Frantz Fanon, the intellectual patron saint of violent national resistance movements, is among the authors most likely to be quoted on a sign held up at the protests that have recently taken up so many headlines. In the new book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, London Review of Books editor Adam Shatz offers a sympathetic yet frank assessment of his much-too-romanticized life and thought.
Born in Martinique in 1925 into a patriotic bourgeois family, Fanon received the Croix de Guerre fighting for the French resistance. But the racism he faced made him break with France. For a while he hoped that the Négritude movement of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire could provide the sense of belonging that France had refused him. However, he soon became convinced that neither Senghor’s belief in blackness nor Césaire’s effort to integrate Martinique with France could sustain true liberationist politics. It was instead in Algeria that he found his life’s cause.
When Fanon arrived in the Algerian town of Blida to head up the local psychiatric clinic, he encountered a town “cut in two,” where the boundaries between settler and native quarters were “marked by barracks and police stations.” Psychiatric care in Algeria in 1953 often meant little more than chaining the patients to their bunks once they had been fed. But Fanon had practiced under François Tosquelles — POUM veteran of the Spanish Civil War — who strove to “bring Marx into the asylum.” He opened the cells and organized a film club and a theater. But while the European women improved, it had little effect on the Muslim men, who’d slouch to bed once the last meal had been served. Fanon was told by hospital staff that they were suffering from the “North African syndrome” — that is to say, the natives were just lazy.
The staff, Shatz writes, had grown used to “the sluggish pace of colonial life,” to which Fanon’s “energy must have been a provocation.” Like a character out of Strindberg, Fanon shook life into the provincials. “He always arrived at work before his interns, dressed in fastidious shirts with cufflinks, and sometimes changed his tie twice a day.” In the evenings, he’d discuss Freud’s clinical studies and the latest psychiatric research. He realized that rural Muslims couldn’t relate to French film or theater like the European women, so he provided them with a café maure — they were lethargic no longer. So much for the North African syndrome.
Fanon, since he succumbed to leukemia in 1961, has become an icon of violent resistance. Practically every “third world” radical groupuscule paid homage to him. There were, of course, those who thought he betrayed his profession when he joined the Front de libération nationale. Here was a psychiatrist who became a man of violence. But both roles, as he saw it, were in the service of liberating the “wretched of the earth” from colonial subjugation. Even while preaching violence, he chronicled the toll it inflicted on both the colonized and the colonizer. In his clinic, he’d treat French torturers by day and Algerian torture victims by night.
What elevated Fanon over other pamphleteers wasn’t the lucidity of his prose but its incandescent rhetoric. His style was highly literary, leaning rather heavily on Césaire’s poems, as well as philosophical, interweaving Hegel with Sartre. But few would’ve remembered Fanon if it weren’t for his sloganeering. He moved from subtle psychoanalytical premises to blunt conclusions, without really explaining his reasoning in between. Shatz notes Fanon’s “elusive, even cryptic language,” while Fanon himself said that if his sentences were obscure it was because he sought to touch the reader “irrationally.” Not everyone on Fanon’s “side” was impressed, though. The writer Mouloud Feraoun thought some of Fanon’s polemics had “the pompously idiotic style of a certain regional weekly.”
Fanon, Shatz writes, “made no allowance for ironies,” like the fact that it was Charles de Gaulle who reconciled himself to the independence of Algeria, on the conservative grounds that integration would turn his hometown Colombey-les-Deux-Églises into Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées, while the progressive Jacques Soustelle would’ve tortured every Muslim in Algeria if it meant keeping the secular republic intact. Fanon professed that he had a “horror of weaknesses.” He sided with the FLN unconditionally, even when it massacred civilians. He expected the same of others: he never forgave Richard Wright for not rejecting America the way he had rejected France. The critic Edward Said believed that exile made people more sensitive to historical ironies. But it seems like Fanon, because he was an outsider in the FLN, felt the need to prove his loyalty by being more uncompromising than his Algerian comrades.
The relevance of Fanon today stems not only from the fact that he opposed colonial tyranny but from how he predicted the postcolonial malaise. He warned that the “national bourgeoisie” would try to reproduce colonial structures in newly independent countries, while rallying the people behind chauvinistic nationalism. It is a theme that, Shatz notes, V.S. Naipaul took up in A Bend in the River. But Fanon’s own solution — to put one’s trust in the masses, what Shatz calls his “mystical belief in the peasantry” — wasn’t exactly ideal. Even the Fanon-infatuated director Claude Lanzmann, who’d go on to make Shoah, suspected that Fanon’s talk of Algeria’s “peasant-warrior-philosophers” couldn’t be true.
Houari Boumédiène, who later became president of Algeria, thought that Fanon “didn’t know the first thing about Algeria’s peasants.” That might put it too harshly, but Fanon never really reconciled his vision of a pluralist Algeria with the reality of Islamism. He helped craft the program that held the peasantry to be “the most revolutionary section of the population,” but as the historian Mohammed Harbi pointed out, the FLN had to enforce its control over rural Algerians, killing more Muslim than French in the process. Fanon would regret those killings, but, ever the loyal spokesman, he euphemized the slaughter. He blamed the French for the massacre of Melouza, where more than 300 Algerian villagers were killed, before excusing it as a case of comrades taking “revolutionary action” a little too far. The villagers had been killed for factional, not revolutionary, reasons, though; they supported the FLN’s rival, the Mouvement national algérien.
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The Rebel’s Clinic is sympathetic to Fanon without being uncritical. It is particularly good on Fanon’s views of violence. The source of Fanon’s rhetorical power was that he combined sensitive psychiatric studies of the corrosive effects of violence with bold endorsements of it. He praised it as a “cleansing force,” but as Shatz notes, the original French — la violence désintoxique — suggests that it helps wake subjugated peoples from their colonial stupor, not that it is itself redemptive. That is, I think, a distinction lost on Fanon’s less careful readers. Fanon’s case studies show how violence breaks people, how torture crushes one’s psyche, but he believed colonial rule could only be ended by force. He said that “to work means to work toward the death of the settler” but also that the colonized should seek to “discover the man behind the colonizer.”
Shatz, I think, is correct to say that Fanon’s chapter on violence in The Wretched of the Earth should be read as a parable: the slave, to free himself, must battle the master — only then will he be recognized as equal. It is, of course, true that resistance can restore dignity to those who have been humiliated. But even so, there’s something creepy in Fanon’s statement that “everyone must be compromised in the fight for common salvation.” It might seem like Fanon is simply facing facts when he writes that “There are no clean hands, there are no innocents, no onlookers.” But, having bloodied his own hands, he may really just be trying to make himself feel better.
Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.