FRANTZ FANON was born in Martinique and educated in France, where he
became a psychiatrist. In 1953, he went to work in Algeria and soon sided with the
nationalists engaged in armed resistance against the French. Through his
psychiatric work, Fanon was one of the few people other than victims or
perpetrators who knew the full extent of the French army's use of torture
against those fighting for an independent Algeria.
Shortly before he died, Fanon wrote _Les Damnés de la Terre&_(The
Wretched of the Earth, 1961), the book he is best remembered for, although its very
notoriety overshadows his other work. A sort of non-Marxist bible of the
oppressed, it was seized on by mid-century radicals in the third world as
justifying violence not only for national independence but as a response
to racism and poverty. The Fanon who is likelier to interest today's readers
is the doctor who saw at first hand how humiliation and prejudice can affect
people on both sides of the colour barrier and who struggled to understand the
pathology of ethnic hatred.
Fanon never thought of himself as black until he arrived in France, where
he found himself stereotyped midway between the tirailleurs sénégalais, who
were trained to frighten civilian populations, and the fez-wearing black face
that grinned at children from cocoa packets of Banania. The shock was a
lasting one. As Fanon lay dying from leukaemia, he had a nightmare of being put
through a washing-machine and de-negrified. Blackness, he wrote, does not exist as
such. It is something one discovers in another's gaze.
David Macey's life of Fanon provides, as background, an excellent guide
to the history of French decolonisation and the intellectual debates of post-war
France. The contrast between the abstract belief in liberté, égalité,
fraternité that was preached from Dunkirk to Fort-de-France and the reality of
otherness, which Fanon experienced on arriving in France to study medicine, provides
a haunting, if at times overdone, leitmotif that runs through the book, as
it did through his life. Fanon's first book, _Peau noire, masques blancs_ (Black
Skin, White Masks), which was published in 1952, is an angry young man's book, that
mingles personal experiences and psycho-social ideas. Fanon had little patience with
the cult of négritude which Aimé Césaire, also from Martinique, and Léopold Senghor,
who became president of Senegal, believed would transcend racial barriers and
rehabilitate African culture. His interest in mankind was broader. With
François Tosquelles, a Catalan-born psychiatrist, he experimented in social
therapy. This, and his encounter with Algerian workers in Lyons who suffered from
what he identified as the North African syndrome, a psychosomatic condition
brought on by being cut off from one's home environment, prepared him for his later
work in Algeria.
There, he worked in a hospital with white, Arab and Kabyle patients. This
reinforced his interest in the social dimension of some psychological
ailments. Psychotherapy, in his view, involved understanding the patient's way of
seeing the world, however irrational it might seem. As the violence increased in
Algeria, Fanon treated (mostly Arab) victims and (mostly French)
perpetrators of torture who appealed to him for help. He turned no one away and found
that both needed care.
Fanon died before Algeria became independent in July 1962. Its soldiers
and religious thugs have since made nonsense of his hopeful theory that
purifying violence would spend itself once independence was achieved. He seems here
to have forgotten a truer observation of his, taken directly from clinical
experience: in face of violence and humiliation, victims will turn also
on each other. It is for conclusions such as this, and for his other pioneering
work in the psychology of ethnic prejudice, that Fanon deserves to be read and
remembered.
Copyright © 1995-2001 The Economist Newspaper Group Ltd. All rights
reserved.
---
Macdonald Stainsby
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