--------------------------
FRANTZ FANON: A BIOGRAPHY
by David Macey
Granta Books, 2001
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Remembering Fanon
By John Alan
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 violence of the
brutal French colonial world, which was the context for that
revolution.
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."
Copyright (c) 2001 News & Letters. All Rights Reserved.



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