Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

       Introduction

       Unthinking Fanon

       Worlds, Legacies, Politics

      Reality, for once, requires a total understanding. On the objective level as on the subjective level, a solution has to be supplied.

       —Black Skin, White Masks ¹

      Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on Martinique in the French Antilles, an archipelago of islands scattered across the southeastern edge of the Caribbean between Haiti and South America. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a political theorist of anticolonial liberation struggle. During his brief thirty-six-year life, he published two seminal books: Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the latter appearing in print just days before his death. These two books addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–62), respectively. He also wrote a less-appreciated third book titled Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), in addition to numerous medical journal articles and political essays both under his name and anonymously, a selection of which appeared in the posthumous collection Toward the African Revolution (1964). Despite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s observations and analysis of colonialism and decolonization in these books have remained vital, due to their firsthand immediacy as well as the incisiveness of his ideas.

      Indeed, Fanon’s prescient insights have influenced a range of academic fields, such that the term Fanonism has been invented as shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. The secondary literature on his work continues to grow apace. Above all, Fanon remains a political martyr, who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future.

      But who is Frantz Fanon? His diverse career, personal geography, and complex ideas defy any simplistic rendition of his life. Indeed, the wide-ranging influence of his work over the past fifty years has often prompted a rudimentary sense of his biography, with his books and essays being a substitute for the man himself. Like other writers and intellectuals, Fanon is regularly appreciated in textual terms, rather than through the facets and challenges of his own personal experience. Explaining the political orientation of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton (1942–1989), one of its leaders, once declared, “We read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, the four volumes of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare.”² Such is the approach that emerged shortly after Fanon’s death and has since extended to the present day, with his insights still providing vital methods of political interpretation.

      However, this critical application has had, at times, a seemingly incongruous effect. Edward Said (1935–2003), the esteemed Palestinian scholar, once insisted, for example, that Fanon be read alongside Jane Austen as a means of rethinking the Western canon.³ Others have taken this textual approach even further, to the point of scripture, seeing Fanon as a near spiritual figure akin to the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948).⁴ Though this textual angle is understandable, given the range of Fanon’s ideas and the highly personal nature of his work, it has also frequently sanctified his writing, resulting in overwrought assessments and muted debate, with sharp criticism of Fanon typically played in a minor key—a situation that lends itself to hagiography.

      Grasping his life and its human limitations in detail provides a more acute sense of his ambition, the experiences that informed it, and why his books have offered continued resonance for different audiences. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a leading intellectual of African American studies, once noted the relative disregard for Fanon’s personal history in contemporary scholarship, which occasioned the anachronistic use of Fanon’s work that was too alienated from the specific colonial contexts and revolutionary spirit that influenced his thinking.⁵ The tendency toward mythmaking surrounding Fanon has often rendered him an uncomplicated universal symbol—an emblematic, and thus ahistorical, voice against colonialism in its varied forms across time and place, without attention to the reception and meaning of his work during his lifetime.⁶ When we remove him from history, we risk making him a cliché.

      This book offers a historical portrait of Fanon. It is written in the belief that it is essential to understand his life experiences in order to grasp the origins of his thought and its evolution over time. Indeed, the aura of destiny presents a constant challenge. Fanon is too often treated as a fully formed thinker, without granting him a period of apprenticeship that is indispensable to any political or intellectual life. As Alice Cherki, a former colleague of his, has forcefully argued, an “unrestrained idealization” of Fanon has created a “heroic image” that “cuts him off from history.”⁷ But the profile offered here is not a mere recounting of facts. His writing and biography are tightly interwoven. Understanding his life and the life of his philosophy at once not only serves to address the complex sources of his ceaselessly energetic thinking—what political theorist Achille Mbembe has called his “metamorphic thought”—but also underscores dramatic shifts in perspective over the course of his youth and adulthood, the improbability of his status as a revolutionary, and the intellectual and professional restlessness that carried him from Martinique, to France, and, finally, to Africa.⁸ Intellectual figures are often perceived as solitary, inhabiting a realm of thought and therefore existing primarily on the page. While textual engagement is integral to this book, understanding Fanon as a historical figure is central.

      In this regard, we must unthink Fanon. We must situate him in time, beyond the shifting vicissitudes of social and political theory. Fanon was profoundly shaped by the people he encountered and the social contexts and historical period in which he lived. He assumed a number of roles: being a son, a sibling among eight children, a husband, and a father, in addition to his better-known vocations as a psychiatrist, writer, and revolutionary activist. His philosophy