Frantz Fanon: the revolutionary psychiatrist

 

Frantz Omar Fanon was a psychiatrist. writer and revolutionary, who played an active role in the Algerian war of independence from French colonial rule who remains a key thinker on decolonisation and Third World independence struggles.Fanon was born on July 20, 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He was the fifth child of a middle class mixed family of eight children. His father was a civil servant and his mother a successful shop owner He received a middle class education  He originally thought of himself. as was true of many others at the time . as French and not “Black.” That began to change when he  experienced  the racism of Vichy France soldiers sent to occupy the island during World War II  which compelled him to leave Martinique and fight with Free France forces against fascism,

Decorated for bravery with a Croix de Guerre after sustaining a serious shrapnel wound in the chest. Fanon returned briefly to Martinique to complete his studies. He met Aimé Césaire – later the most famous radical Caribbean poet – who, for a time taught him. The contact with the poet’s work marked him for the rest of his life. Césaire was a teacher, recently returned from France, of brilliant and precocious intelligence. Fanon memorised large sections of Césaire’s celebrated poem Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal and was struck by the poems forthright pride and courage: “no race has a monopoly on beauty, or intelligence, or strength, and there will be a place for all at the rendezvous of victory”.

Césaire was a proponent of Négritude, a movement of black renaissance which he, Leopold Senghor and Léon Damas founded in Paris in the 1930s. It was a confident assertion of the vitality and pride in being black, and of African society and culture. Fanon was influenced by the movement but questioned the way Négritude contrasted a contrived African emotionality with European rationality and science. Fanon praised Négritude’s important celebration of being black in a world of overwhelming racism. 

Fanon graduated from his Fort-de-France lycée and moved to Paris to study dentistry. His decision was no longer based on a romance of the motherland, but a pragmatic recognition that Martinique was too small to contain his plans and ambitions. He abandoned dentistry and Paris for medicine and Lyon. In Lyon he specialised in psychiatry and became active on the periphery of the Communist Party (PCF).  Here he began writing political essays and plays, and he married a Frenchwoman, Jose Duble. 

At the same time, he absorbed the latest European intellectual developments such as phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.”This led to his first book, published in 1952 when Fanon was only twenty-six: Black Skin, White Masks. originally titled “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks,” in part based on his lectures and experiences in Lyon in which he denounced racism and "linguistic colonization"

  BSWM is part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon’s personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship is normalized as psychology. Because of his schooling and cultural background, the young Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the disorientation he felt after his initial encounter with French racism decisively shaped his psychological theories about culture. Fanon inflects his medical and psychological practice with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind the black man to his subjection to a universalized white norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological health in the black man.

What does the Black want? To be recognized as human. The question and logic has resonance with the idea of Black Lives Matter. Why? Because Black Lives Matter is a demand not a request. In its gestures to humanism, it is an imminent critique of White liberal humanism and its abstract universals, which, by saying all lives matter, elides the concreteness and specificity of Black lives mattering  In other words, at the level of daily experience of Black life, especially the life of Black youth, Black life does not seem to matter, or matters only as a threat to civil society, which is normatively White. Put another way, in cosmopolitan civil society, racially coded across space and place, Black life is still not fully human

The opening pages of Black Skin, White Masks contained a vivid declaration: “Man is a ‘Yes’ resounding from cosmic harmonies.” Fanon conceived of freedom as a “world of mutual recognitions,” insisting that a desire “to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other” was an essential part of humanity’s very being.

After practicing psychiatry for several years in France, Fanon moved to Algeria in 1953, where he took up a position at the Blida-Joinville hospital, outside of Algiers. He did not make this move for political reasons, knowing little of Algeria at the time, and having had minimal contact with African liberation movements.

When Fanon arrived in Algeria, at the age of 28 and only a year after the publication of his first book, he was already a man of wide and precocious intellectual culture, equally at home in European philosophy and Afro-Caribbean thought as well as the intellectual linkages between Africa and the African Diaspora, quite aside from his professional training in psychiatry and psychopathology.

Until he arrived in Algeria his political passion against colonialism and racism were focussed almost entirely on how these affected “Black” people, whose origins were in “Black” Africa, with whom his own identity as a very dark-skinned “Negro” was profoundly enmeshed. In Algeria, however, he saw victims of colonial racism and violence who were not “Black”, and once the war of Algerian independence began, he encountered a colonial violence far more extreme than anything he had seen in Martinique. He quickly learned that colour, per se, was secondary in structures of colonial racism; the “Arab” could be stigmatised just as brutally and contemptuously as the “Black”.

