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March 31, 2002
REVIEW: Spokesman of the wretched
NOT long ago Fanon’s name stirred people’s souls. His The wretched of the earth was compulsory reading for blacks, leftists and anti-colonialists of all hues, particularly in the third world. Now, when armed struggle, even for freedom and justice, is called terrorism, Fanon’s reputation is in decline. Even for Algerians he is not a hero because, according to the sterile fiction of post-colonial Algeria, the “people” were the only heroes.
His role as an ideologue of the Algerian revolution, one of the founders of “third worldism” and an apostle of violent anti-colonial struggle, was bound to overshadow both Fanon’s earlier life and other aspects of his personality. David Macey’s biography sets out to rescue him from ‘anonymity’ — the reduction of a multifaceted personality into a papier-mache figure. There is extensive treatment of Fanon’s three books and his career as a second world war soldier, FLN’s roving Ambassador and contributor to El Moudjahid, as well as his medical career.
Fanon remained a practising psychiatrist even while engaged in Algeria’s anti-colonialist struggle. He introduced new, humane methods of psychiatric treatment in Blida in Algeria, and subsequently in Tunis — techniques he had learnt in the hospital in St. Alban’s in France. He debunked the ‘Algiers school’ of psychiatry, with which French psychiatrists sought to reinforce the fiction of France’s civilizing mission amongst savage Arabs. Ultimately, however, politics determined the attitude of his professional peers. Information Psychiatrique refused to publish Fanon’s selected papers after his death because of the editor’s need to show respect to the memory of “our boys who died in Algeria”.
Fanon’s medical practice among Algerians and blacks was, vital in the development of his anti-colonial thought. No less significant was his personal experience on a street in Lyon when a little girl pointed at him and shouted, “Look mother, a black man. I am so afraid.” There could be no consciousness of “blackness”, Fanon pointed out, but for the white man’s attitude. “I am black. But I don’t know it; because I am black.” Only a white person, with notions of racial superiority, makes the black man aware of his colour.
For Fanon, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is a Manichean one. The precepts of Hegelian and Marxian philosophy do not apply to colonialism because the class conflict that it studies is a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat of the same race and of the same continent. He rejects the dialectic between the master and the slave in Hegelian phenomenology of the mind, according to which both parties seek “recognition” of their humanity in the eyes of the other. Fanon regards this as the nonsense it is.
In the colonial context, the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. “Here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants is labour, not recognition. The colonial world is a world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues.” The contradiction between the colonizer and the colonized cannot be resolved through “synthesis”. Only violence will liberate the colonized.
During the second world war, Fanon believed that the French cause was also his. Freedom, he believed, was indivisible. He ran away from home to join the army but he was only seventeen and was sent home. He joined the army the following year, fought during the war and was decorated for bravery, as was Ben Bella. But he became disillusioned.
He was black and in a white man’s army. He wrote to his parents, “If I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say: God called him back to him. This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong. Nothing here, nothing justifies my sudden decision to defend the interests of farmers who don’t give a damn.”
The French war in Algeria was long, bitter and brutal. The French army was resolved not to suffer another humiliating defeat, as it had in Dien Bien Phu. This added to the war’s cruelty as did the vested interests of French settlers in Algeria, the pieds noirs, who did not hesitate even to plan a coup d’etat in France to perpetuate their hold on Algeria. France maintained the fiction that it was engaged only in a campaign to “restore order”. Only in 1979 did it admit that there had been a colonial war.
The French left, and the communist party in particular, was guilty of complicity in the cruelty of the French establishment and fully deserved Fanon’s contempt. Some French leftists did, belatedly, raised their voice against what was happening in Algeria and even risked their freedom to help but only after young conscripts became sick of being sent to their death.
It is ironic that a French war hero became the most famous spokesman for the Algerian struggle against France, but there was a final irony in store for Fanon’s death. Suffering from leukemia, he had to be treated in an American hospital. An American columnist, Joseph Alsop, wrote that he died “practically in the arms of the CIA”. That the CIA would have arranged Fanon’s hospitalization is beyond dispute.
But why did Alsop, who had close contacts with the agency, reveal the fact. Macey has not shed much light on this but could it have been an effort to discredit Fanon who was popular with American blacks? Finally, the French police confiscated all copies of The wretched of the earth the day news of his death reached Paris. Macey’s monumental work is based on painstaking research; it seems mere carping, therefore, to point out one error of fact.
Eqbal Ahmed, who had worked with Fanon in Algeria, is described as an “Indian political scientist”. If one mistake is identified, there is the suspicion that others have escaped one’s notice. Nevertheless, Macey’s biography is invaluable in illuminating the life of an important figure in the history of de-colonization.
Frantz Fanon: a biography
By David Macey
Picador, USA
ISBN 0-312-27550-1
640pp. $40
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