|
F r a n t z F a n o n
|
Frantz Omar Fanon
|
| Born |
July 20, 1925 (1925-07-20)
Fort-de-France, Martinique,
France |
| Died |
December 6, 1961(1961-12-06) (aged 36)
Bethesda,
Maryland |
| Spouse(s) |
Josie Fanon |
| Children |
Olivier Fanon, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France |
● Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 – 6
December 1961) was a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, philosopher,
revolutionary, and writer
whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial
studies, critical theory, and Marxism.[1]
As an intellectual, Fanon was
a political radical, and an existentialist humanist concerning the
psychopathology of colonization, and the
human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.[2][3]
In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported
the Algerian war of independence from France, and was a member of the Algerian
National Liberation Front. For more than four decades, the life and works of
Frantz Fanon have inspired movements
in Palestine, Sri Lanka, the U.S. and South Africa.[4][5][6]
●
Biography
● Martinique and the Second World War
Frantz Omar Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a
French colony and is now
a French département. His father
was a descendant of enslaved Africans; his mother was said to be an
"illegitimate" child of African, Indian and European descent, whose white
ancestors came from Strasbourg in Alsace. Fanon's family was
socio-economically middle-class and they could
afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, then the most prestigious high school
in Martinique, where the writer Aimé Césaire was
one of his teachers.[7]
After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval
troops were blockaded on Martinique. Forced to remain on the island, French
sailors took over the government from the Martiniquan people and established a
collaborationist regime. In the face of economic distress and in the isolation
under the blockade, they instituted an oppressive regime; Fanon described them
as taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists."[8]
Many accusations of harassment and sexual misconduct arose. The abuse of the
Martiniquan people by the French Navy influenced Fanon, reinforcing his feelings
of alienation and his disgust with colonial racism. At the age of eighteen,
Fanon fled the island as a "dissident" (the coined word for French West Indians
joining Gaullist forces) and travelled
to British-controlled Dominica to join the Free French
Forces.
He enlisted in the Free French army and joined an Allied convoy that arrived
in Casablanca. He was later
transferred to an army base at Béjaïa on the Kabylie coast of
Algeria. Fanon left Algeria from Oran and saw service in France,
notably in the battles of Alsace. In 1944 he was wounded at
Colmar and
received the Croix de
guerre.
When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces
crossed the Rhine
into Germany along with photo journalists, Fanon's regiment was "bleached" of
all non-white soldiers and Fanon and his fellow Caribbean soldiers were sent to
Toulon
(Provence).[5]
Later, they were transferred to Normandy to await repatriation.
In 1945 Fanon returned to Martinique. His return lasted only a short time.
While there, he worked for the parliamentary campaign of his friend and mentor
Aimé Césaire, who would be a major influence in his life. Césaire ran on the communist ticket
as a parliamentary delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of
the Fourth Republic.
Fanon stayed long enough to complete his baccalaureate and then went to France,
where he studied medicine and psychiatry.
He was educated in Lyon, where he also studied
literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures.
During this period he wrote three plays, which are lost. After qualifying as a
psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon
did a residency in psychiatry at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole
under the radical Catalan psychiatrist François
Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the role of
culture in psychopathology. After his residency, Fanon practised psychiatry at
Pontorson,
near Mont Saint-Michel, for
another year and then (from 1953) in Algeria. He was chef de
service at the Blida–Joinville Psychiatric Hospital
in Algeria, where he stayed until his deportation in January 1957.[9]
●
France
In France, in 1952, Fanon wrote his first book, Black Skin, White
Masks, an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial
subjugation upon Black people. Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral
dissertation, submitted at Lyon, entitled "Essay on the Disalienation of the
Black"; the rejection of the dissertation prompted Fanon to publish it as a
book; for the doctor of philosophy degree, he then submitted another
dissertation of narrower scope and different subject. It was the left-wing philosopher Francis
Jeanson, leader of the pro-Algerian independence Jeanson network, who
insisted upon the new title, for which book he wrote the epilogue. Jeanson also
was a senior book editor at Éditions du Seuil, in Paris.[10]
When Fanon submitted the manuscript of Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
to Seuil, Jeanson invited him for an editor–author meeting that did not go well:
Jeanson described Frantz Fanon as nervous and over-sensitive. Despite Jeanson
praising the manuscript, Fanon abruptly interrupted him, and asked: "Not bad for
a nigger, is it?" The editor Jeanson was insulted, became angry, and dismissed
the disrespectful author Fanon from his editorial office; later, Jeanson said,
that his response to Fanon’s discourtesy earned him Fanon’s lifelong respect.
