historian Matthew Connelly has argued, the war was as much a \u201cdiplomatic revolution\u201d as a military challenge. But the heroic myth of armed struggle, which Fanon did much to burnish, allowed the leaders of the ALN to present themselves, rather than the GPRA, as the real victors, and impose themselves as the country\u2019s rightful rulers.<\/p>\n

For all that Fanon meant his book to be a manifesto for the coming revolution, The Wretched of the Earth is perhaps most prophetic as an analysis of the potential pitfalls of decolonization. While Fanon defended anticolonial violence as a necessary response to the \u201cexhibitionist\u201d violence of the colonial system, he also predicted that \u201cfor many years to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaught.\u201d He also knew that Sartre\u2019s \u201cfraternity-terror\u201d could turn inward, with lethal consequences. The idea that solidarity under arms would give way to social revolution was questionable, however. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in a perceptive critique of his work, the sense of comradeship in war \u201ccan be actualized only under conditions of immediate danger to life and limb,\u201d and tends to wither in peacetime, as it did after independence. The taste of power that violent revolt provided was fleeting; the suffering and trauma of national liberation wars would cast a long shadow. Fanon himself had seen that anticolonial violence was driven not only by a noble desire for justice, but by darker impulses, including the dream of \u201cbecoming the persecutor.\u201d He also predicted that leaders of postcolonial African states were sure to entrench themselves by appealing to \u201cultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism\u201d: he was anticipating the Mobutus and Mugabes of the future, the \u201cbig men\u201d who would drape themselves in African garb, promote a folkloric form of black culture, and cynically exploit the rhetoric of anticolonialism\u2014even, in the bitterest of ironies, Fanon\u2019s own words.<\/p>\n

One of the earliest readers of Fanon\u2019s manuscript was his hero, Sartre. Fanon first contacted him in the spring of 1961 through his publisher, Fran\u00e7ois Maspero, to ask for a preface: \u201cTell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.\u201d The admiration was mutual: to Sartre, Fanon was more than an intellectual disciple; he was the man of action Sartre never forgave himself for not having been during the Nazi Occupation. In late July 1961, they met for the first time in Rome, where they were joined by Beauvoir and Lanzmann. Their first conversation lasted from lunch until 2 a.m., when Beauvoir announced that Sartre needed a nap, much to Fanon\u2019s irritation. Over the next few days, Fanon spoke endlessly in what Lanzmann calls a \u201cprophetic trance.\u201d He urged Sartre to renounce writing until Algeria was liberated. \u201cWe have rights over you,\u201d he said. \u201cHow can you continue to live normally, to write?\u201d He was scornful of the picturesque trattoria where they took him to eat. The pleasures of the Old World meant nothing to him.<\/p>\n

Fanon had recently undergone treatment in the Soviet Union, where he was prescribed Myleran, and was experiencing a brief period of remission. But in Beauvoir\u2019s account of the meeting in Rome, he comes across as a haunted man, beset by self-doubt and remorse, full of apocalyptic foreboding. The days after independence would be \u201cterrible,\u201d he predicted, estimating that tens of thousands would die in power struggles. The score-settling among Algerian rebels seemed to horrify him nearly as much as French repression. He blamed himself for failing to prevent the deaths of Ramdane and Lumumba, and struck Beauvoir as \u201cupset that he wasn\u2019t active in his native land, and even more that he wasn\u2019t a native Algerian.\u201d When Beauvoir shook his feverish hand, she felt as if she were \u201ctouching the passion that consumed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week after Sartre filed his preface to The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, Fanon was admitted to a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland\u2014his only visit to the United States, a country he called \u201ca nation of lynchers.\u201d He was shocked, he told a friend, not that he was dying, but that he was dying in Washington of leukemia, when he \u201ccould have died in battle with the enemy three months ago.\u201d He died on 6 December 1961, just as his book was appearing in Paris, where it was seized from bookshops by the police. In New York, Algerian diplomats gave it as a Christmas gift. Beauvoir saw his picture on the cover of Jeune Afrique<\/em>, \u201cyounger, calmer than I had seen him, and very handsome. His death weighed heavily because he had charged his death with all the intensity of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Algeria achieved its independence in July 1962. It would soon become a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and play host to the ANC, the PLO, the Black Panthers, and other national liberation movements, many of them deeply influenced by Fanon. But over the years independent Algeria \u2014 austere, pious, socially conservative \u2014 bore less and less resemblance to the country Fanon had hoped for. Even if he had lived, it\u2019s not clear he would have ever been at home there, any more than Che was in postrevolutionary Havana. For all that he said to Beauvoir about his desire to put down roots, Fanon was too nomadic a spirit to remain for long in any one place.<\/p>\n

