On 20 July 1925, Frantz Fanon was born into a relatively prosperous middle-class family living in the capital of Martinique. The Fort-de-France where he was born was effectively a new town.69 In 1890, the town’s wooden buildings had been largely destroyed when a fire broke out after a child upset a cooking stove in the rue Blenac. Rebuilding had scarcely got under way when, a year later, a cyclone swept through the town and destroyed the remaining buildings. Fort-de-France was rebuilt to its original pattern of a grid of narrow streets flanked by two- and three-storey houses with wrought-iron balconies. Despite the risk of fire, most houses were rebuilt in wood; Fort-de-France stands on swampy ground and the unstable subsoil made it difficult to build in stone. A third natural disaster now accelerated the growth of the town. Originally known as Fort Royal (the name was condensed to ‘Foyal’; its inhabitants are still known as ‘Foyalais’), Fort-de-France has always been Martinique’s administrative capital, but was not its first social or cultural capital. For much of its history, Fort-de-France’s importance was eclipsed by that of St Pierre. Built entirely of stone, the so-called Athens of the Antilles stood on a bay on the Caribbean coast, and at the foot of Montagne Pelée. Even though the lack of port facilities meant that ships had to ride at anchor in the bay and be loaded and unloaded by lighters, St Pierre was a more important port than Fort-de-France at the turn of the century. Sugar and rum were its principal exports. The population was more mixed than that of the administrative capital and the influence of the rich békés was much more noticeable. Unlike Fort-de-France, St Pierre had a vibrant cultural life and was home to Martinique’s first theatre – a scaled-down replica of that in Bordeaux.70 At eight in the morning on 8 May 1902, Montagne Pelée erupted and a nuée ardente (a burning cloud) of gas and volcanic dust engulfed the town, leaving an estimated 30,000 dead in little over ten minutes. The sea itself burned as the rum and sugar in the holds of the ships at anchor were ignited. The eruption shifted the ethnic balance of Martinique’s population: the majority of the dead were békés. St Pierre never recovered its ascendancy, even though it was rebuilt. The ruins of the theatre and other buildings now make it a popular, if somewhat melancholy, tourist attraction.
The destruction of St Pierre worked to the advantage of its old rival, which now expanded rapidly. In 1902, Fort-de-France had a population of 14,000; by the mid-1930s, 43,000 people lived there, many of them seeking an alternative to the harsh conditions of the habitations, others driven there by the agricultural downturn as sugar became less and less profitable. Although the port and its associated facilities – the dry dock, the ship-repair facilities, the major coaling depot and the naval base – employed a large workforce, the capital never became a manufacturing centre. Its only sugar mill was burned down in 1890 and was never rebuilt. The centre of Fort-de-France was home to a population of shopkeepers, minor officials and members of the liberal professions, most of them living in the narrow streets between the Canal Levassoir to the west, the park known as the Savanne to the east, the boulevard de la Levée (now the boulevard du Général de Gaulle) to the north and the sea to the south. The town centre was flat – it is in fact one of the very few flat places in Martinique – and hemmed in by an amphitheatre of steep hills. It was also small and covered an area of little more than forty-two hectares. Central Fort-de-France was a predominantly black and mulatto town. White officials and békes tended to live in the spacious colonial-style villas of Didier, an exclusive district in the hills above the town. A declining number of planters still lived on their self-sufficient habitations and rarely visited Fort-de-France.71 The poorer black population was largely confined to the Terres-Sainville area beyond the boulevard de la Levée, which followed the course of the old drainage canal that once marked the town’s boundary. From the 1920s onwards, little wooden houses were constructed here on small plots, many of them without running water or electricity.
Although Fort-de-France was a new town in 1925, it was not a modern town. It was ‘a little town in the Caribbean, with no châteaux and no seigneureries, no ruins and no monuments’.72 It had few public buildings of any note, and still fewer cultural amenities. Sanitation was not good, and the open drains – home to thriving populations of rats and land crabs – were not a pretty sight, whilst the Canal Levassoir served as an open sewer as well as an anchorage for fishing boats. Fort-de-France is at sea level, and a rising tide would drive sewage back up the drains into the town. It was only in 1951 that Fort-de-France began to build a proper sewage system; until then, ‘organic waste’ was simply dumped in the open drains and rivers. The same year saw the beginning of a serious campaign, co-ordinated by Aimé Césaire, against typhoid.73 Sheltered from sea breezes by the headlands of the Pointe des Nègres to the west (once the site of the slave market) and the Pointe des Carrières to the south-east, Martinique’s capital could be stiflingly hot as well as dusty. Aimé Césaire described it in unflattering terms:
An old life with a lying smile, its lips open with disaffected anxieties; an old poverty rotting silently in the sun, an old silence dying of warm pustules . . . This flat town – sprawling, tripped from its right direction, inert, breathless under the geometric burden of a cross that is constantly being reborn, rebellious against its destiny, frustrated in every way, incapable of growing along with the sap of this soil, ill at ease, clipped, diminished, at odds with its fauna and flora.74
Fanon found this description ‘magnanimous’.75 Both Césaire and Fanon described Martinique as disease-ridden, and it was. For Césaire, the Antilles were ‘pitted with smallpox . . . an old silence bursting with warm pustules’, and Fort-de-France was an inert town with ‘leprosies, consumption and famines’.76 He goes on to describe ‘the parade of risible and scrophulous buboes, a fattening ground for very strange microbes, poisons for which there is no known alexiteric, pus from very old wounds, the unpredictable fermentations of putrescible species’.77 These are no metaphors. Diseases like elephantiasis were still endemic during Fanon’s childhood. Tuberculosis and even leprosy were still being fought in the 1950s. It was only then that malaria was eradicated as the swamps around Le Lamentin were drained and cleared to allow the construction of Martinique’s airport.78 A visitor from the metropolis describes his feelings on landing in Martinique in 1952, the year in which Peau noire was published:
When I landed at Fort-de-France, I was ashamed. Ashamed of the wretched airport. Ashamed of the sloppy policemen and customs officers in their tattered uniforms. Ashamed of what I saw on the road from the airport: shacks of rusty corrugated iron, barefoot children dressed in brownish rags, worn-out adults dragging their deformed legs in the dust: I could see the ulcers through the holes in their shirts and trousers.79
Extreme rural poverty was far from unknown during Fanon’s childhood. It was common for agricultural labourers to wear roughly cut garments made from guano sacks and known as ‘Aubéry khaki’.80 In 1937, Victor Coridun wrote of the ‘termite hills of thatch’ that had grown up around the colonial mansions of Martinique’s lords and masters and of the ignorant, misbegotten children who still worked in the cane fields ‘sunburned, burned and cooked by the murderous sun, bent over at their thankless, interminable task from morning to night’ and wore loincloths of jute and skirts of straw. Their legs were deformed and their faces were lined with premature wrinkles.81 This was what lay behind the exotic façade of ‘the isle of eternal sun, with its sweet-smelling tuberoses, its giant ferns, picturesque gorges and smiling creeks,