His initial project at the Blida Hospital was simply to train nurses and interns in the kind of socio-therapy he had learned from Tosquelles and to investigate the cultural backgrounds of his patients in the course of his own psychiatric practice.

Though  understaffed, Fanon and his colleagues made use of techniques such as occupational therapy, having patients produce newspapers and plays, and allowing them to freely associate with each other in the institution. In the course of this work, Fanon was still prepared to administer pharmaceutical drugs, and he even deployed shock therapy. But he did so while seeking to create a humanist environment that treated the patient as a person. He created a café that functioned as a kind of social club or meeting place. He “organized daily meetings, built a library, set up ergotherapy stations—weaving, pottery, knitting, gardening—and promoted sports, especially soccer, which, he argued, could play an important role in the re-socialization of patients.”

Fanon noticed that these activities were instantly successful with European women patients at producing stronger social ties and self-determination, but less so with the Muslim men under his care. In the act of decolonization, he and his colleagues set out to sensitize themselves to the culture of these men, rather than continue to impose an imperialistic “western grid” on them.

He traveled throughout Algeria and discovered that the Muslim culture there was more interested in religious and familial gatherings than “parties.” They were more familiar with storytelling and reciting epic poems that modes of entertainment such as theater.

In response, Fanon and colleagues “changed their movie selection and privileged action-filled films; they picked games that were familiar to Algerians; they celebrated the traditional Muslim holidays; they invited Muslim singers to perform in the hospital, and they hired a professional storyteller to come speak to the patients.”

An openness to human possibilities grounded this approach, both in Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist, and in his later role as a revolutionary activist. It was in the course of such investigations that he began to see how deep the psychological wounds are that the colonial system inflicts upon its subjects.

Fanon quickly discovered a “Manichean” society where the French settlers, about 10 percent of Algeria’s population, lived in a different world from its Arab and Kabyle masses. The latter were subjected to discrimination that was far more brutal than anything he had experienced in the Antilles.

Soon thereafter, he began to see victims of torture almost as a routine matter in his practice;

When the Algerian revolution broke out in November 1954, Fanon  discovered at his hospital an underground network associated with the National Liberation Front (FLN), and came into contact with the FLN himself, initially in his capacity as a psychiatrist.Fanon embraced the movement’s aims and its advocacy of armed struggle.Fanon now combined his psychiatric work with involvement in a revolutionary movement. He secretly hid FLN militants in the hospital and provided therapy to victims of rape and torture. He also became increasingly active in political debates within the FLN. 

As one who was philosophically committed to an authentic existence in which thought and action had to be organically united, he found it personally untenable to remain an official in colonial service in the midst of a revolution, and in the midst, moreover, of the wholesale colonial machinery of torture. He chose to serve the revolution, instead, and resigned from colonial service in the summer of 1956 and joined the revolution soon thereafter. His letter of resignation encapsulates his theory of the psychology of colonial domination, and pronounces the colonial mission incompatible with ethical psychiatric practice: “If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization … The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people” (Toward the African Revolution 53) 

Following his resignation, Fanon fled to Tunisia and began working openly with the Algerian independence movement. In addition to seeing patients, Fanon wrote about the movement for a number of publications, including Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, Presence Africaine, and the FLN newspaper el Moudjahid; some of his work from this period was collected posthumously as Toward the African Revolution (1964).

Fanon contrasted the revolutionary praxis of the colonized with the passivity and betrayals of the European Left. The French Socialist and Communist Parties supported the war of French imperialism against the Algerian revolution, which led to over half a million deaths.

A Socialist premier, Guy Mollet, presided over the violent clampdown in Algeria, while the Communist deputies in the French parliament voted in favor of war credits, despite their formal commitment to Leninist anti-colonialism. With the important exception of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, there was little active support for Algeria’s revolution from even the most radical sections of the European Left. This led Fanon to become increasingly critical of the paradigm that defined much of Western thought.

Fanon’s work for Algerian independence was not confined to writing. During his panytenure as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government, he worked to establish a southern supply route for the Algerian army.