The only country that he could have called home, besides the page, was the emancipated future, a secular messianism he shared with Walter Benjamin. He worried that newly independent countries would fall into the same trap as the advanced countries of the West: the fetishism of production rates and the despoliation of the environment that Adorno and Horkheimer bemoaned in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Fanon was not Jewish, but he had an elective affinity with the \u201cnon-Jewish Jews,\u201d many of them Marxists, who so powerfully shaped European critical thought during the 1930s and 1940s.<\/p>\n

In Fanon\u2019s writing, the crimes of Nazism and imperialism are indissolubly linked: he saw colonized Algerians and Africans, like Jews, as victims of a hypocritical Europe. This linkage, which Fanon shared with C\u00e9saire in his Discourse on Colonialism<\/em>, would recede with Israel\u2019s emergence as, in Deutscher\u2019s words, the Prussia of the Middle East, as an adversary of liberation struggles in the Third World. As the historian Enzo Traverso has argued in The End of Jewish Modernity<\/em>, the \u201cexhaustion of the Jewish cycle of critical thought\u201d set in with Israel\u2019s conquest of the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and Jewish intellectuals went from being the West\u2019s greatest internal critics to some of its most impassioned defenders. Since then, the traditions of Jewish critical thought and postcolonialism have gone their separate ways, with notable exceptions such as Edward Said, a Palestinian literary critic steeped in the writings of Eric Auerbach and Adorno, and his friend Tony Judt, a London-born Jewish historian who became an eloquent champion of a binational state in Israel-Palestine. Fanon, in retrospect, can be seen as one of the last threads connecting these traditions, and it is striking that Arendt defended him against caricatured interpretations of his writings on violence, and never once took issue with his critique of Western imperialism. She could have done so only at the risk of contradicting her Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is no wonder, then, that one of the most striking critiques of Fanon, by turns tender and damning, should have been written by a Jewish anticolonial theorist who converted to Zionism. Albert Memmi shared much with Fanon. He was a man in-between, and never quite at home, as a Jew from Tunisia, educated in Paris, who stood between the colonizer and the colonized. He wrote novels and nonfiction, worshipped Sartre, and practiced child psychology in Tunis when Fanon was stationed there for the FLN, although the two never met. In a fascinating essay, \u201cThe Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,\u201d published in 1971, Memmi characterized Fanon\u2019s life as a thwarted quest to belong. The \u201cgerm of Fanon\u2019s tragedy,\u201d Memmi argued, was his alienation from Martinique, his homeland. Once the dominated man recognizes that he will not be accepted by the dominant society, \u201che generally returns to himself, to his people, to his past, sometimes \u2026 with excessive vigor, transfiguring this people and this past to the point of creating counter-myths.\u201d This was what C\u00e9saire had done, he suggested, by returning home from the grandes \u00e9coles<\/em> of Paris, inventing N\u00e9gritude, and becoming his people\u2019s representative in the Assembl\u00e9e Nationale. Fanon, however, had failed to return; instead, after realizing he could never be fully French, he transferred his fierce identification with the country that had spurned him to Algeria, the country that was battling France for its independence. Once Muslim Algeria proved too \u201cparticularist,\u201d it was subsumed by something still larger: the African continent, the Third World, and ultimately the dream of \u201ca totally unprecedented man, in a totally reconstructed world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Fanon never disavowed his Martiniquan roots, or his love of C\u00e9saire\u2019s writing, from which he drew his images of slave revolt in The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>. Even so, Memmi captures something that Fanon\u2019s admirers in today\u2019s antiracist movements tend to overlook: his ambivalence about his own roots, and his relentless questioning of the \u201creturn to the self.\u201d For Memmi, a North African Jew disillusioned with Arab nationalism, identity had become destiny. And in his essay on Fanon, he wrote as if primordial ethnic identification\u2014and the contraction of empathy it often entails\u2014were the natural order of things, and Fanon an outlier, if not a failure, for defying it.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s great hope was that such identification could be replaced by a new, postnational culture, a Third World humanism that the philosopher Achille Mbembe has described as \u201cthe festival of the imagination produced by struggle.\u201d It was not to be. In much of the Third World, the dream of liberation from Europe has been supplanted by the dream of emigration to Europe, where refugees and their children now struggle for sanctuary rather than independence. Universalism, meanwhile, has turned into a debased currency: for all the talk of transnationalism, the only two postnational projects on offer are the flat world of globalization, and the Islamist tabula rasa of the Caliphate: Davos and Dabiq<\/em>.<\/p>\n

