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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 Remembering Fanon FRANTZ FANON: A BIOGRAPHY, David Macey, Granta Books, 2001. Forty years after Frantz Fanon died in 1961 at the National Institute of Health, in Bethesda, Md., David Macey has written a new biography of him. Macey's FRANTZ FANON, at 516 pages, is the most voluminous biography yet of this great revolutionary thinker. The reader is taken on a long journey through Fanon's lifetime of struggle against all forms of human alienation. The issue for Fanon was the unity of humanity, which in the colonial experience had not been positively manifested. This unity could only be achieved by the negation of social conditions that deny the common human essence. Macey looks at every facet of Fanon's life, from his birth in Martinique to his burial in Algeria. Martinique, Fanon's birthplace, is a Department of France in the Caribbean. Martinique is a part of France, but "not of" France. The "NOT OF" is a crucial distinction which means Fanon is a Black Frenchman with a different historic legacy than the "metropolitan" French. For several centuries his ancestors had worked as slaves in the cane fields and sugar mills of Martinique and had lived through nothing less than "cycles of death." The slave labor system in Martinique created a class division based upon skin color with the beke, whites, at the top and Blacks at bottom of the social structure. Fanon was born in a relatively privileged family. His father was employed by the government and the family spoke French instead of creole. Fanon was an excellent student and a good athlete. When France fell to Germany during WWII, and the Vichy Admiral Robert occupied Martinique, Fanon engaged in a fistfight with the white racist Vichy sailors and left Martinique to join the Free French. He was decorated for bravery but was totally disillusioned finding that he was defending "the interests of farmers who don't give a damn." He learned, as Macey adds, that "freedom was not indivisible. He was a black soldier in a white man's army." At the end of the war, Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyon. From a book poor world of Martinique, he moved to a book rich world of a university town. He read Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, met Arab students and Arabs who became his patients. During this period, Fanon wrote BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS. In it he developed the theory that over a long period of oppression, some Blacks wanted to become white and for them "whiteness was liberation." Macey states that BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS was originally written as Fanon's dissertation thesis and was a form of "self analysis." Fanon's approach to psychiatry was to never separate mental illness from the social context as he searched for a self-negation that produces freedom by transcending inhuman social relations. What he criticized was a form of self-negation that reproduced alienation and human divisions. Fanon became the administrator of the Blida mental hospital in Algeria. During the Algerian struggle to end French colonial domination his concept of mental therapy became united with revolutionary activity. Undoubtedly, no other psychiatrist in the history of psychiatry has brought this kind of unity into being. At Blida, Fanon hid Algerian revolutionaries and treated the tortured victims of police and the military. He even gave psychiatric aid to mentally disturbed French torturers. His letter of resignation captures his philosophy and his total commitment: "Madness is one of the ways in which man can lose his freedom. And being placed at this intersection, I can say that I have come to realize with horror how alienated the inhabitants of this country are. If psychiatry is a medical technique which aspires to allow man to cease being alienated from his environment, I owe it to myself to assert that the Arab, who is permanently alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization." Macey began his biography of Fanon with Fanon's funeral in Algeria at a time when there was a serious factional conflict going on in Algeria. Macey only gives the reader a hint of this internal conflict and he never explains extensively why he titles the opening chapter of book, "Forgetting Fanon, Remembering Fanon" other than saying that Algerians can't remember Fanon because he was "Negro" while at the time of his burial all described themselves as "Fanonists." The truth lies in the revolutionary process itself which became the focus of Fanon's greatest work THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH written as he was dying of leukemia. Fanon saw the future in terms of the revolutionary movement among the
deepest layers of the population and put himself in the middle of that process in Algeria. He remained ruthlessly critical from within the
revolutionary process, criticizing the prevailing ideas of the Algerian leaders as well as Black intellectuals who looked too much to culture and
the past. He said, "we don't want to replace one form of barbarism with another form of barbarism." Fanon was never merely an advocate of violence
as some have claimed. As Macey shows, it was the historic and ongoing What informed Fanon's whole life was a commitment to the absolute independence of the deepest subjects of revolution, especially the Black dimension, as a path to a new reciprocity between all peoples-a "new humanism." Political leaders of the dominant party were especially a target of his wrath: he called "the single party...the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical." Macey is too quick to make Fanon's ideas a discontinuity with Marx. It is true that post-Marx-Marxists, unlike Marx, never appreciated the revolutionary subjectivity of peasants nor what we now call the Third World. Long before the African revolutions, for Marx the revolt of slaves in the U.S. was integral to a war of liberation against the capitalist world. Fanon's continuity with Marx has to do with a vision of a new whole mental and manual human being. As Fanon put it: "Let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction...This new humanity cannot do otherwise than to define a new humanism both for itself and for others." |
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