Yet in the long run, Fanon believed, the African continent would have to reckon with threats more crippling than colonialism. On the one hand, Africa\u2019s independence had come too late: rebuilding and giving a sense of direction to societies traumatized by colonial rule\u2014societies that had long been forced to take orders from others and to see themselves through the eyes of their masters\u2014would not be easy.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, independence had come too early, empowering the continent\u2019s narcissistic \u201cnational middle classes\u201d who \u201csuddenly develop great appetites.\u201d He writes: \u201cThe deeper I enter into the cultures and political circles the surer I am that the great danger for Africa is the absence of ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fanon recorded these impressions in a blue Ghana School Teachers Book No. 3 that he had picked up in Accra. It is now stored at the Institut M\u00e9moires de l\u2019\u00e9dition contemporaine, a research library housed in a former monastery in Normandy that sheltered partisan fighters during the Second World War. To take it in one\u2019s hands sixty years later and leaf through the pages is to inspect the thoughts of a dying man: Fanon did not yet know he had leukemia, or that his life would end in 1961 in a hospital in Maryland, in the heart of the American empire he despised. On the road in West Africa, he was open, thoughtful, and intrigued by the continent from which his ancestors had been carried on slave ships to the French colony of Martinique.<\/p>\n
In Mali he imagined himself home, among his Black brothers, yet he remained a stranger. He had come as an undercover agent of a neighboring country in what he called \u201cWhite Africa\u201d: Algeria, then in the seventh year of its liberation struggle against French rule. The aim of his reconnaissance mission was to make contact with the desert tribes and open a southern front on Algeria\u2019s border with Mali so that arms and ammunitions could be moved from the Malian capital of Bamako through the Sahara to the rebels of the Front de lib\u00e9ration nationale (FLN).<\/p>\n
The head of Fanon\u2019s commando unit was a major in the FLN\u2019s military wing, the Arm\u00e9e de lib\u00e9ration nationale (ALN). He was a \u201cfunny chap\u201d who went by the name of Chawki: \u201csmall, lean, with the implacable eyes of an old maquis fighter.\u201d Fanon was impressed by the \u201cintelligence and clarity of his ideas\u201d and his knowledge of the Sahara, a \u201cworld in which Chawki moves with the boldness and the perspicacity of a great strategist.\u201d Chawki, he tells us, spent two years studying in France but returned to Algeria to work his father\u2019s land. When the war of liberation launched by the FLN began on November 1, 1954, he \u201ctook down his hunting rifle from its hook and joined the brothers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not long after, Fanon, too, had joined \u201cthe brothers.\u201d From 1955 until his expulsion from Algeria two years later, he had given sanctuary to rebels at the psychiatric hospital he directed in Blida-Joinville, just outside Algiers. He had provided them with medical care and taken every possible risk short of joining the maquisards in the mountains\u2014his first impulse when the revolution broke out. No one believed more fervently in the rebels than the man from Martinique. He had gone on to join the FLN in exile in Tunis, identifying himself as an Algerian and preaching the cause of Algerian independence throughout Africa. Every word that he wrote paid tribute to the Algerian struggle.<\/p>\n
But he could never really become an Algerian; he did not even speak Arabic or Berber (Amazigh), the languages of Algeria\u2019s indigenous peoples. In his work as a psychiatrist, he often had to depend on interpreters. Algeria remained permanently out of reach for him, an elusive object of love, as it was for so many other foreigners who had been seduced by it\u2014not least the European settlers who began arriving in the 1830s. He would be, at most, an adopted brother, dreaming of a fraternity that would transcend tribe, race, and nation: the kind of arrangement that France promised him as a young man and that had led him to join the war against the Axis powers.<\/p>\n
France betrayed its promise, but even as he turned violently against the colonial motherland, Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a \u201cBlack Jacobin,\u201d as the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.<\/p>\n
Nearly six decades after the loss of Algeria, France still hasn\u2019t forgiven Fanon\u2019s \u201ctreason\u201d: a recent proposal to name a street after him in Bordeaux was struck down. Never mind that Fanon had bled for France as a young man, then fought for Algeria\u2019s independence in defense of classical republican principles, or that his writing continues to speak to the predicament of many young French citizens of Black and Arab descent who have been made to feel like strangers in their own country.<\/p>\n
In 1908, Georg Simmel, a German Jewish sociologist, published an essay called \u201cThe Stranger.\u201d The stranger, he writes, \u201cis not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today\u2014and stays.\u201d This was Fanon\u2019s experience throughout his life: as a soldier in the French army, as a West Indian medical student in Lyon, as a Black Frenchman, and as a non-Muslim in the Algerian resistance to France. Simmel suggests that even as the stranger arouses suspicion, he benefits from a peculiar epistemological privilege since \u201che is offered revelations, confessions otherwise carefully hidden from any more organically embedded persons.\u201d<\/p>\n