Afterwards, their working and personal relationship became much easier, and
Fanon agreed to Jeanson’s suggested title, Black Skin, White Masks,
because of the heavy load of medical course-work Fanon had to do to earn his
doctor of medicine degree.[10]
●
Algeria
Fanon left France for Algeria, where he had been stationed for some time
during the war. He secured an appointment as a psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville
Psychiatric Hospital. It was there that he radicalized methods of treatment. In
particular, he began socio-therapy which connected with his patients' cultural
backgrounds. He also trained nurses and interns. Following the outbreak of the
Algerian revolution in
November 1954 he joined the Front de
Libération Nationale as a result of contacts with Dr Pierre
Chaulet at Blida in 1955.
In The Wretched of
the Earth (Les damnés de la terre), published shortly before
Fanon's death in 1961, Fanon defends the right for a colonized people to use
violence to struggle for independence, arguing that human beings who are not
considered as such shall not be bound by principles that apply to humanity, in
their attitude towards the colonizer. His book was then censored by the
French government.
Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabyle region, to study
the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. His lost study of "The
marabout of Si Slimane" is an example. These trips were also a means for
clandestine activities, notably in his visits to the ski resort of Chrea which hid an FLN base. By
summer 1956 he wrote his "Letter of resignation to the Resident Minister" and
made a clean break with his French assimilationist
upbringing and education. He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957 and the
"nest of fellaghas [rebels]" at Blida
hospital was dismantled.
Fanon left for France and subsequently travelled secretly to Tunis. He was part of the
editorial collective of El Moudjahid, for which
he wrote until the end of his life. He also served as Ambassador to Ghana for the
Provisional Algerian Government (GPRA)
and attended conferences in Accra, Conakry, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville, Cairo and Tripoli. Many of
his shorter writings from this period were collected posthumously in the book
Toward
the African Revolution. In this book Fanon reveals himself as a war
strategist; in one chapter he discusses how to open a southern front to the war
and how to run the supply lines.[9]
●
Death
On his return to Tunis, after his exhausting trip across the Sahara to open a Third Front,
Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He went to the Soviet
Union for treatment and experienced some remission of his illness. on his return
to Tunis he dictated his testament The Wretched of
the Earth. When he was not confined to his bed, he delivered lectures to
ALN (Armée
de Libération Nationale) officers at Ghardimao on the
Algero-Tunisian border. He made a final visit to Sartre in Rome. In 1961
the CIA arranged a trip to the U.S. for further leukemia treatment.[11]
He died in Bethesda, Maryland,
on December 6, 1961, under the name of Ibrahim Fanon. He was buried in Algeria, after
lying in state in Tunisia. Later his body was
moved to a martyrs' (chouhada) graveyard at Ain Kerma in
eastern Algeria. Fanon was survived by his wife Josie (née Dublé), a
French woman, their son Olivier, and his daughter (from a previous relationship)
Mireille. Mireille married Bernard Mendès-France, son of the French politician
Pierre Mendès
France. Josie took her own life in Algiers in 1989,[9]
Olivier still works for the Algerian Embassy in Paris.
