How to escape the mythifying and often contradictory readings of the figure of Frantz Fanon, revolutionary and theorist of anti -colonialism ? His journey makes it possible to grasp his thought in his context, in reverse of contemporary trends in generalization.
In 2013, the African-American painter Kehinde Wiley made a portrait of Frantz Fanon. The face of the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary appears there on a background of bright blue sky, taking up the codes of a Flemish painting of the XVe century. Wiley surrounds it with two golden wood panels, forming a kind of icon in front of which we would come to meditate. The artist seems to offer us a kind of Fanon canonization.
Like many young people who died young, from Che Guevara to Thomas Sankara, Frantz Fanon is an icon. Compared to these fellows, Fanon is less known by his image than by his writings. We see such an appetite for his work for several years that it has probably never been so read. To understand what racism produces as psychological effects, to reflect on the violent and deep inequality that runs through our world, Fanon’s writings remain so burning that they are often read as prophecies. Whether it is police violence against blacks in the United States or in France, or the terror that falls on the Palestinians in Gaza, a quotation from Fanon is never far away.
Fanon’s new biography by Adam Shatz, a American literary journalist, is part of this renewed interest. Published simultaneously in his original English and in a French version translated by Marc Saint-Upéry (in question here), it is part of an important editorial news on Frantz Fanon. Shatz himself, as he writes at the end of the book, was passionate about this life by reading a previous biography of man, published by David Macey in 2000. But Shatz also writes to criticize certain aspects of this trend, especially what he perceives as a “ idôlatrization “De Fanon:” My admiration for him is not unconditional, and I believe that his memory is not well served by sanctification companies (P. 17).
Cross portraits
That this attempt reveals to us to take out the portrait of a man from his golden altarpiece ? The life of Frantz Fanon is fascinating in itself, and his story is served by generous research and a precise writing here. Shatz takes us from his childhood within a bourgeois family in Martinique to the years of medical study in France, before detailing his practice of psychiatry in Algeria, which is quickly coupled with a career as an activist for the Flnfirst in Algeria and then in Tunis and in several other African countries. At each stage, the author proposes a contextualization in finesse of the different worlds that Fanon crosses, offering useful summaries of subjects as diverse as the development of institutional psychiatry or the decolonization of Belgian Congo.
Most often, Shatz offers them through the individual scale, by cross portraits. We thus meet a gallery of characters around Fanon, from an intellectual West Indian like Aimé Césaire, to existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, to psychiatrists like Octave Mannoni and François Tosquelles, we still have other supporters of Fln Like Adolfo Kaminsky. What interests Shatz is above all to cross people and debates of ideas, to revive a world in full bubble in the 1950s. The book therefore forms a good introduction, for those who do not know it, in this world according to the Second World War, when some have tried to lead to a new understanding of the human being.
The indissoluble whole of Fanon’s life
If some of these characters are well known, even the connoisseur discovers certain surprising moments. Thus, Fanon’s expedition to Mali on behalf of the Fln In 1960, in order to obtain the opening of a new southern front in the Algerian war of independence, was one of the highlights of the work. If the episode was not very fruitful, we follow Fanon on the ground, kicked out in the interior delta from Niger to Gao, far from his office and his doctor’s blouse.
One of the author’s biases is also to emphasize the multiple aspects of Fanon’s work: his clinical psychiatry practice, his activities as a political manager, as well as the literary aspects of his writing. Fanon secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, that Shatz met, is one of the central characters in the book. She too insists on this “ indissoluble ». The subject thus restores body to the abundant complexity of the character, too often reduced to a theorist.
From this point of view, Shatz relies on existing work, and in particular on a work which has marked a real turning point in studies on Fanon: the publication by Jean Khalfa and Robert Young of the so far unpublished texts of Fanon under the title ofWritten on alienation and freedom in 2015. While Fanon is too often, as Shatz notes, reduced to his last work, The damned of the earth (1961), and especially in the first chapter of this on violence, the publication of these scattered writings, ranging from plays to articles for the newspaper of Fln El Moudjahid made it possible to discover a more personal, and more complex Fanon, and above all a great practitioner and theorist of psychiatry.
