Frantz Fanon. David Macey

on the basis of degrees of pigmentation are still commonplace: a chabin has reddish hair, and sometimes blue eyes; a câpresse is a woman with long wavy hair and cinnamon-coloured skin. A mulatto woman has long silky hair, whilst an ‘African’ has crinkly hair and will, if he is particularly dark-skinned, be said to be ‘blue’. A sociometric study of the racial attitudes of school-children carried out at the beginning of the 1970s showed that there was a close correlation between skin colour and perceived social status. Children who assumed that one of their fellows was of higher social standing regularly described him or her as lighter-skinned.⁵⁵ The children’s perception of skin colour was found by this study to intersect with a sharp sense of socio-economic differentiation which can distort the stereotyping; as proverbial wisdom has it, a rich negro is a mulatto, but a poor mulatto is a negro.⁵⁶ This ‘shadism’ was originally overdetermined by economics and property relations: wealthy mulattos owned black slaves and treated them no better than the béké. In 1998, both Le Monde and Libération sent journalists to Martinique to investigate the ‘heritage’ of slavery. The eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds they interviewed told stories that could have been told by Fanon. A young woman identified as ‘Jeanne’ said that it was commonplace for parents to warn their daughters against going out with black boys because their ‘babies would have crinkly hair’. The twenty-year-old Jean-Philippe, who described himself as a métis (‘half-caste’), complained that he often had the impression that the girls who went out with him did so only because they could not find a white boy.⁵⁷

      The Martinique described by Fanon in Peau noire is obviously not today’s Martinique, but some things have not changed. Even though the rate of unemployment runs at about 30 per cent (and reaches 60 per cent in some areas), subsidies from France ensure a level of prosperity that is higher than that of the other islands of the Eastern Caribbean. Yet underlying attitudes seem surprisingly constant. Just like the heroines of Mayotte Capécia’s novels, which were so despised by Fanon, the adolescent girls interviewed by Michel Giraud still dreamed of marrying white husbands, and saw such a marriage as a form of social promotion. In that sense, they were still negrophobic.⁵⁸ The use made of the terminology of shadism is complex and even confusing. Terms like nègre can be used both as a compliment and as an insult, depending on who is speaking, and to whom. To complicate matters, the Creole equivalent (nèg) can be used to mean simply ‘man’ or even ‘friend’, as in Awa nèg (‘Don’t count on me, man’) or Sé nèg-an-mwen (‘He’s my pal’).

      It is by no means easy to trace the genealogy of a black or mulatto family from Martinique.⁵⁹ Family trees that can be traced as far back as the abolition of slavery in 1848 disappear into the relative anonymity of servitude and then into the lost African past that preceded it. Names and dates become confused. Documents in the possession of Fanon’s uncle and research carried out by his brother Joby make it possible to trace an outline family history back to the 1840s, but no further. The origins of the very name ‘Fanon’ are obscure, but it can be reasonably assumed that it was given by a master to an African slave brought to Martinique at some forgotten date. This would not have been unusual. Fanon’s friend Marcel Manville was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that his surname derived from ‘Mandeville’, which is the name of both a village in Normandy and a family from that region.⁶⁰ The Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, Le Havre, Nantes and La Rochelle were the main centres for the slave trade, and many Martinican names do appear to originate in Normandy and Brittany. There does not, however, appear to be any great concentration of Fanons there. The family history therefore begins in Martinique in the 1840s.

