What a summer to reread Fanon and to devour for the first time David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Life! The world appears to be descending into what Fanon in 1952 called “Manichean delirium”. Repeated terrorist attacks took place in France in 2015 and 2016. The French government responded with a draconian and paranoid ‘emergency’, which encompassed the French Caribbean territories including Fanon’s homeland of Martinique.

Fanon was born in Martinique, one of France’s old colonies, in 1925. Most of these, like Quebec and parts of India such as Pondicherry had become independent. Those that remained, such as the five ‘departments’ of Mayotte, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Réunion, and Martinique, were deemed fully French, even appearing in insets on maps of France. However, when Martinicans like Fanon travelled to Europe, their French citizenship seemed less secure. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes being pointed at by a young child in Paris, who exclaimed, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened”.

He was from a middle-class family living on an island dealing with residue of slavery. The young Fanon fought for Free France in WWII and was decorated for bravery. During his service, he briefly stopped in Algeria, the nation he was later to make his own. He became disillusioned with France and its second-class treatment of non-white soldiers.

Despite these experiences, after the war ended Fanon enrolled to study medicine in Lyon. In this conservative city, he saw how badly Algerian immigrants were treated by the French. They were often interrogated by the police, who addressed them as “tu” rather than the polite second-person pronoun “vous”. Here Fanon formed relationships with two French women. The first, Michelle, he soon abandoned, leaving her with a daughter. He married the second, Josie, with whom he had a son. It was here, too, that he developed his specialism in psychiatry, a branch of medicine that enabled him to pursue his interests in philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis.

With works that dwelt on identifying violence in the colonial system, Frantz Fanon did not just theorise but also fought for his beliefs

In his writing, Fanon exposed black people’s psychological trauma and the inferiority complex imposed by colonialism. His career is bookended by his two most important works, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). In contrasting ways these volumes aver that colonialism not only ravaged countries’ economies and political structures, but also devastated the minds of colonised peoples. In order to challenge imperialism, Fanon argued, formerly-colonised countries and immigrants on the receiving end of racism would have to rebuild their own psychologies. These “wretched” peoples needed to become the subject rather than the object of their history.

Black Skin, White Masks is characterised by its eclectic but sharply focused reading and quotations, its neologisms and Creole inflections, and its anger. It details the collective mental illness imposed by racism. Fanon lambasts European psychoanalysis’s obsession with the Oedipus complex. He observes that for non-white subjects, trauma does not happen in early childhood within the family setting. Instead, it is experienced outside the home and at a later age. At school colonised children are educated in contempt for their language and culture, and on the street adults are confronted with the white gaze of misrecognition.

His book scarcely making a ripple in the French intellectual scene, Fanon accepted a position as a psychiatrist in Algeria. He did not anticipate the war of independence that was imminent, and nor did he have much knowledge of the country, its language, or that it was treated more harshly than France’s other colonies.

Frantz Fanon observes that for non-white subjects, trauma does not happen in early childhood within the family setting. Instead, it is experienced outside the home and at a later age. At school colonised children are educated in contempt for their language and culture, and on the street adults are confronted with the white gaze of misrecognition.

Once war broke out, Dr Fanon treated a curious mix of French-Algerian women with mild neurosis and male Arab fighters suffering post-traumatic mental collapse. He became increasingly involved with the National Liberation Front or FLN. His essays for their magazine El Moudjahid were posthumously compiled in Toward the African Revolution, and he acted as the party’s ambassador in other French colonies such as Mali. Although he was never admitted to the FLN’s innermost circle, he was nearly assassinated by French agents while recovering from a car accident at an Italian hospital.

In 1959 Fanon published A Dying Colonialism, his book about the Algerian War. It contains his urgent if rather masculinist essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ about modest Muslim dress and resistance. Early in the war female Algerian freedom fighters disguised themselves in Western clothing because French occupiers assumed that Parisian fashion denoted a lack of sympathy with the FLN. As the colonisers woke up to this, the women changed tactics. Veils created a cloak of invisibility under which bombs and grenades could be secreted.

Fanon contracted leukaemia in his mid-30s. Knowing he was dying, he wrote The Wretched of the Earth, dictating it as usual to his white wife, Josie. His final book’s advocacy of violence continues to cause controversy. He writes that “the colonised man finds his freedom in and through violence” and that this violence functions as a “cleansing force”. However, Fanon was primarily identifying the violence in the colonial system. The only way to combat this deeply racist and sadistic system was through counter-violence. Fanon was, of course, not just theorising, but actually fought for his beliefs.

Moreover, his espousal of violence has to be understood in its Algerian context of torture, mass murder and the trauma this engendered. Such trauma was exemplified when Fanon’s cancer compelled him to seek treatment in the US. There, his five-year-old son Olivier saw his father’s intravenous blood-bag and thought he’d been murdered. The boy was discovered defiantly waving an Algerian flag on the streets outside. We should remember that for many years the French government refused to call Algeria’s 1954-1962 conflict a war. Moreover, in 1961 the River Seine ran with the blood of hundreds of Algerian immigrants cut down by security forces at a peaceful anti-war protest. As Fanon so powerfully demonstrates, the coloniser is “the bringer of violence into the mind of the native”.

The book is also about the perils of decolonisation. Fanon’s use of the phrase “national bourgeoisie” signals that many of the nationalist leaders who replaced the British colonisers were similar to the people they unseated in every area except their race. Fanon is scathing about their opportunism and willingness to replicate the colonisers’ divisive systems of control.

He maintains that postcolonial nations should reconstruct or abandon racially-segregated cities that were a legacy of colonial rule. Instead, the countryside and the peasant are Fanon’s hope for the future. With these ideas at least, he echoes Gandhi, even if the two men’s attitudes towards violence are completely opposed. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi asserted, “If India copies England, it is my firm conviction that she will be ruined”. The Congress leader likewise believed that India’s beating heart could be found in her villages.

This summer the Panama Papers unmasked state corruption around an Algerian petroleum industry deal. A remake of Tarzan recalled Black Skin, White Masks’ description of young Afro-Caribbean boys who identify with the original film’s white Tarzan. Finally, a video emerged of French police forcing a burkini-clad woman to strip on a beach in Cannes. In these contexts, the relevance of Fanon’s work can hardly be overstated.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 4th, 2016