Fanon seems quite at home in Rivière-Pilote but his memory remains rather marginal to Martinique as a whole. There is no ‘Fanonist’ party. The connection between Fanon and the supporters of independence is somewhat tenuous and Peau noire is not a pro-independence manifesto. His association with Martinican nationalism was at its strongest in the early 1960s, when, inspired by the Algerian Revolution and Fanon’s interpretation of it, a group of young students founded the Organisation de la Jeunesse Anticolonialiste de la Martinique (OJAM) and called on their fellows to join the struggle for the liberation of the island.40 OJAM’s leading members were arrested for ‘plotting against the State’ and put on trial in France. They were finally acquitted on appeal in April 1964.41
Neither the tiny Communist Party of Martinique nor Césaire’s much more powerful party can take full responsibility for Fanon’s Martinican eclipse, but it is true that neither has done a great deal to preserve his memory. In 1982, a ‘Mémorial International’ to honour Fanon was organized in Fort-de-France, but no political party supported or financed it. The members of the small ‘Cercle Frantz Fanon’ founded by Fanon’s childhood friend Marcel Manville had to rely upon public donations from the people of Martinique to finance it.42 A total of 200,000 francs was raised and the organizing committee brought speakers from twenty-five countries to Fort-de-France.43 Aimé Césaire did not attend the celebrations, but he did at least make municipal facilities available to the organizers.44 According to a somewhat optimistic commentator on nationalism in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the Mémorial marked the return to the people of the first heroes of a pantheon: the marron and Frantz Fanon.45 Not everyone agreed. In the course of a televised debate, members of the audience asked why so much publicity was being given to someone who had betrayed France and taken the side of the terrorists of the FLN in Algeria.46
The underlying reason for the – at best – ambivalence towards Fanon is captured by a rare Martinican review of Les Damnés de la terre:
The fact is that Fanon denounces with extreme rigour all the ugliness of old Europe’s policy of colonization, without ever taking into account what the France of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, republican and secular France, has done for the country he came from: the French West Indies, for Fanon is Martinican. It was as a result of his noble freedom as a free and independent Frenchman that he felt himself obliged to side with the FLN and to place his science and conscience at its service.47
There are still those in this Département d’Outre-Mer who regard Fanon as a traitor to the republican and secular France, of which it has been an integral part since 1946, when the former ‘old colony’ acquired the same constitutional status as Charente-Maritime or Seine-et-Marne. One of his nieces has remarked that it is ‘not easy’ to be a Fanon in Martinique,48 though it has to be said that the family is prosperous enough. When he visited Martinique for the first and last time, Olivier Fanon discovered that many Martinicans regarded his father as a pariah. When he produced his passport – he is by choice an Algerian national – he sensed a certain hostility even within his own family, and had the impression that he was in the same position as the son of a harki – an Algerian who fought on the French side in the war of independence – who had returned to Algeria.49 Others interested in Fanon have experienced more overt hostility. When his first biographer told his hotelier what he was working on, he was unceremoniously asked to find alternative accommodation. He discovered that none of Fanon’s works were on sale in Fort-de-France, and that booksellers refused to order them.50 Such hostility is now a thing of the past, and mention of an interest in Fanon provokes little more than polite indifference. Fanon’s books, or at least Peau noire, masques blancs and Les Damnés de la terre, are on sale in Fort-de-France’s few bookshops, where they are somewhat incongruously shelved alongside the ‘Creolist’ works of Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau in the ‘local interest’ section. There is no hint outside Rivière-Pilote that Fanon might possibly be regarded as a national hero.
The novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, who knew Fanon, describes the delighted reactions of the black American students who realized that he came from the same island as their hero, and then adds that years can go by without the author of Les Damnés de la terre being mentioned in even left-wing newspapers published in Martinique. He explains: ‘It is difficult for a West Indian to be Fanon’s brother or friend, or simply his comrade or “compatriot”. Because, of all the French-speaking West Indian intellectuals, he was the only one who matched action to words by espousing the Algerian cause.’51 The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar recalls with some amusement how her casual remark that she had known Fanon immediately raised her status in the eyes of black Americans.52 She would not have got the same reaction in his native Martinique. Speaking for a younger generation of Martinicans, Patrick Chamoiseau compares the memory of Fanon to that of the marrons. There were in fact relatively few marrons in Martinique, mainly because there are very few places to run to on an island with a surface area of only 1,080 square kilometres, but that does not diminish their importance for the collective memory of Martinique, as they are proof that the wretched of the earth can rise up. For Chamoiseau, who first read Fanon in his teens and at a time when he was influenced by the American black power movement, Fanon plays a similar role.53
There is no ‘Avenue Frantz Fanon’ in metropolitan France. Even though some psychiatrists who work with immigrants acknowledge, like Robert Berthelier, that Fanon’s clinical writings provide at least a starting point for reflections on transcultural psychiatry, no psychiatric institution in France bears his name.54 When Jacques Postel, who knew Fanon at medical school in Lyon, suggested that the journal Information psychiatrique should devote a special issue to reprinting a selection of Fanon’s papers, a number of his colleagues objected and muttered about the need to respect the memory of ‘our boys who died in Algeria’. It should be noted that Information psychiatrique has always been the most liberal of French psychiatric journals, and that Fanon published some important articles in it. And when Postel distributed a questionnaire to his psychiatry students at the Censier faculty in Paris, he discovered that whilst 95 per cent of them had heard of Fanon, only 5 per cent knew that he was a psychiatrist.55
It is not difficult to understand why Fanon has been largely forgotten in France, where there is now little interest in his work. Almost ten years after Fanon’s death, a critic noted that Fanon had been forgotten because France wanted to forget something else, namely a war in Algeria that lasted for eight years. France wanted to forget ‘one million dead, two million men, women and children in camps, police raids and torture in France and, at the same time, apart from rare fits of indignation, the passivity of the masses and the spinelessness of the entire Left’.56 It is of course difficult to remember something that never happened, and France has been slow to recognize that there was indeed an Algerian war. From 1954 onwards, peace was maintained in Algeria; police operations were undertaken; and rebels, terrorists and bandits were hunted down, but there was no war. Algeria consisted of three French départements, and a nation-state cannot declare war on part of its own territory. It was only in 1999 that France accepted that the Algerian war did take place and that references in legislative documents to ‘peace-keeping operations’ should be replaced by references to ‘the Algerian war’.57 The war, or ‘the war without a name’, has never been truly forgotten.58 There is an abundant literature on the subject, with new histories appearing at regular intervals. There is, however, no definitive ‘History’ and no public consensus as to the meaning