While writing this essay, I received an email from a friend, an African intellectual based in Munich. \u201cTo live in Europe today,\u201d he wrote me, \u201cis to wake up every day to the drum beat of naked racial hostility, with politicians and their supporters lumping us poor black souls together as the wretched and dregs of the earth, vermin for which there is no legal protection or even empathy. Everywhere one turns you are a negative, a constant subject of dehumanization and depersonalization. I am sick of the claim of a common humanity. There is no such thing as a common humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanon, the founding father of Third Worldism, shared my friend\u2019s bleak view of Europe, yet he insisted that if the world was to have a future, it lay in the struggle for a common humanity. For most people, the life he chose would have been a severe test, perhaps an impossible one: in conditions of oppression and exclusion, the bonds of nation, faith, family, and clan provide sustenance, and can\u2019t be wished away by revolutionary acts of will, as Fanon knew from his own work as a psychiatrist in Algeria. In No Name in the Street<\/em>, James Baldwin writes that in all his years in Paris, he \u201chad never been homesick for anything American,\u201d and yet, he adds, \u201cI missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits, I missed the music, the style \u2026 I missed the way the dark face closes, the way dark eyes watch, and the way, when a dark face opens, a light seems to go on everywhere.\u201d When Baldwin returned to Harlem in 1957, just as Fanon settled in Tunis, he experienced the peculiar feeling of being a stranger at home.<\/p>\n

Fanon, who never returned home, attempted to do the opposite: to become a native in exile, in a country of the future. The emancipated future for which Fanon sacrificed his life now lies in ruins. The racial divisions, the economic inequalities, and the wars of the colonial era were not so much liquidated as reconfigured. The postcolonial world is no less divided between North and South, and no less shaped by spectacular violence, from the imperial exhibitionism of the \u201cmother of all bombs\u201d recently dropped in Afghanistan, to the low-tech shock and awe of throat slittings and stonings by the Islamic State. The boundaries that separate the West from the rest, and from its internal others, have been redrawn since his death, but they have not disappeared: if anything, they have multiplied. The coercive unveiling of Muslim women has reappeared in France, where burkini-clad women have been chased off beaches by police and jeering spectators. In the United States, the killings of unarmed black people by the police have furnished a grim new genre of reality television. The president has surrounded himself with white supremacists, imposed a ban on citizens from six Muslim-majority countries, and declared his intention to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, all to keep out the \u201cbad hombres.\u201d The era of alternative facts and hypernationalism has been a breeding ground for the racialized fears that Fanon so brilliantly diagnosed in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>. The gated enclaves, surveillance cameras, and prisons of the liberal West have created cities nearly as compartmentalized as Fanon\u2019s Algiers. When John Edgar Wideman\u2019s imprisoned brother asked him why he was writing a book on Fanon, Wideman replied, \u201cFanon because no way out of this goddam mess \u2026 and Fanon found it.\u201d I am not sure that he did, but it was not for lack of trying, and the power of his example lies less in his answers than in his questions \u2014 questions that he was driven to ask as if by some physical necessity. How can Western democracies overcome the legacy of racial domination, so that black and brown citizens can experience the freedom enjoyed by whites? How can postcolonial societies avoid reproducing the oppressive patterns of colonial rule? What might be the shape, the identity, of a genuinely free society, an emancipated culture? As he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, \u201cOh my body, make of me always a man who questions!\u201d The mess of our postcolonial world is different from the one Fanon faced, but it is no less daunting, and finding our way out of it will require new forms of struggle, and no less imagination.<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the <\/em>London Review of Books. He is currently a fellow-in-residence at the New York Institute for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n

In memory of Jean Stein<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to original \u2013 raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winter 2019 – Reading Fanon, one sometimes has the impression that mere expository prose cannot do justice to the impulsive movement of his thought. I use the word \u201cmovement\u201d advisedly: Fanon did not write his texts; he dictated them while pacing back and forth, either to his wife, Josie, or to his secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan (who has just published a memoir about the experience). This method of composition lends his writings an electrifying musicality: restless, searching, and, as he fell prey to the leukemia that would kill him, otherworldly in its call for a new planetary order, cleansed of racism and oppression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":37310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,127,148,208],"tags":[229,237,101,258,267,260,604,642,109,103,616,99,126,830],"class_list":["post-130993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-the-week","category-africa","category-history","category-literature","tag-activism","tag-africa","tag-cultural-violence","tag-education","tag-geopolitics","tag-history","tag-invinsible-violence","tag-literature","tag-politics","tag-racism","tag-social-violence","tag-structural-violence","tag-violence","tag-western-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}