Frantz Fanon. David Macey

house [un garni] in the rue Garibaldi. There were a lot of us in that garni, twenty or thirty people. It’s true. We paid 1,000 old francs a month; at the time I was earning 13,000 . . . We were overrun with rats in that garni. It was a scandal, yes, yes . . . pitiful, yes . . . and a scandal.’³⁷ The garni and the café – a poor imitation of the Moorish cafés of Algeria, but always a major centre of political activity – were the social poles of the urban immigrant’s world. Conditions had changed little since the 1930s, when a local Communist paper described the rooming houses in the Molière area:

      In order to get an idea of the social wound known as a slum you have to have gone down those narrow corridors, climbed the wooden staircases with their uneven or missing stairs, breathed the revolting smells from the gutters, cesspools and courtyards of certain houses. Let’s not talk about the flats. Let’s not talk about the garrets they call rooms, as their low ceilings and sweating walls defy description. And yet miserable wretches live in them, and at a horribly high price they are sold the right to sleep under a roof, despite the rancid smell and the inadequate air-space.³⁸

      Compared to this, a cubicle in a former brothel was luxury indeed.

      It was in Lyon that Fanon first came into contact with the North Africans he had been unable to meet during his brief stay in Algeria in 1944. Although Lyon was, even in the harsh climate of the post-war years, a relatively prosperous city, the home visits he made to the rue Moncey as a young doctor taught him that the wretched of the earth were not far away. The Algerian community had rapidly acquired the reputation for criminality and violence that still clings to North African immigrants. According to a 1923 police report, the rue Moncey was a nest of filth, a centre of anti-hygiene, a threat to public order and a social danger.³⁹ Such views were – and are – not uncommon; the image of the Algerian with a knife is deeply rooted in a certain French imaginary⁴⁰ which, since at least the 1930s, has seen the ‘Sidi’ as a barbarian who is invading the white citadel.⁴¹ Given their living conditions, it is not surprising that the Algerian immigrants provided Lyon’s hospitals and psychiatric centres with large numbers of patients, and it was in that context that Fanon first came to know ‘all these men who are hungry, all these men who are cold, all these men who are afraid . . . All these men who make us afraid.’⁴²

      Fanon’s sense of isolation was increased by the news that reached him in the first week of February 1947. Félix Casimir Fanon had died unexpectedly on 30 January at the age of only fifty-six. A telegram was dispatched to Lyon and, on receiving it, Fanon left immediately to talk to Gabrielle in Rouen. It was a long and uncomfortable overnight journey. Rouen is 600 kilometres from Lyon and the journey involved a change of train and station in Paris. Fanon spent a sleepless night trying his best not to think about the telegram. Despite the gestures of sympathy that had been made by friends, he could not believe that he had been orphaned, so difficult was it to imagine the death of his father. In 1945, he had written in very harsh terms to him, but was now anxious to know if his father had spoken of him before he died. He wanted to know what his father thought of him, because a paternal opinion would help him to ‘reform his norms’ and to work harder at his daily tasks. He was also afraid that his mother would lapse into despair or even die of grief, and begged her not to leave her children: ‘What would we be without you?’⁴³ His fears were not realized: Eléanore Fanon lived on in her cool, dark house in Redoute until July 1981. In Rouen, Gabrielle was also in tears. Well aware that her father’s death was a blow to the stability – and finances – of the family, she was talking of abandoning her studies and returning to Fort-de-France to find work. It took Frantz a night of persuasion to convince her that this was the wrong course. After what her brother called ‘a good talking to’, she capitulated and agreed to go on with her university course. When she did return to Martinique, it was as a qualified pharmacist. Fanon himself could offer little help in the impending financial crisis, as his grant was proving almost inadequate for his own needs. Joby was able to help a little. He was playing semi-professional football on a part-time basis and was able to send his younger brother a little money occasionally.⁴⁴

      Fanon’s geographical-racial isolation was compounded by the need to study a new and unfamiliar subject. His lycée education had left him able to cite Kant on the sublime⁴⁵ (not that this implied any great acquaintance with critical philosophy), but had given him little scientific knowledge. As a preliminary to his five years of medical studies, he therefore had to take a year-long foundation course in biology, physics and chemistry. Peau noire tells us little about Fanon’s medical studies, though it is informative about his initiation into psychiatry. It does, however, tell us that he was bored by the ‘objectivity’ of anatomists who could describe the tibia, but reacted with astonishment when he asked them how many pre-peroneal depressions they had. It rapidly became clear that he was not destined to be a surgeon. As he should have foreseen after his reaction to watching the autopsy in Le François, even basic dissection made him feel nauseous and a more hardened student’s advice to regard the cadaver as though it were a mere cat did not help.⁴⁶

      Fanon had some difficulty in integrating himself into the academic community, and often remained both aloof and isolated. There were few other black students, and it would have been more usual to find a young West Indian washing the floor of the dissecting room than cutting up cadavers in it. Fanon was older than most of his fellow students and, unlike them, had fought a war that had left him bitter and angry, and with his supposedly ‘French’ identity largely in tatters. Yet he rarely talked about either his experiences in Dominica or during the war in France; a close acquaintance like Nicole Guillet, who is now a psychoanalyst in Paris, had no idea that he had been a soldier and had been decorated. Some younger students such as Jacques Postel found him slightly intimidating. He was not always easy to approach, and was sharp-tongued and ferocious when involved in arguments, as he constantly attempted to defeat people on their own ground, to make them admit defeat. He could be cuttingly aggressive, but also often appeared to be under great stress. Guillet suggests, with hindsight, that the displays of aggression were a defence against an underlying sense of self-doubt or insecurity.⁴⁷

      Yet, the same Fanon could also be boisterously outgoing, and was given to declaiming from memory – and in a very loud voice – long passages from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. He enjoyed dancing and listening to his Stellio records. This was a very Martinican taste. Alexandre Stellio (1885–1939) was the leader of the most famous of the Creole orchestras that took France by storm just before the Second World War. He was an accomplished clarinettist, and his beguine music was a pleasantly syncopated dance music with hints of New Orleans jazz. By 1946, the beguine was no longer particularly fashionable in France; Fanon was quite simply listening to the music of his childhood. He had no great liking for classical music but claimed to have an interest in jazz, although a friend who worked with him in Algeria and then Tunisia believes that he was less interested in the music itself than in the sociological phenomenon of black music in the racist white society of the United States.⁴⁸ The parody of the ‘negritude’ vision of Louis Armstrong’s music in Peau noire suggests that this was indeed the case: ‘I am black, I bring about a total fusion with the world, a sympathetic understanding of the earth and lose my ego in the heart of the cosmos; no matter how intelligent he may be, the white man cannot understand Armstrong.’⁴⁹ In 1959, he discussed the reactions of white jazz fans to the development of new styles such as be-bop, which he saw as a reflection of the new-world view of a black community that had glimpsed a new hope for the future. For the white fans, this was a betrayal: jazz had to be ‘the broken and despairing nostalgia of an old negro trapped between five whiskies, the curse upon him and the racist hatred of whites’.⁵⁰ The sociology of jazz and the blues does appear to have interested him more than the music itself.

      Fanon is reported to have been close to the student branch of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) but he did not become a member, even though he was active in student politics and took part in anti-colonialist demonstrations. Some of the demonstrations concerned the case of Paul Vergès, the leader of the Communist Party of Réunion, who was arrested on a murder charge in May 1946. Convinced that he could not hope to have a fair trial in Réunion, anti-colonialist groups there succeeded in having the hearings transferred to metropolitan France. Between April and August 1947, when he was acquitted, Vergès was held