Listening to such confessions was Fanon\u2019s trade as a psychiatrist, and it was in doing so that he decided to throw himself into the independence struggle, even to become Algerian, as if a commitment to his patients\u2019 care and recovery required an even more radical kind of solidarity, a marriage to the people he had come to love.<\/p>\n
The twentieth century was, of course, full of foreign-born revolutionaries, radical strangers drawn to distant lands upon which they projected their hopes and fantasies. Yet Fanon was unusual, and much more than a sympathetic fellow traveler. He would eventually become the FLN\u2019s roving ambassador in Africa\u2014his complexion a decided asset for a North African movement seeking support from its sub-Saharan cousins\u2014and acquire a reputation as the FLN\u2019s \u201cchief theoretician.\u201d<\/p>\n
This he was not. It would have been highly surprising if such an intensely nationalistic movement had chosen a foreigner as its theoretician. Fanon\u2019s task was mostly limited to communicating aims and decisions that others had formulated. But he interpreted Algeria\u2019s liberation struggle in a manner that helped transform it into a global symbol of resistance to domination. And he did so in the language of the profession he practiced, and at the same time radically reimagined: psychiatry.<\/p>\n
Before he was a revolutionary, Fanon was a psychiatrist, and his thinking about society took shape within spaces of confinement: hospitals, asylums, clinics, and the prison house of race, which\u2014as a Black man\u2014he experienced throughout his life.<\/p>\n
Fanon was not a modest man. He struck some of his contemporaries as vain, arrogant, even hotheaded. Yet to his patients he could hardly have been humbler.<\/p>\n
What he saw in their faces, and in their physical and psychological distress, were people who had been deprived of freedom and forcibly alienated from themselves, from their ability to come to grips with reality and act upon it independently. Some of them were mentally ill (in French, ali\u00e9n\u00e9s<\/em>); others were immigrant workers or colonized Algerians who suffered from hunger, poor housing, racism, and violence; still others suffered from performing the dirty work of colonial repression. (Fanon treated French soldiers who had tortured Algerian suspects, and wrote with remarkable lucidity and compassion about their traumas.) What they shared was an invisible, lacerating anguish inscribed in the psyche, immobilizing both body and soul. This anguish, for Fanon, was a kind of dissident knowledge: a counternarrative to the triumphal story that the West told about itself.<\/p>\n In a 1945 essay on Richard Wright\u2019s memoir Black Boy<\/em>, Ralph Ellison observed that racial oppression begins \u201cin the shadow of infancy where environment and consciousness are so darkly intertwined as to require the skills of a psychoanalyst to define their point of juncture.\u201d Fanon was a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst, but he read deeply in the literature of psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs<\/em> (Black Skin, White Masks<\/em><\/a>), published in 1952, when he was twenty-seven, was an attempt to reveal the shadow that racial oppression cast across the lives of Black people. In his later writings on Algeria and the Third World, he powerfully evoked the dream life of societies disfigured by racism and colonial subjugation.<\/p>\n \u201cHistory,\u201d in the words of the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, \u201cis what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.\u201d Fanon had a rare gift for expressing the hurts that history had caused in the lives of Black and colonized peoples, because he felt those hurts with almost unbearable intensity himself. Few writers have captured so vividly the lived experience of racism and colonial domination, the fury it creates in the minds of the oppressed\u2014or the sense of alienation and powerlessness that it engenders.<\/p>\n To be a Black person in a white majority society, he writes in one of his bleakest passages, was to feel trapped in \u201ca zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a new departure can emerge.\u201d<\/p>\nLike any struggle to exorcise history\u2019s ghosts and wipe the slate clean, Fanon\u2019s was often a confrontation with impossibility.<\/span>\n Yet Fanon himself had a fervent belief in new departures. In his writing, as well as in his work as a doctor and a revolutionary, he remained defiantly hopeful that the colonized victims of the West\u2014the \u201cwretched of the earth,\u201d he called them\u2014could inaugurate a new era in which they would be free not only of foreign rule but also of forced assimilation to the values and languages of their oppressors. But first they had to be willing to fight for their freedom. He meant this literally. Fanon believed in the regenerative potential of violence.<\/p>\n Armed struggle was not simply a response to the violence of colonialism; it was, in his view, a kind of medicine, rekindling a sense of power and self-mastery. By striking back against their oppressors, the colonized overcame the passivity and self-hatred induced by colonial confinement, cast off the masks of obedience they had been forced to wear, and were reborn, psychologically, as free men and women.<\/p>\n But, as he knew, masks are easier to put on than to cast off. Like any struggle to exorcise history\u2019s ghosts and wipe the slate clean, Fanon\u2019s was often a confrontation with impossibility, with the limits to his visionary desires. Much of the power of his writing resides in the tension, which he never quite resolved, between his work as a doctor and his obligations as a militant, between his commitment to healing and his belief in violence.<\/p>\n
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