The foreigners were ordered to get out of Algeria by the fundamentalists. Some were killed. The writers, the musicians and the intellectuals began to be murdered. The novelist Tahar Djaout spoke out: ‘Silence is death, and if you say nothing you die, and if you speak you die, so speak and die.’ He died in June 1993, gunned down outside the apartment block where he lived. In a sense, Djaout spoke on behalf of – and died for – Fanon’s wretched of the earth, on behalf of the thousands who were dying cruel and anonymous deaths. Other writers also spoke on their behalf. They have produced a literature of defiance and of terrible beauty. It is a good time to reread Fanon. Not to hear once more the call for violent revolution, but to recapture the quality of the anger that inspired it.
Fanon was angry. His readers should still be angry too. Angry about what happened in Algeria in the 1990s. Angry that Algerian immigrants could be treated with such contempt in a police station. Angry at the casual racism that still assumes that the black and North African youths of the suburbs are all criminals or at least potential criminals (which is not to say that they are all angels, merely that the repeated experience of poverty and exclusion does not make for good citizens). Angry at the cultural alienation that still afflicts the children of Martinique, so beautiful in their smart school uniforms and so convinced that they are just like other French children until someone teaches them otherwise. Angry at what has happened in Algeria. Angry that the wretched of the earth are still with us.
To read or study the history of the Algerian war is to sup on horrors. To do so against the backdrop of contemporary Algeria was worse. I have read so many horror stories about contemporary Algeria, and I have been told many others. The Algeria with which Fanon identified so strongly had become a country in which police interrogators used blow torches in cellars and in which mass murder was committed in the name of a perversion of Islam. Several of my informants were forced to leave the Algeria where they had lived since independence in 1962, and where some had been born. Some simply left as the tide of intolerance and xenophobia began to rise faster and faster. Others had narrower escapes. One morning, a doctor was informed by the police that his name figured on a death list of several doctors who were to be killed by a group of self-styled Islamic fundamentalists. He was immediately put on a plane for Paris. The other doctors were killed. The list itself had been drawn up by one of the doctor’s own students. I was told the story of what happened in a school in the Algerian countryside. A group of armed men burst into a classroom and cut the throat of the teacher. They then severed her head and left it on her desk. This occurred in front of a class of primary schoolchildren. I will never know the name of that teacher but I cannot – will not – forget the story of her death. Some things must not be forgotten. And whatever else happens in and to Algeria, it will take years for the trauma inflicted on those children to heal.
The violence in Algeria had its effects in France. Schoolgirls who wore ‘Islamic headscarves’, judged by many to be incompatible with the secularism of the French educational system, were portrayed in the press as members of a fundamentalist fifth column or even as potential Algerian terrorists, even though many of them were not Algerians at all! In the summer and autumn of 1995, bombs went off in Paris, with the shadowy Armed Islamic Groups claiming responsibility. Tension was high. From the window of a hotel room, I could watch the police stopping every car driven by anyone who looked even vaguely ‘Algerian’. No doubt those stopped were addressed as tu. No doubt a few Martinicans were stopped too, only to be let go with the gruff apology: ‘Sorry, thought you were Algerian . . .’ It happened to Fanon too.
I half expected some hostility or at least suspicion from those I approached for information about Fanon. White liberals and white leftists are, for understandable reasons, not welcome in all quarters. The Algerian war is still a delicate and difficult issue in France. I could, to some extent, empathize with the forlorn Algerians in the Préfecture, but no child has ever stared at me in a park and said, ‘Look a nigger. Mummy, I’m frightened.’ I need not have worried. One or two people – white, as it happens – expressed amused surprise when they opened their doors and found that Fanon’s would-be biographer was a white redhead. Most were only too delighted to find that someone was interested in Fanon, who is not now widely read in France. My most emotionally charged memory is that of a conversation with an elderly Martinican who played football with Fanon as a child and fought alongside him in the Second World War. He gently brushed his black fingers across my white wrist, looked at me and said ‘Fanon . . . race . . . racism: it’s nothing to do with that.’
Fanon has often been described as preaching a gospel of hate and violence. He certainly had a talent for hate and he did advocate and justify a violence that I can no longer justify. And yet, his first readers sensed in his work a great generosity. The combination of anger and generosity of spirit is his true legacy. In the introduction to his first book, Fanon writes that ‘man is a yes’. The ‘universal-inclusive’ man grates, but it is rather pointless to reproach Fanon for not sharing the political sensibilities of a new millennium and of a generation influenced by feminism. In the final chapter, he picks up the same argument: ‘Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn for man. No to the indignity of man. No to the exploitation of man. To the murder of what is most human about men: freedom.’2 Fanon, pas mort.
In 2004, Grove Press published a new – and badly needed – translation of Les Damnés de la terre by Richard Philcox. In a brief afterword – significantly entitled ‘On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice’ – Philcox describes what he calls his three ‘encounters’ with Fanon. In 1968, the twenty-three-year-old Englishman went to Senegal to work as a teacher. The textbooks he had to use spoke of daffodils and snow, but half his class would be asleep by three in the afternoon, when the temperature reached forty degrees Celsius. Philcox gradually came to realize that Dakar was part of the compartmentalized world described by Fanon in the opening pages of Les Damnés. A third encounter came in the course of many visits to Martinique and Guadeloupe, the birthplace of Philcox’s wife, the novelist Maryse Condé: ‘Any visitor from outside France visiting the French islands of the Caribbean is immediately struck by the overwhelming presence of a metropolis seven thousand kilometres away, the extraordinary alienation of a petite bourgeoisie more attuned to France than their own destiny, and he or she cannot but admire Fanon’s lucidity.’3
Philcox’s second encounter with Fanon took place, he believes, in 1971, when he returned from Senegal to France. The similarity between it and the circumstances of my own Fanonian encounter is almost uncanny, though he certainly had a harder time of it: ‘One year before Britain joined the Common Market I was not only forced to apply for a work permit, but also undergo a series of medicals, mandatory for immigrants from non-member European Union countries.’ Most of the immigrants were, predictably, from North Africa, and Philcox now witnessed ‘that very special relationship, based on humiliation and contempt, that exists between the French and the Algerians’:
We were all made to line up in front of a nondescript building near to boulevard périphérique and once inside, submitted to a series of humiliating medical examinations that would allow us to apply for a work permit at another line at the Paris Préfecture. It was obvious that all the clichés about the Algerian’s criminal impulsiveness, his indolence, his thefts, his lies and rapes, which had been inculcated into the French bureaucrats’ minds before, during, and after the Algerian war, rose to the surface and treatment was dealt out accordingly.4
I am not convinced by Philcox’s suggestion that it might, in part, be because we are ‘two islanders’ that we both developed an interest in Fanon – I suspect it has more to do with a fleeting glimpse of what humiliation means. But he is surely right to remark that one of the reasons why Fanon is studied more in the universities of the English-speaking world than ‘in France and the French Caribbean’ is that ‘the skeletons of the Algerian war and the colour hierarchy, respectively, are too close for comfort.’5 As I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, Fanon is (or can be) a continued source of political embarrassment in both France and Martinique.6 This is not to suggest that the English-speaking world is innocent of racism, or to imply that France is uniquely prejudiced, but it might serve as a reminder that racism takes different forms in different places. It is also significant that disciplines such as black studies,