New book explores the life of psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon

Adam Shatz: It made quite a difference because Fanon grew up in a place where, essentially he was taught that he was just like any other Frenchman, that he was a French person of color, that his color really had no significance whatsoever. And he believed fiercely in France. He believed in liberty, equality and fraternity. And he joined the Free French forces to fight against fascism. But when he was fighting in this army, he realized that, first of all, it was a colonial army with racial hierarchies. And after the war, he found that he couldn’t attract a white French woman to dance with him, even though he’d just helped to liberate her country. So, coming from a place like Martinique shaped him. There was also the fact that these enslaved people of Martinique had been granted their freedom in 1848, with the abolition that was presided over by a man named Victor Schœlcher. And for Fanon, it was kind of a source of shame that Martinique had been, quote unquote, “granted its freedom,” that it hadn’t struggled for its freedom in the manner of Toussaint Louverture and the enslaved people of Haiti. And he thought that no freedom that wasn’t fought for was worthy of a name.

They ended up in Algeria because he was offered a very good job. It was a plum post for a man who was only 28 years old at the time. He was given this job, is appointed as director of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital on the outskirts of Algiers. And it was an opportunity and he went there. But once he got there, he became increasingly interested in the predicament of his Muslim patients and of the Algerian colonies more generally. And 11 months after his arrival, the independence struggle broke out, and Fanon immediately wanted to join it. In fact, originally he wanted to join it as a fighter, since, after all, he fought in the Second World War and had fighting skills. But in the end, he ended up providing, kind of, sanctuary in a clandestine clinic for wounded rebels.

I think the significance of his work as a psychiatrist can’t be underestimated, because psychiatry was critical to Fanon’s understanding of the colonial condition, of the kind of passivity and self-hatred and sense of futility and despair that form in the hearts and even the bodies of colonized people who have been deprived of independence, of the right to self-governance, the right to their language and culture. And his insights as a psychiatrist infused all of his writing on anti-colonial liberation. His psychiatry and his politics, for the most part, went hand in hand, although there were also tensions between them.

I think Fanon has had an enormous impact on culture, on African cinema, on postcolonial literature. But he’s also had important influence on radical psychiatry in places like Italy, where psychiatrists influenced by Fanon have been working with refugees and migrants. And he’s also had quite a significant impact on political movements like the Palestinian movement, although he never really wrote about Israel-Palestine. He’s always been read very closely by Palestinian politicians and by Palestinian critics and writers. He was an important influence on the early PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] because he was read by Abu Iyad, known as Salah Khalaf, who declared “The Wretched of the Earth” one of his favorite books, and then later Edward Said wrote extensively and quite brilliantly about Fanon.

Yeah, the Palestinian American literary critic. And he’s also been adopted by Palestinian psychiatrists who work on cases of torture and are interested in the effects of oppression on the psyches of their victims.

I knew of him in my teens because my father had old copies of the original Grove Press editions of “Black Skin, White Masks” and “The Wretched of the Earth.” And I also ended up doing a fair amount of reporting in Algeria, a country that had an immense impact on me. I mean, I didn’t become a revolutionary. I was not there during an insurgency against the colonial power, but I was deeply affected by my travels there. And I also became aware that Fanon had a different meaning for Algerians today than he had during the time of the independence struggle. He was meaningful to young Algerians precisely because he addressed himself to the failures, the corruption, the autocracy that existed in post-independence states. He predicted this with startling prescience, and so he was looked to by young Algerians. And so, the roads in my reporting kept leading to Fanon. And then in 2017, when I wrote a long piece on Fanon’s work, this was the height of the Trump era. This was the period in which we were seeing the resurgence of white nationalism and the most brazen, flagrant racism. France was caught up in these very contentious arguments about integration, about Islam, about laicité. And in these arguments, the name Fanon was often invoked. I just thought this was a time to revisit the life and legend of this person, who has often been reduced to a kind of cartoon figure, a kind of violent and bloodthirsty advocate of armed struggle. And it seemed to me always that Fanon was much more complicated.