In December 1957, Abane Ramdane, Fanon’s closest comrade in the Algerian national liberation movement, was assassinated by a right-wing faction within the movement that aimed to subordinate political work to military authority. Fanon’s name was placed on a list of people to be watched, and subject to a similar fate should there be open defiance within the movement in response to the assassination. From this point on, Fanon lived knowing that there was a potential of significant risk from the authoritarian nationalists in the movement, and a vital struggle within the struggle. and continued his anti-colonial political engagement until the end of his life, always maintaining the intimate link between sociopolitical and economic violence and mental health.

In speaking about the project of emancipation, Fanon believed that the oppressed in society must walk a fine line between rootedness in tradition and a more universal, humanist openness toward the future. He encouraged people to avoid “imitating Europe” and its models for life (and psychiatry), while also avoiding a hopeless return to an imagined pre-colonial past or tribalism.

In 1961, his life ebbing away from leukaemia  (he had contracted the disease in the course of his exhausting trip across the Sahara as a part of a team trying to open a third front for the revolution and its supply lines. In this sense, he died for the revolution that he had sought to serve with his life) Fanon dictated his masterwork, “The Wretched of the Earth”, to his wife, friends and secretaries. Finding some strength after a new round of treatment, he travelled to the Tunisian/Algerian border (Ghardimaou in Tunisia) and spoke to the Armée de Libération Nationale as it prepared to fight the French and enter a free Algeria.

In his book The Wretched of the Earth  Fanon outlined the cure to colonialism which he believed induced mental illness in the colonized and colonizers alike and develops the Manichean perspective implicit in BSWM. To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and white is good, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being. This utopian desire, to be absolutely free of the past, requires total revolution, “absolute violence” To throw off the shackles of colonialism, Fanon argued that colonized peoples have no other choice but to meet colonists’ physical and emotional acts of violence with a violence of the same magnitude, until “the last become first”  Fanon further believed violent rebellion has the capacity to cure the ailments of the colonized while unifying a people as a basis for a new nation.

He described how the national bourgeoisie, after independence, is only too happy to accept what crumbs the departing colonial powers throw to it. Without social reform, without political and economic transformation, he warned, national liberation would be an empty shell.

Fanon’s final act was to encourage – and yet subvert – the revolutionary movement to which he had devoted the last and most important years of his life. He had stubbornly refused to accept treatment in the United States, which he condemned for its racism.

But, in October 1961, he flew there from Tunisia, his home in exile. His last Atlantic crossing was to no avail. On December 6 1961 he died at the tragic young age of 36 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he had sought treatment for his cancer,At his request, his body was returned to Algeria and buried with honors by the Algerian National Army of Liberation.

Since his death Fanon has been endlessly resurrected, sometimes bastardised, often deified.

In his adoptive Algeria, which won independence in 1962 after a gruelling eight-year war that killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians, he has received uneasy recognition. His work has been translated into Arabic, his old hospital in Blida named after him, a school and large street carry his name in Algiers.

 Critics and fellow travellers alike  have declared him a prophet of violent revolution, accusing him of championing the detoxifying and cleansing effects of violence without appreciating its destructive and degenerative whirlwind, but in the mid-1960s a new Black Power movement, principally in the United States, took up Fanon’s writings. It interpreted his analysis of racism and his insistence on the necessity of organising the wretched of the earth, and on the therapeutic effects of violence as defence against oppression, as tools to deploy against the “colonisation” of black communities there.

Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, cited the influence of everything that Fanon said about violence and the spontaneity of violence, how spontaneous violence educates those who are in a position with skills to lead the people to what needs to be done.The Black Panther activist Eldrige Cleaver once claimed “every brother on a roof top” could quote Frantz Fanon.

Ultimately, though, the major point is that Fanon is still relevant sixty years after his death in 1961. As he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth “each generation must discover its mission, fulfill or betray it, in relative opacity”. Certainly, a much-needed call to action. Individuals continue to be subject to the daily pain of alienation, they experience the daily indignity of threats to their various and multiple experiences of well-being. Millions face very real threats to their survival, both physical and psychological. 

Despite the hope that existed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, decolonialization did not help people on the social, cultural, and economic margins of these newly “independent” nations. The national bourgeoisie mimicked their colonial masters and enriched themselves at the expense of the poor. The brutality simply took another form, and the exploitation continues apace.

Frantz Fanon is buried in the cemetery chouhadas (martyrs cemetery of war) near the Algerian-Tunisian border, in the town Ain Kerma (wilaya of El-Tarf) in Tunis. At a time when activists are turning a spotlight on racial oppression, he’s never been more relevant, his innovative thinking still speaks vividly to the present, his ideas remaining the weapons of the oppressed.