Frantz Fanon

Anushka Shah discusses Fanon’s life and work, and gives recommendations for reading and listening.

Biography

There is often value in not merely viewing political and philosophical texts as isolated from their authors. Instead, through looking at them within the context of the authors’ backgrounds, we may hope to achieve an appreciation of why an author wrote as they did, or hope to achieve a more nuanced understanding of their work.

Frantz Fanon is one such political philosopher whose life is inextricability linked with, and undoubtedly influenced, his work. Born in the French colony of Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought with the Free French Forces during World War Two, and he later reflected on his experiences of racism within the army. He ‘found himself disillusioned by the racial hierarchy within the military. “The French," he wrote, "do not like the Jews, who do not like the Arabs, who do not like the Negroes.”’[1] After the war, he wrote what would later become one of his most influential works, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), while studying Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Lyon. He hoped to submit his paper as his dissertation, but it was deemed ‘too subjective and experimental’[2]. Upon its eventual publication in 1952, Peau Noire, Masque Blancs ‘puzzled readers with its mix of literary, psychoanalytic and philosophical observations’[3]. Readers today comment upon the clarity yet characteristic eloquence and literary prowess with which Fanon conducted his writings.

Fanon took up a post at a hospital in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, France, and after qualifying as a psychiatrist, he became head of a psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. When the Algerian War of Independence broke out between the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and France, Fanon found himself in an odd position: he was simultaneously treating ‘the psychological distress of the soldiers and officers of the French army who carried out torture in order to suppress anti-colonial resistance’ and the Algerians who were the victims of this torture[4]. Much to his discomfort, he found that the hospital was ‘not keen on treating the natives’, and the ‘psychiatric theories followed by doctors and nurses [assumed]… the innate savagery, criminality and propensity to violence of the Arab and the [B]lack man’[5]. He resigned from his post, and his experiences at Blida are drawn upon in his Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth). In this work, also one of his most famous, he argues that ‘violence was not immanent to the [B]lacks, it was produced in them by the injustice of colonial domination’[6].

Following his resignation, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale. While based in Tunisia, he wrote articles, trained nurses, and edited El Moudjahid (FLN’s newpaper). He published a series of essays titled L’An Cinq de Révolution Algérienne (also published as ‘A Dying Colonialism’) in 1959. Soon after, Fanon was diagnosed with Leukaemia and died from double pneumonia in 1961. A collection of his other writings was published posthumously as Pour la Révolution Africaine (Toward the African Revolution). Before his death, he managed to complete Les Damnés de la Terre, which proved so controversial that it was confiscated from Parisian bookstores by the French authorities on the day of his death.

The cover image is a close-up of Frantz Fanon, who is wearing a suit and looking away from the camera. This biography is condensed from Nayar (2003) and (IEP, 2020).

[1] Columbia College, 2020. Frantz Fanon. [Online]
Available at: https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/frantz-fanon

[2] Nayar, P. K., 2003. Frantz Fanon. Abingdon: Routledge

[3] Nayar, P. K., 2003. Frantz Fanon. Abingdon: Routledge

[4] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). [Online]
Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/fanon/

[5] Nayar, P. K., 2003. Frantz Fanon. Abingdon: Routledge

[6] Nayar, P. K., 2003. Frantz Fanon. Abingdon: Routledge