GentlyFeral - Here's some info:
September 2, 2001
'Frantz Fanon': The Doctor Prescribed Violence
by ADAM SHATZ
New York Times
FRANTZ FANON
A Biography.
By David Macey.
640 pp. New York: Picador USA. $40.
When the third world was the great hope of the international left -- three
very long decades ago, in other words -- no book had a more seductive
mystique than ''The Wretched of the Earth.'' Its author, Frantz Fanon, was a
psychiatrist, originally from Martinique, who had become a spokesman for the
Algerian revolution against French colonialism. He was black, dashing and,
even better, a martyr -- succumbing to leukemia at the age of 36, a year
before Algeria's independence in 1962. Fanon was hardly alone in championing
the violent overthrow of colonialism. But his flair for incendiary rhetoric
was unmatched.
If ''The Wretched of the Earth'' was not ''the handbook for the black
revolution,'' as its publisher boasted, it was certainly a sourcebook of
revolutionary slogans. (Eldridge Cleaver once said that ''every brother on a
rooftop can quote Fanon.'') ''Violence,'' Fanon argued most famously, ''is a
cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from
his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his
self-respect.'' This was mau-mauing with Left Bank panache. Not to be
upstaged, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his preface, ''To shoot down a European
is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he
oppresses at the same time.''
Fanon's apocalyptic aphorisms have not aged well, least of all in the third
world. And yet he cannot be written off so easily. His 1952 book, ''Black
Skin, White Masks,'' offers a penetrating analysis of racism and of the ways
in which it is internalized by its victims. While his faith in the
therapeutic value of violence is now hard to fathom, much of what he wrote
was eerily prescient. Unlike some of his peers on the left, Fanon was acutely
aware that African leaders were more than capable of oppressing their own
people. His essay on the struggle between native (''an oppressed person whose
permanent dream is to become the persecutor'') and settler (''an
exhibitionist'' who ''pits brute force against the weight of numbers'') will
teach you more about the forces clashing in the Middle East today than a
year's worth of editorials.
David Macey has written a prodigiously researched, absorbing book about the
mind and the passion of a 20th-century revolutionary. ''Frantz Fanon'' is the
first comprehensive biography in three decades; it is also the best, the most
intellectually rigorous and the most judicious. A biographer of Michel
Foucault, Macey takes Fanon seriously as a thinker, and though the inner life
of his subject eludes him, he has captured the public figure in all its
nobility and confusion. Macey's Fanon is far more than the ''apostle of
violence'' of Black Panther iconography. Still less does he resemble the
''postcolonial Fanon'' of literary criticism, a fashionably melancholy exile
who, as Macey writes, ''worries about identity politics, and often about his
own sexual identity.'' Fanon was brave but also reckless, prophetic but often
dangerously wrongheaded. When he began writing, his weapon was truth; when he
embraced revolutionary violence, truth became a casualty of his decision.
It is often forgotten that Fanon's profession was not writing or revolution
but psychiatry. The force of his writings lay in their arresting insights
into the disquieting dream life of colonial society. A volunteer with the
Free French in World War II -- he was awarded a Croix de Guerre after
sustaining a serious shrapnel wound in the chest -- Fanon studied psychiatry
on a scholarship in Lyon, and married a white Frenchwoman barely out of high
school. Embittered by his experience in the French Army, where Africans and
Arabs answered to white superiors and West Indians occupied an ambiguous
middle ground, he gravitated to radical politics, Sartrean existentialism and
the philosophy of black consciousness known as negritude. Fanon also fell
under the influence of François Tosquelles, an innovative practitioner of
group therapy. Applying Tosquelles's methods at a hospital in a suburb of
Algiers, where Fanon arrived in 1953, he earned the trust of Arab patients
whom French psychiatrists had treated with a mixture of pity and contempt. In
Fanon's new home, Macey reminds us, one million Europeans ruled over some
nine million Arabs and Berbers, largely illiterate and cruelly exploited.
