I cannot recall just why I first read Frantz Fanon. Perhaps it was a recommendation from a friend, perhaps it was the Sartre connection. But I do remember where and when I discovered Fanon. I was twenty and spending a year in Paris as part of a degree course in French. It was a good year and provided an introduction to many things, but it began with a severe culture shock. When I went to the Préfecture de Police on the Ile de la Cité to obtain a temporary resident’s permit, I saw a group of Algerians – all men – being turned away from the counter on the grounds they had not filled in their application forms correctly. Individually, they were addressed as tu. To address a friend or relative as tu is to signal intimacy and affection. To address an adult stranger as tu is to insult and humiliate him or her. Collectively, those men were treated with utter contempt by officials who knew a bicot (‘wog’) when they saw one. It transpired that the Algerians simply could not read and write well enough to complete the forms.
To watch anyone being humiliated – to recognize the look of hurt in the eyes of the other – is distressing. I had rarely seen people looking so forlorn and lost, and I do not think I had ever seen such a naked display of racism. When my turn came to approach the counter, the photograph I tendered was rejected: my hair concealed too much of my face, and I had to have new photographs taken with it pulled back off my face. For a year, I therefore carried a resident’s permit bearing a photograph in which I was almost unrecognizable. This was a source of amusement rather than humiliation. I was treated brusquely, even rudely, but not with contempt. After all, I was a white European, not a bicot, not a bougnole, not a ‘Mohammed’ and not a ‘Sidi’. In the circumstances, it seemed only natural to at least try to help the Algerians with their application forms. I should have known I could never have been of any great help. Any encounter between undergraduate French and Gallic bureaucratese is always going to be an unequal struggle. I could not speak the language of these men and they could not speak mine. I could not help. I assumed that they were immigrant workers. If and when they did get their papers, they probably helped to build the rapid transport system that exiled most Algerians from central Paris by displacing them to distant suburbs. It was a good moment to encounter Fanon.
Now very battered, my old copies of Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Studies in a Dying Colonialism) were bought in the spring of 1970 from François Maspero’s La Joie de lire bookshop in the rue Saint Sévérin. Maspero was Fanon’s main publisher, and this was where Les Damnés de la terre first went on sale in late 1961. It is also where, on the very day that the news of Fanon’s death reached Paris, copies were seized and taken away by the police because they were deemed seditious. My copies are not first editions but the reprints published in the Petite Collection Maspero edition. Copies of those elegant little books are now quite difficult to find, and the shop where I bought them has gone. The sites of its two branches – one on either side of the narrow street – are now home to a travel agency and a shop selling posters and cards. The bookshop’s name meant ‘the joy of reading’, and I always find its absence depressing.
The Algerian war had been over for eight years in 1970; almost no one talked about it. It was still impossible for Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (made in 1966) to be shown in a French cinema. Plans to screen it in three Parisian cinemas were dropped when their owners were threatened with violence if the screenings went ahead.1 It was to be almost thirty years before a French government could finally admit that what occurred in Algeria had indeed been a war and not a police operation. No one talked about how, in October 1961, or only two months before Fanon’s death, the police opened fire on unarmed Algerian demonstrators at the bottom of the boulevard St Michel. No one talked about how Algerians died in the courtyard of the Préfecture de Police. The memory of the student revolt of May ’68 had eclipsed that of an earlier generation of twenty-year-olds, some of whom fought and died in a war that had no name, and some of whom refused to fight in it or even deserted from the army. Many of those who deserted, who refused to accept their call-up papers or who even joined the small groups that gave active and clandestine support to the Front de Libération National were inspired to do so by Fanon, the black doctor from Martinique who resigned from his post in a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria to join the Front and who preached a gospel of violent revolution.
May ’68 had come and gone, but Paris was still turbulent. The police presence around the rue St-Séverin was both permanent and heavy. Although it certainly helped a great deal, one did not need to be black or North African to be stopped regularly and asked for one’s papers; being twenty and having long hair were perfectly good qualifications. It felt right to rebel, to be angry, even though our anger and our rebellion were largely symbolic. Running away from police charges during occasional demonstrations in the Latin Quarter was both frightening and exhilarating, but we were not facing machine guns. Was it really possible to believe that the CRS riot police were a latter-day SS?
In 1970, the political horizon was dominated not by Algeria, but by the war in Vietnam that politicized so many members of a generation. There were some vague parallels with the experience of the so-called Algerian generation. We dismissed talk of ‘peace in Algeria’ and rejected calls for a negotiated settlement in favour of a much more militant commitment. In 1970, ‘Victory to the NLF’ felt a much more appropriate slogan than ‘Peace in Vietnam’. At Christmas and the New Year, banners went up on the lampposts in the boulevard St Germain, courtesy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono: ‘War is Over (if you want it)’. It went on, regardless of what we wanted.
It was a sign of the times that my acquaintance with Fanon began with Les Damnés de la terre and not Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). In many ways he seemed to have less to do with an Algeria that had been bureaucratized than with a very general image of the Third World – that colossus facing Europe. Fanon had spoken of setting Africa ablaze, and it was on fire. Vicious colonial wars were going on in Portugal’s African colonies. A guerrilla war was taking place in a Rhodesia that would eventually become Zimbabwe. In South Africa, the armed wing of the African National Congress was waging its own struggle. It was possible to follow the wars’ progress by browsing through the collection of papers and journals on offer in La Joie de lire’s basement. This was as much a library as a bookshop and there was certainly no obligation to buy. Fanon fitted easily into the revolutionary pantheon of the day, along with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel and the Mao of the Cultural Revolution. There was also a close perceived association between Fanon and the Black Power movement in the United States. Every brother on a rooftop who was taking care of business with a gun could, so it was said, quote Fanon. A lot of white students thought they wanted to be on the rooftops too. And so, we read Fanon. It was his anger that was so attractive.
I read a lot during that year in Paris. It was the beginning of the moment of theory, a time to read Althusser, Lacan and Foucault. Fanon began to look naive. His analyses were wrong so often, disastrously so when it came to Angola. It was obvious to any Marxist, to any Althusserian, that the peasantry could not lead a revolution, that the lumpenproletariat could not play a progressive role. Just look at Marx and Lenin. Just look at the state of Algeria. Fanon had feared that the national bourgeoisie would confiscate the revolution. But it was confiscated by the FLN and by the army that stood behind it in the shadows.
In October 1988, Algeria began to implode. Strikes and riots broke out as discontent with the FLN, corruption and the stagnation of what should have been an oil-rich economy turned to violent protest. Violence was met with violence and perhaps some 500 people died on the streets of Algiers when the army was sent in. According to some accounts, their deaths were a factor that contributed to the suicide of Fanon’s widow. In February 1989, a multi-party system was introduced after a referendum. One of the new parties to emerge was the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Victorious in the local elections of June, it seemed poised to win the legislative elections of December. Within a month, the president had been deposed and the elections had been cancelled. The FIS turned to armed struggle. Policemen