The Fanons’ dual income made them relatively prosperous – prosperous enough to afford servants and music lessons for the girls. In January 1945, Frantz Fanon wrote to his mother to tell her what he wanted when he got home from a war with which he was increasingly disillusioned: ‘A big meal. Menu: punch (in the plural), blaffe, rice, chicken, red beans. Mangoes.’83 This was not the diet of a poor family, and not many Martinicans ate chicken on a regular basis. As a student in Lyon in 1947, Fanon would nostalgically recall Sunday mornings at home – the sound of his father’s slippered footsteps on the stairs, his mother scolding the servant who had just announced that lunch would be late, and the piano recitals given by his sisters Marie-Flore and Marie-Rose. The ability to hire servants was a prized symbol of social status and the family were acutely aware of their status as recent recruits to the urban middle class. The Fanons were careful to avoid the trap that snared so many middle-class families: debts occasioned by conspicuous consumption and the acquisition of the outward signs of relative prosperity. They treated their country cousins with amused if slight condescension and, being self-consciously new recruits to their class, were very punctilious about observing the social conventions. Church-going was something to be taken seriously, and so were the unwritten rules that prevented the sons of customs officials from playing with the sons of lawyers or doctors. The girls attended the private Pensionnat Colonial (now the Collège Ernest Renan) on the grounds that fee-paying schools were better than state schools at inculcating the social graces. Such considerations were important to respectable families whose rural past was long behind them and who would have been insulted to have been reminded that they were only two generations removed from slavery.
Thanks to the income generated by Eléanore’s shop – and her acute business sense – the family was able to build a second house, which was originally used for weekends and holidays. Redoute is now a middle-class suburb of Fort-de-France but it was a separate community in the 1930s. The solidity of the houses – and the presence of the best pâtisserie in Martinique – testify to its contemporary prosperity, as do the well-kept graves in the cemetery behind the church of Notre Dame du Rosaire, a peaceful place with spectacular views of the conical Pitons du Carbet to the north. A number of Fanons are buried there, including Albert, the generous uncle who always had small change and sweets in his pockets for his nieces and nephews. Fanon’s uncle Edouard, who was born in 1907, calmly informs interested – and suddenly disconcerted – visitors that he will soon join his brother in the family grave. Like most of Fort-de-France’s outer suburbs, Redoute is built on a steep ridge and straggles along the main road leading north to St Joseph. The Fanon house was off the main road on an unpaved lane (now the rue François Rustal) that plunged steeply down towards the Madame river. The plot of land faced north and stood on a slope above one of the river’s minor tributaries. If the purchase of the plot was testimony to Eléanore’s business acumen, its development was testimony to her tenacity. Bringing in water and electricity meant crossing a neighbour’s property and caused quarrels; in order to provide vehicular access, the boys had to pave the lane as best they could with local stones and gravel. The house itself was a single-storeyed wooden construction built in a traditional style designed to provide shade and to keep out the heat. For the children, the large garden was a greater attraction than the house itself. There were no gardens in the rue de la République, and this was a paradise with a profusion of breadfruit trees, mangoes and coconut palms and views across the bay to the Lamentin plain. This was a place to watch the darting humming birds, the spectacled thrushes and the enormous butterflies. Each child had their own mango tree, where they could read or doze, perched in the branches. Left in the care of servants while their parents were at work, they experienced a wild freedom in the garden that they could never have in Fort-de-France itself. Like so many traces of Fanon’s childhood, the house has disappeared. After Eléanore’s death in 1982, it was sold to speculators and demolished to make way for two small blocks of flats built in the ugly concrete that covers so much of modern Martinique. Fanon never speaks of this side of his childhood.
Whilst it was a status symbol, domestic help was also something of a necessity: Frantz was the fifth of eight children: Mireille (who was also his godmother), Félix, Gabrielle, Joby, Marie-Flore, Marie-Rose and Willy. There were often twelve to fifteen members of the extended family present for meals in the rue de la République. Eléanore was the central authority figure and has been described by Manville as a ‘strong-minded intellectual woman’ whose malicious irony masked an enormous generosity,84 and by her son Joby as une maîtresse-femme, meaning a competent woman with a firm belief in her own authority, and not one to be trifled with. There appears, on the other hand, to be no basis for the suggestion made in Irene Gendzier’s Critical Study of Fanon that she was ‘of rather difficult temperament’, ‘not overly affectionate’ and ‘favoured her daughters’.85 She was ambitious for her children and anxious to see them succeed. No child of hers was going to go back to rural poverty. Family loyalty was, in her view, the cardinal virtue and she liked to tell her children that: ‘Unity is the one thing that saves the family, and every one of us. So long as you are friends, you are strong. What belongs to one of us belongs to all of us, and that way we are all rich.’ So strong was the sense of loyalty and unity that the family effectively excluded anyone who was not a blood relative. Marrying into the Fanon clan was conditional upon a demonstration of worthiness and a promise of loyalty.
Casimir Fanon was not an active participant in the day-to-day activities of his family and appears to have taken little interest in his children. He worked long hours, and then kept his distance. To that extent, he was, recalls Joby, a typical father in a matrifocal society. The domestic authority wielded by Eléanore was as typical as Casimir’s non-involvement. Significantly, there are very few positive father-figures in Martinican fiction, but there is an abundance of devoted mothers and grandmothers. Whilst Joby Fanon shrugs off his father’s passivity as an effect of Martinican society, Frantz seems to have resented it bitterly, as is evident from the harsh letter he wrote in 1944:
Papa, you really have sometimes failed to perform your duty as a father. I allow myself to judge you in this way because I am no longer of this earth. These are the reproaches of someone living in life’s beyond. Sometimes Maman has been unhappy because of you. We made her unhappy enough. In future, you will try to return to her one hundredfold all she has done for the equilibrium of the family. The word now has a meaning that was previously unknown. If we, the eight children, have become something, Maman alone should take all the glory. She was the spirit. You were the arm. That is all. I can see the face you will pull when you read these lines, but it’s the truth. Look at yourself. Look back at the years that have passed, lay your soul bare and have the courage to say: ‘I deserted’. And then, repentant parishioner, you will be able to return to the altar.
The apocalyptic tone, and Fanon’s claim that he was no longer of this earth, reflect his conviction that he was about to die in a war he no longer perceived as his own, but the sense of bitterness must have gone further back than that.
Alliances