      Fanon’s great grandfather was the son of a slave of African origins and was said in 1842 to be a nègre à talent, or in other words ‘a negro with a trade’. He owned some land in the area around Le Robert on the Atlantic coast, where he grew cocoa, and must therefore have been a free man. In 1848, his wife stated to the authorities that she was a ‘free negress’, and she was therefore either the daughter of manumitted slaves or had herself been granted her freedom prior to abolition. Their son Jacques-Bernardin was born in La Trinité, another small settlement on the Atlantic coast, and married Françoise Vindil, born in 1857. They too were small farmers, and had six children. Born in 1891, Félix Casimir married Eléanore Médélice, who came from Le Vauclin, some thirty kilometres to the south of La Trinité. Eléanore’s origins were, according to the Fanon family’s collective memory, more exotic than her husband’s. She was, it is said, an illegitimate child of mixed race, and her white ancestors came from Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, having been forced to leave their native Austria as a result of religious persecution. The name ‘Frantz’ is believed by members of the family to allude to the distant Alsatian strand in his ancestry. Like many of their generation, Casimir and Eléanore drifted away from the land. After working at a number of different trades, he entered the customs service as an inspector in Fort-de-France; she opened a shop selling hardware and drapery. This was not unusual; civil servants had regular salaries, but were not well paid and the small retail sector was largely a female province.⁶¹ The upward social mobility of Frantz’s parents was parallelled by that of his two uncles: Edouard became a schoolteacher, whilst Albert worked for the Office des Eaux et Forêts, which is France’s equivalent of the Forestry Commission.

      If there is a dominant image of a childhood spent in pre-war Martinique, it is probably that enshrined in Joseph Zobel’s popular novel La Rue des cases-nègres (Black-Shack Alley; the US title is Sugar-Cane Alley), first published in 1955 and long banned because of its brutal portrayal of rural Martinique. Often described as a classic of Francophone literature, the novel gained a new popularity – and an international audience – thanks to Euzhan Palcy’s cinematic adaptation, which won both a French ‘César’ and four prizes including Best First Film and Best Actress at the 1983 Venice Film Festival. The novel and film tell the story of José, a young boy born on a sugar plantation who succeeds against the odds in acquiring the education that will spare him a brutally harsh life in the cane fields and the ‘black shacks’ of the title, thanks largely to the self-sacrificing efforts of the grandmother who brings him up. The portrayal of rural poverty is eloquent; that of the relationship between José and M’man Tine, or ‘Grandma Tine’, touching (in the film adaptation, M’man Tine is played by the wonderful Darling Legitimus, who, as a young woman, once danced in Paris with Josephine Baker’s troupe).

      La Rue des cases-nègres is in many ways a classic novel of education, but it describes an education that is also an alienation. An unresolved dilemma faces José: if he obtains a grant, he may be able to study in France like the ‘sons of modest civil servants or small shopkeepers’ who obtained grants ‘because their fathers were used as front men by députés’.⁶² Those boys will be able to enter a higher social class, but they will be forced to deny their origins. José’s only real alternative is to enter the competitive examination that will give him a modest position in the local civil service. José’s years at school confirm his intuitive realization that ‘the inhabitants of this country really are divided into three categories: Negroes, Mulattos and Whites (not to mention the sub-divisions), that the former – by far the most numerous – are belittled, like tasty wild fruits that need no attention; the second might be regarded as varieties that have been produced by grafting; and the rest are the rare, precious variety, even though most of them are ignorant and uneducated’.⁶³ As a result, many black Martinicans suffer from an ‘inferiority complex’ that inspires a forlorn desire to ‘whiten their race’.⁶⁴ Zobel’s analysis and even his vocabulary here are obviously similar to those of Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. It is not that Zobel was influenced by Fanon: both are writing of the same reality, and writing within a specific tradition going back to at least the 1930s, when René Ménil, who taught at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, wrote of the ‘tragic history of a man who cannot be himself, who is ashamed and afraid of what he is’.⁶⁵

      Fanon’s early experience was not that of Zobel’s fictional José. He was one of the sons of modest civil servants and small shopkeepers, though there has never been any suggestion that his father was anyone’s ‘front man’, and rural poverty was at least a generation away. Unlike José, Fanon was the descendant of the ‘free men of colour’, who, by the end of the eighteenth century, were equal in numbers to the white population.⁶⁶ Their descendants developed into a Martinican middle