Frantz Fanon: A Biography

616 Pages·2012·3.78 MB·English

by  David Macey

Frantz Fanon
A Biography
DAVID MACEY
Dedication
For Zak and Marni, and Sophie and Leo . . . the next generation!
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Foreword
1 Forgetting Fanon, Remembering Fanon
2 Native Son
3 An Tan Robè
4 Dr Frantz Fanon
5 ‘Black Skin, White Masks’
6 In Algeria’s Capital of Madness
7 The Explosion
8 Exile
9 ‘We Algerians’
10 The Year of Africa
11 The Wretched of the Earth
12 Endgame
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
On the Typeface
Copyright
Acknowledgements
This study could not have been written without the generous help of many
individuals and institutions. My thanks are due to the following: Margaret Atack
(as always), Jacques Azoulay, Neil Belton, Robert Berthelier, Bibliothèque
Médicale Henri Ey (Paris), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque
Populaire Frantz Fanon (Rivière-Pilote, Martinique), Bibliothèque Publique
d’Information (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), Brotherton Library (University
of Leeds), Centre Culturel Algérien (Paris), Charles Cézette, Alice Cherki,
Patrick Chamoiseau, Fanny Colonna, Olivier Corpet, Basil Davidson, Thomas
Deltombe, Assia Djebar, Jean-Marie Domenach, Edouard Fanon, Joby Fanon,
Olivier Fanon, Odette Fresel, Charles Geronimi, Nicole Guillet, Institut
Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, Marie-Hélène Léotin, André Mandouze,
Marcel Manville, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, Jacques Postel, Service
Historique de l’Armée de Terre (Château de Vincennes).
Abbreviations
AJAAS Association de la Jeunesse Algérienne pour l’Action Sociale
ALN Armée de Libération Nationale
BMA Bataillon de Marche (Antilles)
CEE Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution
CNRA Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne
CRS Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité
CRUA Comité Révolutionnaire pour l’Unité et l’Action
CSP Comité de Salut Public
DCI Division Coloniale d’Infanterie
DOM Département d’Outre-Mer
DOP Dispositif Opérationnel de Protection
DST Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire
DUP Détachement Urbain de Protection
FAF Front de l’Algérie Française
FIS Front Islamique de Salut
FLN Front de Libération Nationale
FLQ Front de Libération Québecoise
FRELIMO Frente de Liberaçao de Moçambique
GPRA Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne
MDRM Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache
MIM Mouvement Indépendantiste Martiniquais
MNA Mouvement Nationaliste Algérien
MPLA Movimento Popular de Liberaçao de Angola
MTLD Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
OAS Organisation Armée Secrète
OJAM Organisation de la Jeunesse Anticolonialiste de la Martinique
OS Organisation Spéciale
PCA Parti Communiste Algérien
PCF Parti Communiste Français
PCM Parti Communiste Martiniquais
POLISARIO Popular Front for the Liberation of Saquia, al Hamra and Río
de Oro
PPA Parti Populaire Algérien
PPM Parti Progressiste Martiniquais
RCP Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes
REP Régiment Etranger Parachutiste
RPC Régiment Parachutiste Coloniale
RTS Régiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais
SAS Sections Administratives Spéciales
SDECE Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-
Espionnage
TAT Thematic Apperception Test
TOM Territoire d’Outre-Mer
UNITA Uniao para la Independencia Total de Angola
UPA Uniao das Populaçoes de Angola
UPC Union du Peuple Camerounais
Foreword
I cannot recall just why I first read Frantz Fanon. Perhaps it was a
recommendation from a friend, perhaps it was the Sartre connection. But I do
remember where and when I discovered Fanon. I was twenty and spending a
year in Paris as part of a degree course in French. It was a good year and
provided an introduction to many things, but it began with a severe culture
shock. When I went to the Préfecture de Police on the Ile de la Cité to obtain a
temporary resident’s permit, I saw a group of Algerians – all men – being turned
away from the counter on the grounds they had not filled in their application
forms correctly. Individually, they were addressed as tu. To address a friend or
relative as tu is to signal intimacy and affection. To address an adult stranger as
tu is to insult and humiliate him or her. Collectively, those men were treated with
utter contempt by officials who knew a bicot (‘wog’) when they saw one. It
transpired that the Algerians simply could not read and write well enough to
complete the forms.
To watch anyone being humiliated – to recognize the look of hurt in the eyes
of the other – is distressing. I had rarely seen people looking so forlorn and lost,
and I do not think I had ever seen such a naked display of racism. When my turn
came to approach the counter, the photograph I tendered was rejected: my hair
concealed too much of my face, and I had to have new photographs taken with it
pulled back off my face. For a year, I therefore carried a resident’s permit
bearing a photograph in which I was almost unrecognizable. This was a source
of amusement rather than humiliation. I was treated brusquely, even rudely, but
not with contempt. After all, I was a white European, not a bicot, not a bougnole,
not a ‘Mohammed’ and not a ‘Sidi’. In the circumstances, it seemed only natural
to at least try to help the Algerians with their application forms. I should have
known I could never have been of any great help. Any encounter between
undergraduate French and Gallic bureaucratese is always going to be an unequal
struggle. I could not speak the language of these men and they could not speak
mine. I could not help. I assumed that they were immigrant workers. If and when
they did get their papers, they probably helped to build the rapid transport
system that exiled most Algerians from central Paris by displacing them to
distant suburbs. It was a good moment to encounter Fanon.