Fanon against his American readings
Adam Shatz is not academic, and therefore offers a living and accessible synthesis. Perfectly documented, this work reads less as a primary research work than as a political intervention in the current intellectual landscape – why, if not, offer us a new book on Fanon, after that of Macey and so many others, including his portrait by one of his former collaborators, Alice Cherki ? Shatz targets certain Fanon readings that he considers erroneous, especially in the United States. During the book he evokes those who make Fanon a “ black identity champion “(P. 81-82), these” contemporary Fanonians, who prefer his analysis of antiney oppression and his pan -Africanism (P. 117). In the epilogue in particular, we understand that the author attacks “ Type of racial essentialism which, in recent years, has become a common place of American progressivism. »»
These opponents, however, are not appointed by Shatz and their arguments are to be understood in watermark. At least he briefly mentions, in the epilogue, the AfropEssimism of Frank Wilderson (p. 420), current of thought which perceives the black condition in a deeply ontological manner and therefore does not believe in a possible transformation of this racial condition. Such an interpretation thus leads to a reading of Fanon which evacuates the whole Algerian and revolutionary portion of his life to make him only a pessimistic theorist. The purpose of Adam Shatz tends, however, to accumulate narrative personalities and details, favoring an implicit argument which sometimes leaves uncertain about the exact identity of those that the author aims.
It is certain that the American intellectual debate tends to reduce racial issues in the world to the prism of the particular history of a country. In the United States, Fanon can thus be read by a single prism: the one who diagnosed the black problems to propose a remedy. Thus, seems to say Shatz, would largely evacuate the complexity of Fanon. His deep ties with French metropolitan existentialism first, but above all his commitment to a country foreign to him, Algeria. Country where the majority of the inhabitants did not perceive themselves as black, a difference which did not prevent a crucial solidarity from forming during the Algerian revolution. In an English -speaking context, the intellectual prestige of Fanon and the Battle of Algiers De Gillo Pontecorvo are inversely proportional to the knowledge of the Maghreb. Very often, in English, Algeria, if we talk about it, is a kind of metaphor rather than a real territory populated by inhabitants. It shares in this the fate of another paradigmatic revolution against French colonization, Haiti.
Towards a global analysis of racial training
But Fanon’s state readings, and their difficulty in understanding different racial formations around the world are symptomatic of a much larger and more structural question that crosses Fanon’s life: how to articulate racial situations in different contexts to make it a common analysis ? It is sort of the project of his life.
Fanon begins with a first trip by passing racial unthoughts from the Martinican company to its brutal achievement of its own black condition in mainland France. There was born his first theorization, that of Black skin, white masks (1952). Then, in the discovery of other companies in North Africa and then of the West, these new trips introduce new reflections, those of Damned of the earth. During this journey, Fanon meets multiple forms of racism. For example, as Shatz notes, in a French post-war society where the question of anti-Semitism is dominant, Fanon crosses many Jewish intellectuals who are victims of racism without being colonized. Above all, Fanon crosses the anti-black racism of the Maghrebians, first during the Second World War, then regularly in Algeria and Tunisia. The question of the relationship between anti-black racism and other forms of racism does not only arise in the United States, and Fanon did not know it.
Unfortunately, this question of internal racism in the Maghreb is only the subject in Shatz’s book of a footnote (p. 230). However, it is one example among others of the many questions that Fanon arouses outside the context of the United States. It is currently reappearing, for example, in debates on the place of anti-black racism in Maghreb societies, where Fanon has spent a good part of its most productive years, which resurface within the framework of a violent news.
Adam Shatz invites us not to read Fanon as a Bible. Through this salutary injunction can take place a better understanding of all its literary richness and the changing context that surrounds its writings, rather than seeing prophecies. However, getting Fanon out of your altar perhaps not only implies finding the man behind the icon, but also makes it necessary to think of our racial present, and to find new political frameworks on a global scale capable of generating actions contributing to our collective emancipation. From this point of view, to go beyond the narrow readings of Fanon designated by Shatz, the biographical approach which participates in the wars of appropriation around a single man can only be a beginning, and not a key to current interpretation of racial formations.