The lessons of school and home were reinforced by other media. When Fanon and his gang crept into cinemas without paying, they were not going to watch the art-house classics of the golden age of French cinema. Fanon’s mother used to sing him French songs which never mentioned negroes,101 but he watched films in which he could see them. They were Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan films, and he identified with the white lord of the jungle, not with his black inferiors.102 Films like this served to teach children what nègres really were, and to instil in them the idea that they were not nègres. French West Indians did not even think of themselves as black; they were simply West Indians, and everyone knew that blacks lived in Africa.103 Fanon had encountered nègres. In either 1938 or 1939, a group of tirailleurs sénégalais stationed in Guyane briefly visited Martinique.104 Fanon and his friends had heard of these famous colonial troops and their colourful uniforms, and went looking for them in the streets. He knew what he had been told about them by veterans of the First World War: ‘They attack with the bayonet and, when that does not work, they charge through the bursts of machine-gun fire, machete in hand. They cut off heads and collect ears.’105 The tirailleurs also had a reputation for looting, brutality and especially rape. To Fanon’s delight, his father brought two of them home, providing concrete confirmation that he and his family were not nègres, but Martinicans. Ironically, and quite spontaneously, the Fanon family behaved in just the way that a white family in France might have done: they charitably entertained the troops from the black African colonies.106
Fanon sums up his situation as follows: ‘I am a negro – but I naturally do not know that, because that is what I am.’107 It would take a brutal encounter with a white ‘other’ to destroy the unthinking naturalness of Fanon’s perception of himself. It came in the form of a brush with a child in France who said: ‘Look a negro . . . Mum, look at the negro, I’m frightened.’108 Fanon himself dates his first experiences of overt racism in Fort-de-France to the Second World War, when the sailors of the French navy revealed themselves to be authentic racists and when the békés began to take back the political power that had been largely lost to the black-mulatto ethno-class. He does not describe prewar Martinique as a non-racist society, but nor does he describe it as overtly or aggressively racist. Although there was a family – and collective – memory of the béké on horseback with a whip in his hand, the 2,000 Europeans in pre-war Martinique were, he thought, ‘integrated into social life, involved in the economy of the country’.109 As a teenager, Fanon had minimal contact with the minority white population. He would obviously see white officials, white soldiers and white policemen in their colonial uniform of shorts and knee-length socks, but had few real dealings with them; there was no reason for a boy, black or otherwise, to come into direct contact with, say, the white owners of the Crédit Martiniquais. Still less did he have any reason to meet the white plantocracy. The young Edouard Glissant had a much more direct knowledge of the plantations than Fanon, but he had no direct contact with the békés himself.110 What he did experience was the depersonalization born of what colonial France had been saying to Martinicans for hundreds of years: ‘No, no. You’re like us. You’re French, completely European.’111
The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to both Fanon’s delinquency and his studies in the Bibliothèque Schoelcher. He was now attending the Lycée Schoelcher. This too was an indication of the family’s status and relative prosperity: fees ensured that poor blacks did not attend the lycée. The same system ensured that few working-class children in France attended the lycée either. One of the stranger myths that circulates through the extensive literature on Fanon is the story that he attended ‘a segregated black lycée which had a religious atmosphere’.112 It would be difficult to miss the point more widely. Like any other school in the French system, the Lycée Schoelcher was militantly secular, and displays of any religious belief were forbidden by law. A ‘lycée with a religious atmosphere’ is simply a contradiction in terms. If any of the Fanon children received religious education at school, it must have been the girls at their private school. And whilst colonial Martinique was certainly a racist society, its racism did not take the form of apartheid. The békés sent – and still send – their children to religious schools like the Collège Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, but this does not mean that the lycée was officially segregated. ‘Separate development’ was not the policy of the old colonies. On the contrary, the difficulties experienced by the lycée’s pupils stemmed from the fact that it took no account of ethnic differences and taught them that they were Europeans. That Fanon’s teachers and fellow pupils were from the mulatto ethno-class is a reflection of economic realities rather than institutionalized segregation.
The lycée, built in the late 1930s on the site of the old Governor’s Residence, was one of Fort-de-France’s first reinforced concrete buildings. It still squats heavily and somewhat ominously on the steep hill across the Canal Levassoir, and seems to echo the forbidding military architecture of the Fort Saint-Louis which dominates the eastern side of the Savanne. A few months into the war, it was empty and deserted. The declaration of war had caused panic in Martinique. Trenches were dug on the Savanne in anticipation of some improbable invasion from the sea. Fort-de-France’s schools were closed in preparation for air raids that never came. The trenches were never used, and quickly became stinking open latrines. Abandoned to their own devices, Frantz and Joby were running wild. In desperation, their mother dressed them in their sisters’ dresses to try to keep them at home. In November 1939, she took the extreme measure of exiling Joby to Le François. Edouard Fanon taught there, and the school was still open. Returning from work to find that his son was missing, Casimir Fanon turned on his wife in anger, demanding that she bring Joby home and pointing out that she had no right to send his children away without his express permission. In legal and even constitutional terms, he was perfectly right and his paternal authority was absolute, but he was no match for his wife. Eléanore announced before the whole family that Joby was not coming back and, what was more, Frantz was going to join him. She was tired of him returning home only for meals and then disappearing again. She won the argument and Frantz and Joby spent the next year in Le François. Accustomed to eating with a large and closely knit family, they now found themselves living in the little town’s one hotel and taking lonely meals with their bachelor uncle. Eléanore’s one piece of advice to them as they left was typical: ‘Be irreproachable.’
Only twenty-four kilometres from Fort-de-France, Le François was a small town dominated by the sugar industry and surrounded by fields of cane. It had a sugar mill which has now been demolished. There was also some fishing, though the town is slightly inland and cut off from the sea by a dusty plain, the fishing boats anchored in a tidal canal. Edouard Fanon was quite a prominent citizen with connections on the Conseil Général that could later be exploited to his nephew’s advantage. The school where he taught did not have the prestige of the lycée in Fort-de-France, but he was an able and committed teacher. He was also the founder of a literary, cultural and sporting society known as Le Club franciscain – the football team still exists