Frantz Fanon. David Macey

taken the first part of his baccalauréat before his departure for Dominica, but now had to return to the Lycée Schoelcher to prepare for the orals. He passed and was awarded the baccalauréat that gave him the right to go to university. Fanon was aware that government grants were available for demobilized soldiers who were returning to education, but was not entirely sure how to obtain one. The funds were controlled by the Conseil Général, which had been re-established after the ‘June Days’, and Fanon decided to approach one of its members. He called at the home of Georges Gratiant, a prominent Communist councillor, in the rue Victor Hugo, and was immediately shown the door by Mme Gratiant. He had breached convention by attempting to approach an official at home rather than in his office. Disappointed and angry, Fanon turned to his uncle Edouard for advice. The school teacher refused to act on his behalf, but advised him to speak to a councillor of his acquaintance from Le François. The response was disappointing. Fanon was told to apply in writing and to attend a council meeting. The general opinion of Martinique’s elected representatives was that it was not their role to train bourgeois by sending them to elite lycées; they were there to produce farmers. It was only after a stormy meeting that Fanon was accorded the rights – and the money – that were his according to the French government.¹⁰⁷

      As Fanon approached the end of his secondary education, he was still unsure of what he wanted to do or be. Career guidance was not one of the French education system’s strong points at this time and school-leavers were largely on their own when it came to choosing their direction. Martinique offered few possibilities. There were no higher education facilities apart from a teacher-training college and a law school, and few opportunities for graduates who returned from university in France. Some found employment in the local state sector, and others became one of Martinique’s stranger exports by joining the colonial administration in France’s African colonies. Despite his real admiration for Félix Eboué, the comments Fanon makes in Peau noire, masques blancs on René Maran, who did work in the African administration, show that he did not regard this as either a viable or a desirable possibility.

      Fanon’s education had been primarily a literary one, and he had talked in Rouen of studying law, but he now made the surprising decision to become a dentist. The decision may have been influenced by Mosole or simply by the belief that a career in dentistry would give him a solid social position and a higher income than that earned in the customs service by his father. Becoming a dentist would have been quite in keeping with the family’s history of upward social mobility, and would have satisfied Eléanore Fanon’s ambitions for her children. Student grants were available for veterans. Years of study at the Paris Dental School seemed a logical step. In the meantime, Fanon lived with his family, attended the lycée and played football. Football was now a more serious matter for Fanon than it had ever been. Joby was teaching in St Pierre while he was preparing for the competitive examination that would lead to a career in the customs service, and was playing regularly for the local team. Both Frantz and Willy joined him, and the three played almost as a team within the team. At 1.65 metres, Frantz was not particularly tall, but he was wiry and strong and made an effective centre-forward. His brothers played outside him as inside-forwards and they played in a triangular formation, passing the ball backwards and forwards on Frantz’s shouted command. Whilst this must have been very frustrating for their flanking wingers, the three brothers made a powerfully effective attacking unit. St Pierre was a successful team.

      Fanon was also aware that Martinique was going through a decisive period. In October 1945, Aimé Césaire ran for parliament as a member of the Communist Party, and Fanon was present at the meeting at which a woman fainted, so powerful was the poet-politician’s oratory.¹⁰⁸ Césaire was one of three Communist députés returned by Martinique. In 1956, he resigned from the Communist Party to found his own Parti Populaire Martiniquais, but he held his parliamentary seat until 1993.¹⁰⁹ Writing in 1955, Fanon would describe the liberation of Martinique in 1943 as the island’s first metaphysical experience and as the first awakening of a distinctively Martinican political consciousness.¹¹⁰ The election of Communist députés was a logical development of that consciousness, but it was still an ambiguous consciousness in that Martinique had relied on ‘the France of the Liberation to struggle against the economic and political power of the sugar plantocracy’.¹¹¹ Fanon’s experience of racism in the French army and of the racism of sections of the French population had sown serious doubts in his mind as to what ‘the France of the Liberation’ really meant. Perhaps more significantly still, Martinicans were discovering that the Césaire of the Cahier was right: they were black, and not Europeans.

      Fanon rarely spoke of his wartime experience, even when he was with friends, but on a number of occasions he did cite a very bitter passage from Césaire’s ‘discourse on colonialism’ of 1951. Here, Césaire speaks of the need to explain to ‘the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century’ that a Hitler slumbers within him and that what he cannot forgive Hitler for are not his crimes in the abstract, but ‘the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the negroes of Africa’.¹¹² It is unlikely that Fanon reached this conclusion in 1945, and his obvious conviction that the angry Césaire was right was influenced by his experiences in Algeria from 1953 onwards. It is, on the other hand, clear that the dis-illusionment he had felt had opened up a festering wound that would not heal.

       4

       Dr Frantz Fanon

      It was a familiar scenario. He had watched them leaving Fort-de-France. He had seen the families accompanying the young men to the foot of the ship’s gangway, and had glimpsed the coming mutation and the power in the eyes of the exile-to-be as he ironically hummed or sang ‘Adieu foulard, adieu madras’.¹ This is the sad song in which a girl from Martinique laments the loss of her white sweetheart or doudou²:

      Adieu foulard, adieu madras,

      Adieu graine d’or, adieu collier chou,

      Hélas, hélas, c’est pou toujours

      Doudou à moi, lui parti

      Hélas, hélas, c’est pou toujours

      [‘Farewell foulard, farewell madras,

      Farewell graine d’or, farewell collier chou,

      Alas, alas, it is for ever,

      My sweetheart has gone.

      Alas, alas, gone for ever’]

      Fanon turns the lament into a farewell to a certain Martinique and to the image of Martinique conveyed by the clothes and jewellery worn by the girl in the song. That image figured on the banknotes and stamps that were issued when Martinique was still a colony and not a département; it still appears on the labels on bottles of rum. A madras is a skirt or dress of checked cotton, and a foulard a headscarf twisted into a turban; a graine d’or and a collier chou are highly prized and expensive items of gold jewellery. Fanon’s version of the song can also be read as a farewell to the doudouiste literature typified by the dedication to a Creole poem by Gilbert Gratiant, the brother of the councillor he had approached in his unsuccessful attempt to obtain his student grant:

      Aux jeunes filles créoles:

      Câpresses, droites et provocantes,

      Békées de lys et de langueur altière,

      Chabines, enjouées marquées de soleil,

      Coulies si fragile aux purs traits d’Indiens

      Bel ti-négresses fermes et saines,

      Mulatresses aux grand yeux, souples reines de tout le féminin possible

      [‘To the Creole girls:

      Straightbacked and provocative câpresses,

      Lily-like békées in their haughty langour,

      Coolies, so fragile