Difficulties with Fanon

Observations stimulated by Adam Shatz’s "Rebel’s Clinic"

“I do not like Fanon’s [thinking] to be chopped into little pieces”, his long-time friend and the person to whom he dictated The Wretched of the Earth, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan said to the author of Fanon’s biography Adam Shatz (The Rebel’s Clinic). Shatz’s is the latest biography that tries to present this complicated man, an iconic figure of a revolved age, in all, or most, of his incarnations. A high-school Martinican French imbued of poetry and a believer in the ideas of liberté, égalité, and fraternité enough to enroll into the Forces Française Libres, and be transported to France to fight for its liberation from the Nazis (when, one thinks, residents were unwilling to do much themselves). A student of psychiatry in Lyon and later practitioner in several clinics in France. An early admirer of Senghor’s Negritude, and poetry of his Martinican compatriot Aymé Césaire. And then a thin-skinned, intense, arrogant and, at the same time, humble young Black man (even if on his grand-mother’s side Alsatien, which might, Shatz speculates, explain his first name) who comes face-to-face with Franch casual racism, open discrimination and haughty paternalism “(“Mais vous parlez si bien le français”). Around that time, Fannon publishes Black Faces, White Masks.

As a French doctor, he transfers to a clinic in Algeria in 1953 (then, an integral part of France) where soon instead of the usual cases of psychiatric trauma and schizophrenia, he meets people whose entire families have been wiped out by the French militaries, or Algerian fighters, kids, involved in settlers’ murders—fully absurd. Not absurd because of an inexplicable angoisse like Camus’ Stranger (Camus, by the way, being a French Algerian) but motivated by a blind desire for revenge. Absurd because they do not help the movement and strike the innocent. Fanon’s hospital becomes the safe-house for the nascent FNL fighters, both those battle-injured or those mentally-scarred by violence and whom Fanon and the entire clinic treat in secret.

Step by step, Fanon moves from a racially-induced unease, attraction to semi-mystical world of Negritude, to socialism (although Shatz never tells us if and how much Fanon was influenced by Marx or Lenin), to the tiers-mondiste involvement in a country whose struggle at that time (together with Vietnam’s) was the most important ground where the new world faced the old. Perhaps even more so than in Vietnan, it is in Algeria, that the racial, political and social issues of the mid- 20^th century were displayed in their sharpest form. Neither French nor the US population’s presence in Vietnam come close to the number of French colons and to their enracinement in Algeria. And unlike in Algeria, Vietnam did not have to face the contradictory claims of socialism and Islam to run the liberated country.

Fanon joins the struggle (the French police is about to raid the clinic) which leads him from Algeria to Tunis (after the Algerian urban guerilla is all but destroyed by French paratroopers), and then to close contacts with FLN top leadership. He becomes FLN’s de facto ambassador in Sub-Saharan Africa which, like Algeria, is in the midst of decolonization. A number of famous people from those times appear in Shatz’s quick croquis of Fenon’s meetings in Africa: Lumumba, Sekou Touré, Modibo Keita, Holden Roberto (even then working for the CIA), Amilcar Cabral. The fall of Lumumba, whom Fanon personally liked, but whom even Algerians abandoned at the last moment is poignantly told. A truly tragic figure in whose vile murder almost all collaborated: many by commission, others by omission.

Shatz brings this Plutarch-like exemplary life to the reader with adroitness and skillful attention to detail as well as awareness of Fanon’s uniqueness, both in terms of personality, and places: centers of the new world that he was trying to create. Shatz’s portrait is sympathetic: it is hard not to fall in love with Fanon and his multiple selves. Like Che Guevara, he was a doctor of human souls and he cured them not only in his clinic, but on the field of battle and by writing about them. Like other extraordinary revolutionaries (see my reviews of books on Victor Serge, Peter Kropotkin), he was a man of praxis—no surprise than he was admired by the more sedate armchair revolutionary of the Sartre’s kind. (The relation between the two men and Simone de Beauvoir is, by the way, quite interesting.)

I read The Wretched of the Earth in the late-1970s in Serbo-Croatian translation that was then published. I still have the book and I recently consulted it when I wrote about Fanon when reviewing Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire and in my Global Inequality.

My difficulty with Fanon when I read it almost half-century ago came from three sources. First, accepting his uncritical celebration of violence that often takes the hues of celebration of the purificatory nature of violence common to Fascist thinkers of the 1920s—even if the roots of the two are very different: one’s objective is reinforcement of supremacy, its reification; the other’s, affirmation of equality and self-realization through overcoming of daily humiliation—was troubling, to say the least.

The second difficulty lay with Fanon’s extension of Marxism, or of the project of social emancipation, beyond its original Eurocentrism. There is no doubt that Marxism, at least until Marx began to look more seriously at non-European societies, and up to Lenin’s 1920 turn to the East, was essentially a Eurocentric project. In Eastern Europe, it was seen as a Eurocentric project of modernization and of catching up with the West. Fanon’s project went way past Marx’s Eurocentrism. Indeed it had aspects of social and economic liberation (FLN introduced forms of labor-management, for example) but forced us to look at the unfamiliar areas where it seemed that Marxist answers were clear—and yet somehow they did not fit: wearing a veil: get rid of it; having marriage decided by the parents: pure feudalism; separate classes for girls and boys: end them today. My cultural Western Marxist matrix did not then, not only not fully, but not at all, appreciate the problems with which Fanon had to deal in Algeria. Gender inequality, various “funny” religions, or for that matter strangely dressed English Queens and Kings, seemed to me relics from some medieval past. I could not understand why Fanon and FLN had to deal with them in ultra cautious manner when it was self-evident that modernization meant simply cancelling them all.

The third issue that I could not then fully appreciate was the difficulty of a Black man not only in metropolitan France (even if I could not relate to Fanon’s experience, I could relate to the complex of inferiority that always englobes smaller cultures and could see how it may become all-consuming for Blacks), but elsewhere. Having to understand similar prejudices in the relations between Africans and Arabs: slurs, contempt, stereotypes, etc. was something new for me then. The Third World solidarity did not seem to go much further than one’s village, or tribe, or at best, and elusively, up to the nation-state. Yet there is also no doubt, as Shatz documents, that in Fanon peripatetic journeys across Africa something of pan-African solidarity was in the process of being created. It was not all mirage.

All three ambiguities remain, to same extent, when we read Fanon today. It is easy to see how independence did not solve social issues: many African countries have income on the level of the 1960s, many display appalling levels of inequality, and some are even more dictatorially run than they were by colonizers—although, and this is of key importance—without the in-built contempt of the “racially inferior” multitudes. Some of the things for which Fanon fought were accomplished though: independence and agency. Nothing is likely to overturn them. African countries and those of the former Third World have become the subjects of history. Whether they do it well or badly, with autocrats or democrats, with poverty or wealth, is less important than the fact that they do create (to cite Marx) their own history. Countries have agency, and even peoples have agency. This was never the case under colonialism. What empires do to colonies is to de-historisize them. Not only by destroying the knowledge of the history there was, but by not creating a new one. During the colonial rule, history of the colonies becomes an annex, a footnote to the history of the metropole, or dissolves into individual family histories. There is hardly any common, national history—because there is no agency. The requirement for that is national independence. Even the worst dictatorship in an independent country implies shared agency of citizens. Full bellies in satisfied colonies produce only family lore. Nothing more. Fanon knew that and his legacy –warts and all—is there for all to see.