After the Algerian National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) launched an
insurrection in 1954, the French Army used Gestapo tactics to restore order.
Suspects were given electric shocks to the testicles, raped with bottles and
often beaten to death. Entire villages were destroyed in retaliation for the
death of a single soldier. While secretly aiding the rebels, Fanon cared for
victims and perpetrators alike, producing case notes that shed invaluable
light on the psychic traumas of colonial war.
Like his contemporary Che Guevara, Fanon was drawn into a career as a
revolutionary in a foreign land by his work as a doctor. Having borne witness
to the unspeakable suffering inflicted by the French Army, he came to believe
that the revolution contained the seeds of redemption, not only for Algeria
but for the entire colonial world. As Macey makes clear, however, he was not
always a reliable guide to Algerian realities. His conviction, for instance,
that ''the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose
and everything to gain,'' was a fantasy; they could scarcely play such a role
since French troops had herded them en masse into relocation centers. In his
famous essay on the revolutionary awakening of Algerian women, Fanon declared
that the ''destruction of colonization is the birth of a new woman.'' Not for
the last time, as Macey notes, Fanon ''mistook temporary changes born of
extraordinary circumstances for a permanent revolution.'' A West Indian
atheist in an Islamic nationalist movement, he saw what he wanted to see.
Expelled from Algeria in 1956, Fanon moved to Tunis, the F.L.N.'s
headquarters in exile. While working for El Moudjahid, the rebel newspaper,
he founded Africa's first psychiatric clinic, wrote several influential books
on decolonization and traveled throughout Africa as a spokesman for the
revolution. It was a treacherous atmosphere, rife with conspiracy and
intrigue, and it did not help that Fanon was neither Algerian nor Muslim. In
1957, he found himself on the losing side of a factional battle when his
friend Abane Ramdane -- a charismatic hard-liner whose growing influence was
resented by the forces in Tunis -- was strangled by his comrades.
Fanon, Macey notes, ''said nothing,'' perhaps because he knew that his own
name ''was on the list of those who were to be eliminated in the event of a
violent reaction to Abane's liquidation.'' (In Rome, Fanon told Simone de
Beauvoir that Abane's death haunted his conscience.) Macey raises even more
troubling questions in connection with Fanon's knowledge of a massacre in
1957 in which the F.L.N. slaughtered 300 suspected supporters of a rival
rebel group. At a press conference in Tunis, Fanon blamed the French for the
massacre. Did he know the truth? The more telling question is whether it
would have mattered to him. Truth, he wrote, ''is that which hurries on the
breakup of the colonialist regime. . . . In this colonialist context there is
no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for
'them.' ''
One has the tragic sense, reading ''Frantz Fanon,'' of an intellectual
determined to prove himself among men with guns. Like most intellectual
advocates of violence, Fanon preferred to contemplate it at a distance. When
he was in medical school, ''even basic dissection made him feel nauseated.''
As a revolutionary and as a writer he strove to overcome his ''weaknesses''
and to make himself hard.
In 1960, after a 1,200-mile expedition from Mali to the Algerian border in
which he gathered intelligence on French troop movements, Fanon returned to
Tunis, desperately sick. Through delicate diplomacy involving the C.I.A., he
ultimately wound up in an American hospital. In his final months, his ideas
assumed an even more messianic hue. A ''new man,'' he claimed, was rising
from the ashes of empire in Algeria. Yet in his more sober moments, he
acknowledged that the Algerian soul could hardly be healed overnight. ''A
whole generation of Algerians, steeped in wanton, generalized homicide with
all the psychoaffective consequences that this entails, will be the human
legacy of France in Algeria,'' he predicted; it was an accurate diagnosis. In
Algeria, as in most of Africa, independence was no sooner achieved than it
was confiscated by generals, bureaucrats and economic elites. Although Fanon
remains indispensable for his writings on race and colonialism, his utopian
program for the third world has gone the way of the colonial empires whose
doom he foretold.
Adam Shatz has contributed to The New York Times, The Nation and The American
Prospect.
[email protected]
