Frantz Fanon. David Macey

were ‘repatriated’ to a France in which many of them had never set foot before 1962 and of just how many died when the police opened fire on Algerian demonstrators in Paris in October 1961 all remain bitterly controversial.⁵⁹

      The memory of Algeria is still an uneasy one. A stamp issued on 10 May 1997 commemorates the ‘French combatants’ who served in North Africa between 1952 and 1962, and thus blurs the differences between the Algerian war and the lesser conflicts that took place in Morocco and Tunisia. Even before it was issued, François Fillon, Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and Space, was at pains to stress that it did not commemorate the ceasefire of 19 March 1962.⁶⁰ The names of the streets of Paris and other French cities provide a laconic account of important dates and names in French history. There is no ‘rue du 19 mars 1962’ in Paris, but there are streets and squares of that name in, for instance, a number of small towns in the Breton department of Finistère. Such names are testimony to the efforts of veterans’ associations anxious to ensure that their members do not become part of a forgotten generation. They have fought a long and difficult battle: it was only in 1974 that they were officially recognized as veterans and granted the appropriate pension rights.⁶¹ Whether or not French war memorials commemorate the memory of young men who died in Algeria depends upon the decisions – and the political complexion – of local councils, though they were informed as early as July 1959 that the names of France’s Algerian dead could join those of the victims of the two world wars and Indochina.⁶² Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was made in 1966, and won the Venice International Film Festival’s Grand Prix. It was a popular success in Algeria, but it was not until 1970 that it was granted a certificate for exhibition in France. Protests and threats of violence from veterans’ associations and groups representing the pied noir community forced the distributors to cancel the planned screening,⁶³ and it was only in October 1971 that the film was finally shown in Paris. The memory of Frantz Fanon is therefore not a comfortable one. It is the memory of a black Frenchman from one of the old colonies who eventually spoke the defiant performative: ‘We Algerians’.⁶⁴ Aimé Césaire puts it very simply: ‘He chose. He became Algerian. Lived, fought and died Algerian.’⁶⁵ Such a man is not easy to remember in France.

      Given his posthumous fame as a Third World revolutionary to be discussed alongside Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara or Vo Nguyen Giap, it is somewhat paradoxical to recall that Fanon was not particularly well known in his own lifetime. Editions du Seuil’s file on his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs, contains pitifully few reviews and not many of them are flattering. At the time of its author’s death, Peau noire had been out of print for years, and it was not reprinted until 1965. The articles Fanon wrote for the FLN’s paper El Moudjahid in Tunis between 1957 and 1960 were published unsigned, and few of their readers could have identified them as being by Kahn’s ‘pamphleteer from Martinique.’ It was only when they were reprinted together with other materials in 1964 that they were identified as being by Fanon.⁶⁶ In response to Ernest Gellner’s sneering comment that Fanon had no influence in Algeria and was ‘for export only’, Eqbal Ahmad, the Indian political scientist who once worked with Fanon and who tends to overstate his impact upon Algerian politics, rightly points out that he was ‘barely known in “international literary-intellectual circles” until after his death at thirty-six’.⁶⁷ The first French edition of Les Damnés de la terre, which by 1985 had sold 155,000 copies and had been translated into nineteen languages, sold only 3,300 copies in France – poor sales figures for what has come to be known as one of the classics of decolonization.⁶⁸ It was the publication in 1965 of the American translation which turned it into a bestseller that was reprinted twice before it reached the bookstores and went through five paperback reprints within the space of a year.⁶⁹

      Jean-Paul Sartre’s notorious preface to Les Damnés de la terre introduced an inflammatory text and attracted more hostility than Fanon’s essay itself but did little to present its author, who remained an almost anonymous ‘African, man of the Third World and former colonial subject’ who happened to be a doctor.⁷⁰ An obituary tribute to Fanon published in the Tunisian press adds to the air of mystery. It is by Maurice Maschino, one of the few young Frenchmen to have refused to serve with the French army in Algeria and to have chosen exile in Tunis, and the classic personification of the so-called ‘Algerian generation’.⁷¹ In some ways, the almost anonymous image of Fanon provides the basis for later identifications with and appropriations of Fanon, precisely because it is at once so ill-defined and so stereotypical. For Maschino:

      Fanon is essentially a militant; more so than anyone else, he was what he did and existed in terms of his commitment – and the rest is of no consequence. Given that his existence merges into the fight he fought, the best tribute we can pay to our departed friend – or brother – is to evoke the continual struggle he waged, even as a young man, for freedom.

      But how can we fail to see that the best way to kill Fanon is, precisely, to treat him as though he were dead. And that, what is more, we betray him – this man who never said ‘I’, who existed only through and for the revolution – if we make a front-page splash of elements of a biography which seem to turn this Algerian resistance fighter into a particular case (not everyone is a psychiatrist and not everyone was born in Martinique).⁷²

      Revolutionaries, it would seem, are destined for heroic anonymity. It is true that Fanon never gave a personal interview, but it is also true that in Peau noire, by far the most personal of his works, Fanon does say ‘I’ or, rather, that a variety of ‘I’s speak there. The anonymous integrity Maschino ascribes to Fanon easily becomes a source of confusion as to who and what he was. The militant was also a husband and a father, as well as a Martinican who enjoyed both the local rum and the beguine music of Alexandre Stellio, but he readily becomes an all-purpose revolutionary icon who can be transported anywhere and invoked in the name of any cause. Fanon’s complexity becomes obscured, and it is easily forgotten that the revolutionary psychiatrist – and it must be stressed from the outset that he was not a psychoanalyst – was also a clinician who worked well within the parameters of normal science and who, even as he was on the point of resigning his post and leaving Algeria, was conducting drug trials in time-honoured fashion.⁷³

      Maschino is a member of a generation who, faced with the prospect of a lengthy and potentially dangerous period of military service in a war they could not assume as their own, could find a new relevance in the opening words of Paul Nizan’s Aden-Arabie, first published in 1931 and republished in the spring of 1960: ‘I was twenty. I will never let anyone say that those are the best years of your life. Everything threatens a young man with ruin . . .’⁷⁴ Nizan left the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in protest at the signing of the Soviet–German non-aggression pact of 1939 and was killed in May 1940 as the British unit with which he was serving as a liaison officer retreated towards Dunkirk. He was promptly denounced by his former comrades as a traitor who had always been a police spy. When Aden-Arabie was republished in 1960 with an angry preface by Sartre, Nizan became an important icon for those who, like Maschino, both supported the FLN and savagely criticised the French left, and especially the PCF, for its failure to lend any real support to the cause of Algerian independence.⁷⁵ Aden-Arabie and Les Chiens de garde, which is its more philosophical companion volume, were calls to arms and critiques of the official philosophers whose very ‘humanism’ was a betrayal of a suffering and oppressed humanity: ‘Today’s philosophers still blush when they admit to having betrayed men for the bourgeoisie. When we betray the bourgeoisie for men, let’s not blush when we admit to being traitors.’⁷⁶ For Sartre, Nizan was ‘the man who said “no” to the very end’; in 1960, it was no bad thing ‘to begin with this naked revolt: everything begins with a refusal’.⁷⁷

      ‘Refusal’ [refus] was the title of Maschino’s autobiographical account of his desertion. Another deserter was quick to identify with Nizan, and explains why one of the tiny groups that actively supported the FLN by channelling its funds across the Swiss border took the name ‘The Nizan Group’: Nizan was ‘the name of Sartre’s friend, who had just been republished by Maspero. He said there was only one solution: betray the traitors.’⁷⁸ Fanon never read Nizan’s words, but there is an almost uncanny similarity between Nizan’s call for the betrayal of the traitors