One of the reasons why Fanon can be such an embarrassment was inadvertently revealed in October 2010. Jean-Paul Guerlain, the seventy-three-year-old former head of the celebrated perfume-maker was being interviewed for a midday news bulletin and described how he created his Samsara perfume – a blend of sandalwood and jasmine inspired by his first wife: ‘For once I began to work like a nigger. I don’t know if niggers have always really worked . . .’ The interviewer allowed the remark to pass without comment, but various anti-racist and black groups immediately protested, called for Guerlain’s products to be boycotted and threatened legal action. The only member of the political class who thought the incident worthy of comment was Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who dismissed Guerlain’s remarks as ‘pathetic’. The firm sent out an email expressing regrets that his comments might damage the company’s image and pointing out that he was no longer either a shareholder or an employee, whilst Guerlain personally apologized for his remarks, but the damage had been done.8
The most startling response came from TV journalist Audrey Pulvar, speaking on the evening news: ‘Le nègre, il t’emmerde.’ She followed this outburst up with a blog entitled ‘Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai.’ Pulvar is one of the few non-white faces to have gained a significant presence in the French audiovisual media. She was born in Martinique in 1972. Both Pulvar and the journalists who covered the story attributed the stinging ‘Le nègre, il t’emmerde’ to Aimé Césaire, described by Le Figaro as a ‘poet, politicial and resolute anti-colonialist, born in Martinique.’ Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai is indeed the title of the last book published by Césaire, who died in 2008, but ‘Le nègre, il t’emmerde’ is not associated with Césaire alone.9 It could also be a slightly distorted quotation from the most famous passage in Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. The passage in question describes the traumatic encounter with the ‘white gaze’ that begins when a child turns to its mother and remarks ‘Tiens, un nègre’ (‘Look, a negro’) and ends with the defiant ‘Le beau nègre, il t’emmerde, madame’.10 Emmerder is, to say the least, ‘vulgar’: The ‘handsome nègre’s’ words can be rendered as ‘sod off, madame’, ‘bugger off, madame’ or ‘screw you, madame.’ That Fanon’s first book is still relevant to any analysis of racism in France is cleverly illustrated by a fictitious interview published in the journal Ravages in 2011. The pretence is that the journal’s editor Georges Marbeck is in Algiers for the first meeting of the Mouvement de fraternité universelle and suddenly notices someone sitting at the back of the room: ‘black skin, white hair’.11 The elderly man is Frantz Fanon, who agrees to be interviewed. Marbeck’s questions were obviously written for the occasion; Fanon’s ‘answers’ consist of unaltered quotations from his published work. Sadly, the ‘interview’ is still of contemporary relevance.
It is significant that Pulvar is, like Fanon, originally from Martinique, where nègre can have many different meanings, as will be discussed below. In conversation, it can have friendly, even joking connotations, but the street sign ‘Pointe des nègres’ on the waterfront in Fort-de-France is a daily reminder of its grimmer associations: this was the site of the old slave market, a reminder that a nègre is the descendent of slaves. From time to time, there are reminders that there were also slave owners in Martinique, and that their descendents are still there. The békés are the descendents of the ‘white creoles’ who once owned the sugar plantations, and now own both banana plantations and the supermarkets that have a stranglehold of Martinique’s retail economy. The statistics are not easy to interpret and there is no breakdown of property ownership by ethnicity, but the widespread belief that the békés still control Martinique’s economy appears to be well founded. It is unusual for a member of this ethno-class to speak out in public, but a documentary shown on Canal Plus in February 2009 gave one of them the opportunity to do so. The documentary, Les Derniers Maîtres de la Martinique, included an interview with the béké businessman Alain Huygues-Despointes: ‘When I see mixed-race families of blacks and whites, their children are born different colours, and there is no harmony. I don’t think that’s right. We have tried to preserve our race . . . Historians speak only of the negative aspects of slavery, and that is to be regretted.’12 Other spokesmen from the béké community rushed to condemn Huygue-Despointes and to claim that all was well in Martinique, and that such prejudices were a thing of the past. One of their number then confused the issue still further and destroyed his own case. Arguing that the béké community was now more open that it before, Roger de Jaham pointed out that his family was related by marriage to ‘both the black world and the mulatto world.’13 Martinique consists, by his admission, of three ‘worlds’, just like the Martinique of Peau noire, masques blancs.
Les Derniers Maîtres de la Martinique was aired at a moment when social tensions were very high. At the beginning of February, the island was paralyzed by a general strike called by a federation of trade unions to protest against the high cost of living and what was called in Creole pwofitasyon (‘profitation’), meaning both ‘excessive exploitation’ and ‘taking advantage of those weaker than yourself.’14 The protest movement began in January in Guadeloupe, where it was stronger and where there was serious violence in the streets. Most of the demands put forward were economic, and they were to some extent met when the lowest paid were awarded wage increases, but the underlying tensions have not been resolved. A collection of documents from the movement included many expressions of anger about the béké and many enraged responses to the TV documentary. It also included a poem written in 1979 by one Alain Phoebé Caprice. Entitled ‘Enfantillages’ (‘Childish Things’), it ends:
In their eyes, my people is a people of children
Of Children
Who never grow up
Of Children
You hold by the hand
By keeping them hungry
That they kill when they are disobedient
To whom they tell stories
Stories about whites
To get them to sleep more easily
Without any trouble15
This was the most significant social conflict to break out in Martinique and Guadeloupe for decades, and many took the view that the underlying issue was that of the legal and administrative status of the two Départements d’Outre-Mer (DOMs). A referendum was organized for the beginning of 2010 and raised the issue of greater autonomy, which had long been on the demands of local politicians. The offer of ‘autonomy within the republic’ was rejected by a significant majority. It is hard not to concur with Le Monde’s comment to the effect that, whatever politicians and supporters of independence might say, the population was deeply afraid of being ‘dumped’ by France.16
None of the documents in the collection published by the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon mentions Fanon, and there is no record of his name or work being invoked by the protestors, even though they would probably have recognized many of their concerns in Peau noire, masques blancs and its descriptions of Martinique. Audry Pulvar’s angry outburst suggests that Fanon’s status in both Martinique and France is, to say the least, ambiguous. She used a phrase that can be associated with both Césaire and Fanon, but identifies only the former, more or less obliging Fanon. Fanon appears to have been consigned to a strange purgatory that exists between being remembered and being forgotten.
The first edition of this book appeared in 2000. Textual revisions have been kept to a minimum and are mainly concerned with factual errors that crept into the original. The bibliographical notes included in the afterword go some way to describe historical-social developments relevant to any reading of Fanon and to the recent literature on him.