According to his own account, it was soon after his arrival in Lyon that Fanon began work on what was to become his first book. He writes that Peau noire, masques blancs was the conclusion of ‘seven years of experiments and observations’, but also that it was ‘three or four years’ before its publication that he began to experiment with the free association tests whose findings he incorporates into his text.68 The book was published in 1952 and, allowing for submission and production, this indicates that the project dates back to either 1945, which is improbable in the extreme, or to about 1947–8. Although Fanon attempted to submit it as his degree dissertation, it is unlikely that Peau noire began life as a thesis. There was no indication in 1947 that he was going to study psychiatry, and it is a very odd first-year student who begins to prepare – or even think of – a final-year project in his first year at medical school. There is the further possibility that the idea for it was sparked by the study of ‘the genesis of the myth of the negro’ launched in the second issue of Présence africaine. Fanon administered what he calls his ‘free association tests’ to some three to four hundred individuals from the white race, inserting the word ‘negro’ into a random series of twenty or so other words. Almost 60 per cent of the tests produced the associations: biological, penis, sport, sportsman, powerful, boxer, Joe Louis, Jess (sic) Owen, Tirailleurs sénégalais, savage, animal, devil, sin. A white prostitute told him that the idea of going to bed with a black man brought her to orgasm. Subsequent experience taught her that black men were ‘no more extraordinary’ than her white clients: ‘I was thinking (imagining) about everything they could do to me: that was what was fantastic.’69 Fanon does not say whether he approached her in the interests of research, or as a client. Technically, Fanon was not using free association but a Jungian word association test in which the subject’s immediate response to the stimulus word is interpreted as revealing a thought process, personality characteristic or emotional state.70 The terminological slip that allows Fanon to describe this as ‘free association’ (in which a patient lying on an analytic couch describes everything that comes into his mind and in which the analyst listens with suspended attention, and without supplying any stimulus) implies a surprisingly slight acquaintance with Freudian practice. Here, Fanon is not exploring the unconscious of an individual but the stereotypical associations of a culture.
Peau noire, masques blancs supplies a few indications as to the nature of Fanon’s extra-curricular activities in Lyon, and his difficult situation there. He was both respected by his colleagues and the object of their casual and unthinking racism. He recalls, for instance, that ‘just over a year ago (i.e. 1949–50) I gave a lecture in which I traced a parallel between black poetry and European poetry’. After it, a metropolitan friend congratulated him warmly but unthinkingly said: ‘Basically, you’re white’.71 Assuming that Fanon’s dates are correct, it seems reasonable to assume that the lecture was a discussion of one of the first anthologies of Black and Malagasy poetry to be published in French.72 He was also asked by the Association lyonnaise des étudiants de la France d’Outre-mer to respond to an article that had described jazz as an irruption of cannibalism into European purity. In his angry reply, he told the ‘defender of European purity’ that there was nothing cultural about his ‘spasm’.73 Neither Fanon’s talk, the article about jazz nor his response to it have survived, but one extant document provides a useful insight into the cultural concerns of his circle.
Nicole Guillet believes that the unsigned fifty-six-page typescript entitled Le Surréalisme dating from her student days in Lyon and still in her possession is Fanon’s work, but the internal evidence suggests otherwise. A reference on the sixth sheet to the lecture ‘your brother Frantz’ gave on the ‘solar poetry’ of Negro art makes it improbable that Frantz Fanon wrote it (‘Frantz’ is not a common name, and the likelihood of there being two black students called ‘Frantz’ in Lyon at the same time is almost absurdly slight), but it could be an allusion to the talk on black and European poetry. It does, however, indicate that the typescript originated from within the circles in which Fanon was active. Given that the author mentions having seen an exhibition of Central African masks and ‘idols’ in Brussels and comments that it had inspired in him a feeling of ‘sacred horror’ that he had never experienced while looking at ‘art from your countries’, it would appear that he was a black student speaking to a mixed audience. Although the text is undated, it refers to Julien Gracq’s essay ‘Lautréamont toujours’, which was originally published in 1947, and it therefore cannot have been written before that date. A frustratingly vague reference to Glissant also points to a date after 1947 – the year in which he published his poem ‘Terre à Terre’, followed by ‘Laves’ in 1948 – as does the author’s ability to cite in its entirety André Breton’s ‘Sur la route de San Romano’, written in 1948.74 It is, then, more than probable that this is the text of a talk given to a group of students in Lyon in about 1949 or 1950, and that it is representative of cultural concerns shared by Fanon.
Whoever did write Le Surréalisme clearly had a very good knowledge of the subject, and a passion for it. It must have taken the better part of two hours to read the lecture, which deals in some detail with the origins and development of surrealism, looking at its beginnings in the ‘Cubist’ poetry of Apollinaire and in the manifestos of Breton, at the techniques of automatic writing, and even at the parallels between Salvador Dali’s notion of critical paranoia and Lacan’s early theory of the origins of psychosis. Obviously addressed to an audience with no more than a passing knowledge of surrealism, this is a paper by a young enthusiast anxious to share his passion for the topic rather than an academic intent upon analysing it. The general characterization of surrealism as a ‘new poetic activity characterized by mysticism and the spirit of revolt’ is unexceptional but not inaccurate, and it is the concluding remarks that are of most interest. Summing up, the anonymous author describes Rimbaud as one of surrealism’s most important forebears, and then refers to him as the first link in a new poetic chain which, through its ‘absolute and brutal aspirations’, links surrealism to the black poetry of Césaire, Senghor, Glissant ‘and so many other contemporary black poets’.
Reviewing Peau noire in 1952, the Martinican novelist Léonard Sainville remarked that it reminded him of Légitime défense, a little magazine published in 1932. Légitime défense was one of the first attempts to create a specifically Martinican literary-political culture, and the precursor of Tropiques. René Ménil worked on both journals. Légitime défense was an angry little magazine, and its brutal denunciations of social conditions in Martinique led to its being banned as subversive. Only one issue was published. The title is borrowed from that of the 1926 pamphlet in which André Breton both declares himself in solidarity with the coming Communist revolution and denounces the PCF daily L’Humanité for its intellectual ‘cretinism’ and its failure to play its self-appointed role as an organ of proletarian education.75 The young collective that produced Légitime défense was not so critical of the PCF, but one of its contributors – the twenty-five-year-old Ménil – outlined a programme that was scarcely in line with the orthodox Marxism of 1932:
The coloured West Indian expresses the feelings of an Other because the powers of his passions and imagination are not recognized. The black West Indian should therefore begin by recognizing his own passions, express only himself and, going against utility, take the path of dreams and poetry. In the course of his effort, he would encounter the fantastic images of which African and Oceanic statuettes are one expression, poems and stories, the jazz of black Americans and French works which by going beyond industry and by using the powers of passion and dreams, have conquered the freshness of Africa.76
A footnote points out that the ‘French works’ in question are those of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Jarry, Reverdy, the Dadaists and the surrealists, or in other words the very authors discussed by the author of ‘Le Surréalisme’. These were also the authors to whom Césaire introduced his students at the Lycée Schoelcher.
Sainville added that it seemed to him that Fanon knew nothing of his predecessors, and that his prise de conscience began