●
Work
Although Fanon wrote Black Skin, White
Masks while still in France, most of his work was written in North
Africa. It was during this time that he produced works such as L'An Cinq, de
la Révolution Algérienne in 1959 (Year Five of the Algerian
Revolution, later republished as Sociology of a Revolution and later
still as A Dying Colonialism). Fanon's original title was "Reality of a
Nation"; however, the publisher, François Maspero,
refused to accept this title.
Fanon is best known for the classic on decolonization The Wretched of
the Earth.[12]
The Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1961 by Éditions
Maspero, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre.[13]
In it Fanon analyzes the role of class, race,
national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation. Both
books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as the leading
anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century.
Fanon's three books were supplemented by numerous psychiatry articles as well
as radical critiques of French colonialism in journals such as Esprit and El Moudjahid.
The reception of his work has been affected by English translations which are
recognized to contain numerous omissions and errors, while his unpublished work,
including his doctoral thesis, has received little attention. As a result, Fanon
has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence (it would be more accurate
to characterize him as a dialectical opponent of nonviolence) and his ideas have
been extremely oversimplified. This reductionist vision of Fanon's work ignores
the subtlety of his understanding of the colonial system. For example, the fifth
chapter of Black Skin, White Masks translates, literally, as "The Lived
Experience of the Black" ("L'expérience vécue du Noir"), but Markmann's
translation is "The Fact of Blackness", which leaves out the massive influence
of phenomenology
on Fanon's early work.[14]
For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in
Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength
must also be of a violent nature because it is the only "language" the colonizer
speaks. Thus, violent resistance is a necessity imposed by the colonists upon
the colonized. The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse
pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning
psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics
and literature.[citation
needed]
His participation in the Algerian Front de
Libération Nationale from 1955 determined his audience as the Algerian
colonized. It was to them that his final work, Les damnés de la terre
(translated into English by Constance Farrington as The Wretched of the
Earth) was directed. It constitutes a warning to the oppressed of the
dangers they face in the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a
neo-colonialist, globalized world.[15]
●
Influences
Fanon was influenced by a variety of thinkers and intellectual traditions
including Jean-Paul Sartre, Lacan, Négritude and Marxism.[4]
Aimé Césaire was
a particularly significant influence in Fanon's life. Césaire, a leader of the
Négritude movement, was teacher and mentor to Fanon on the island of
Martinique.[16]
Fanon referred to Césaire's writings in his own work. He quoted, for example,
his teacher at length in "The Lived Experience of the Black Man", a heavily
anthologized essay from Black Skins, White Masks.[17]
●
Influence and legacy
Fanon has had an influence on anti-colonial and national
liberation movements. In particular, Les damnés de la terre was a
major influence on the work of revolutionary leaders such as Ali
Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa,
Malcolm X
in the United States and Ernesto Che Guevara
in Cuba. Of these only Guevara was primarily concerned with Fanon's theories on
violence; for Shariati and Biko the main interest in Fanon was "the new man" and
"black consciousness" respectively.[18]
Bolivian indianist Fausto
Reinaga also had some Fanon influence and he mentions The Wretched of
the Earth in his magnum opus La Revolución
India, advocating for decolonisation of native South Americans from European
influence.
Fanon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and
others. His work was a key influence on the Black Panther Party,
particularly his ideas concerning nationalism, violence and the lumpenproletariat.
More recently, radical South African poor people's movements, such as Abahlali
baseMjondolo (meaning 'people who live in shacks' in Zulu), have been
influenced by Fanon's work.[19]
His work was a key influence on Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, as well.
Fanon has also profoundly affected contemporary African literature. His work
serves as an important theoretical gloss for writers including Ghana's Ayi
Kwei Armah, Senegal's Ken Bugul and Ousmane Sembène,
Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga,
and Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o. Ngũgĩ goes so far to argue in Decolonizing the Mind (1992)
that it is "impossible to understand what informs African writing" without
reading Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.[20]
Fanon has also influenced the formation in 2013 of a new South African
political party, Economic Freedom
Fighters (EFF) by the former president of the ANC Youth
League, Julius Malema.[21]
The Caribbean
Philosophical Association offers the Frantz Fanon Prize for work that
furthers the decolonization and liberation of mankind.[22]
●
Bibliography
●
Fanon's writings
●
Scholarly sources on Fanon
- David Caute, Frantz Fanon (1970, London: Wm. Collins and Co.)
- Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971, Grove Press)
- Irene
Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1974, London: Wildwood
House), ISBN
0-7045-0002-7
- Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (1969, trans.
1974, Monthly Review Press)
- Richard C. onwubanibe, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz
Fanon (1983, St. Louis: Warren Green)
- Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon And The Psychology Of
Oppression (1985, New York: Plenum Press), ISBN
0-306-41950-5
- Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon
and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human
Sciences (1995, New York: Routledge)
- Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, & Renee T. White (eds),
Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996, Oxford: Blackwell)
- Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's
Dialectic of Experience (1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press)
- T. Denean
Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998,
Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.)
- Anthony Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives
(1999, New York: Routledge)
- Nigel C. Gibson (ed.),
Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (1999, Amherst, New York:
Humanity Books)
- Alice Cherki, Frantz
Fanon. Portrait (2000, Paris: Éditions du Seuil)
- David
Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000, New York: Picador Press), ISBN
0-312-27550-1
- Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (2001, New York:
Crossroad 8th Avenue), ISBN
0-8245-2354-7
- Nigel C. Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003, Oxford:
Polity Press)
- Nigel C. Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2011, London:
Palgrave Macmillan)
- Nigel C. Gibson (ed.), Living Fanon: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
(2011, London: Palgrave Mamcillan)
- Matthew Quest. "Frantz Fanon's Critique of the National Bourgeoisie
Revisited." The CLR James Journal, 11.1 (Summer 2005) 113-126.
- Harb, Sirène. “Frantz Fanon”, in William A. Darity, Jr (ed.),
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 3. 2nd edition,
Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 99–100.
● Films
on Fanon
●
References
- Jump up ^ "Biography of Frantz Fanon". Encyclopedia
of World Biography. Retrieved 8 July
2012.
- Jump up ^ Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis
of European Man (1995), New York: Routledge.
- Jump up ^ Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz
Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985), New York: Plenum
Press.
- ^ Jump up to:
a b Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon.
Portrait (2000), Paris: Seuil.
- ^ Jump up to:
a b David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A
Biography (2000), New York: Picador Press.
- Jump up ^ Fanonian Practices in South Africa, by
Nigel Gibson, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg,
2011
- Jump up ^ Petri Liukkonen (2002). "Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)". Archived from
the original on 2008-06-17. Retrieved 2008-06-17.
- Jump up ^ David Macey, "Frantz Fanon, or the Difficulty of Being Martinican",
History Workshop Journal, Project Muse. Retrieved 2010-08-27
- ^ Jump up to:
a b c Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon.
Portrait (2000), Paris: Seuil); David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A
Biography (2000), New York: Picador Press).
- ^ Jump up to:
a b Cherki, Alice (2006). Frantz Fanon:
A Portrait. Cornell University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-8014-7308-1.
- Jump up ^ Angelo Codevilla, Informing
Statecraft (1992, New York).
- Jump up ^ Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Preface". Fanon,
Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1967, New
York: Grove Press)
- Jump up ^ "Extraits de la préface de Jean-Paul Sartre au "Les Damnés de la
Terre" (Extracts from the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre to The Wretched of the
Eeath)" (in French) (Winter 1996 ed.). Tambour
Journal. Retrieved
2007-02-14.
- Jump up ^ Moten, Fred (Spring 2008).
"The Case of Blackness". Criticism
50 (2): 177–218. doi:10.1353/crt.0.0062.
- Jump up ^ "Two
centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It
succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which
the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling
dimensions. Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third
Europe? [...] It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man,
a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe
has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe's crimes, of which the
most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the
pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity.
And in the framework of the collectivity there were the differentiations, the
stratification and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the
immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and
above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen
thousand millions of men. So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by
creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from
her." The Wretched of the Earth – "Conclusions".