Now very battered, my old copies of Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of
the Earth) and L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Studies in a Dying
Colonialism) were bought in the spring of 1970 from François Maspero’s La Joie
de lire bookshop in the rue Saint Sévérin. Maspero was Fanon’s main publisher,
and this was where Les Damnés de la terre first went on sale in late 1961. It is
also where, on the very day that the news of Fanon’s death reached Paris, copies
were seized and taken away by the police because they were deemed seditious.
My copies are not first editions but the reprints published in the Petite Collection
Maspero edition. Copies of those elegant little books are now quite difficult to
find, and the shop where I bought them has gone. The sites of its two branches –
one on either side of the narrow street – are now home to a travel agency and a
shop selling posters and cards. The bookshop’s name meant ‘the joy of reading’,
and I always find its absence depressing.
The Algerian war had been over for eight years in 1970; almost no one talked
about it. It was still impossible for Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (made in
1966) to be shown in a French cinema. Plans to screen it in three Parisian
cinemas were dropped when their owners were threatened with violence if the
screenings went ahead.1 It was to be almost thirty years before a French
government could finally admit that what occurred in Algeria had indeed been a
war and not a police operation. No one talked about how, in October 1961, or
only two months before Fanon’s death, the police opened fire on unarmed
Algerian demonstrators at the bottom of the boulevard St Michel. No one talked
about how Algerians died in the courtyard of the Préfecture de Police. The
memory of the student revolt of May ’68 had eclipsed that of an earlier
generation of twenty-year-olds, some of whom fought and died in a war that had
no name, and some of whom refused to fight in it or even deserted from the
army. Many of those who deserted, who refused to accept their call-up papers or
who even joined the small groups that gave active and clandestine support to the
Front de Libération National were inspired to do so by Fanon, the black doctor
from Martinique who resigned from his post in a psychiatric hospital in colonial
Algeria to join the Front and who preached a gospel of violent revolution.
May ’68 had come and gone, but Paris was still turbulent. The police presence
around the rue St-Séverin was both permanent and heavy. Although it certainly
helped a great deal, one did not need to be black or North African to be stopped
regularly and asked for one’s papers; being twenty and having long hair were
perfectly good qualifications. It felt right to rebel, to be angry, even though our
anger and our rebellion were largely symbolic. Running away from police
charges during occasional demonstrations in the Latin Quarter was both
frightening and exhilarating, but we were not facing machine guns. Was it really
possible to believe that the CRS riot police were a latter-day SS?
In 1970, the political horizon was dominated not by Algeria, but by the war in
Vietnam that politicized so many members of a generation. There were some
vague parallels with the experience of the so-called Algerian generation. We
dismissed talk of ‘peace in Algeria’ and rejected calls for a negotiated settlement
in favour of a much more militant commitment. In 1970, ‘Victory to the NLF’
felt a much more appropriate slogan than ‘Peace in Vietnam’. At Christmas and
the New Year, banners went up on the lampposts in the boulevard St Germain,
courtesy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono: ‘War is Over (if you want it)’. It went
on, regardless of what we wanted.
It was a sign of the times that my acquaintance with Fanon began with Les
Damnés de la terre and not Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White
Masks). In many ways he seemed to have less to do with an Algeria that had
been bureaucratized than with a very general image of the Third World – that
colossus facing Europe. Fanon had spoken of setting Africa ablaze, and it was on
fire. Vicious colonial wars were going on in Portugal’s African colonies. A
guerrilla war was taking place in a Rhodesia that would eventually become
Zimbabwe. In South Africa, the armed wing of the African National Congress
was waging its own struggle. It was possible to follow the wars’ progress by
browsing through the collection of papers and journals on offer in La Joie de
lire’s basement. This was as much a library as a bookshop and there was
certainly no obligation to buy. Fanon fitted easily into the revolutionary
pantheon of the day, along with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral,
Samora Machel and the Mao of the Cultural Revolution. There was also a close
perceived association between Fanon and the Black Power movement in the
United States. Every brother on a rooftop who was taking care of business with a
gun could, so it was said, quote Fanon. A lot of white students thought they
wanted to be on the rooftops too. And so, we read Fanon. It was his anger that
was so attractive.
I read a lot during that year in Paris. It was the beginning of the moment of
theory, a time to read Althusser, Lacan and Foucault. Fanon began to look naive.
His analyses were wrong so often, disastrously so when it came to Angola. It
was obvious to any Marxist, to any Althusserian, that the peasantry could not
lead a revolution, that the lumpenproletariat could not play a progressive role.
Just look at Marx and Lenin. Just look at the state of Algeria. Fanon had feared
that the national bourgeoisie would confiscate the revolution. But it was
confiscated by the FLN and by the army that stood behind it in the shadows.
In October 1988, Algeria began to implode. Strikes and riots broke out as
discontent with the FLN, corruption and the stagnation of what should have been