reviewed by Fezokuhle Mthonti
Alice
Cherki’s Frantz Fanon: A Portrait is
a rich biographical account of the events that shaped Fanon’s trajectory as a
key psychological and political thinker in Post-Colonial and Critical Humanist
thought. The book is a nuanced account of how Fanon himself was a
“yes that vibrated to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to
watch the dissolution of truths that he had worked out for himself.” (1986:2)
It is an attempt to humanise the thinker that we have come to know as Fanon through a truly Fanonian praxis of
recognition, a kind of strategic historicism, and an attempt to reconcile a
particular subjectivity with the universal.
That
being said however, it is quite difficult to condense Cherki’s work without
being reductive because the text oscillates between detailed historical and
factual accounts to broader and overarching themes of alienation, negation and
finally an attempt to resolve an emancipatory praxis that does not conceive of
itself as being teleologically constituted.
I have therefore chosen the notion of empire and language as an entry point
into this biography. While this covers only a fraction of Cherki’s analysis, it
is my hope that these ideas will still try to give the reader a comprehensive
sense of the book.
In
reading Cherki’s biography I was particularly struck by the nature of the
French Empire and how Fanon’s experiences in both France and Algeria served as
a kind of spatial encounter with the nature of the empire within the colonising
city as well as the colonised city. In trying to make sense of some of the
occurrences in Cherki’s biography I will be referring to Robert Aldrich paper
entitled The French Empire: Colonialism
and its Aftermath where I will be analysing some of the specificities of
French Colonialism and in so doing relate them to Fanon’s experiences as
narrated by Cherki. I would argue that all theory emanates from a particular
political and sociological context, so in revealing some of the specificities
that might have coloured Fanon’s experiences with colonialism, I hope to
seriously consider how he might have come to the political and psychoanalytical
motivations that he theorised about in his work.
Aldrich
argues that “France, like Britain, but unlike other colonial powers, conquered
a truly global empire – from North Africa through western and equatorial Africa
to Madagascar and Indochina, as well as the vieilles colonies and new
ones in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.”(2008:3) He continue
to argue that “if the Raj was, as the cliché has it, the ‘jewel in the crown’
of the British, Algeria was the single most important French
possession.”(2008:3) This may account for why France was reticent to grant the
Algerian Colony their independence until 1964. Although Fanon is said to have written
prophetically about the nature of revolution and subsequent independence, he himself did not live
to see an independent Algeria.
What is
of specific interest to me in the nature of French colonialism is the policies
and the value systems which informed a kind of ‘assimilation of colonies.’ (2008:4)
Cherki writes that “when Fanon arrived in Algeria in 1953, he set foot in
territory considered French since 1830; a corner of France, as the popular
claim went, older than Savoy or Nice.” (2000:38) Which is to say that the way in which the French colony perceived of
‘civilising its colonies’ was through imposing its cultural and architectural
norms on their colonies. This kind of one sided integration was symptomatic of
the French imperial structure. Aldrich argues that “these political structures
reflected, too, the important issue of
citizenship in the French empire. In principle, anyone could become a citizen,
and this was touted as both a goal and an honour in the meritocratic,
republican France.” (2008:6)
That
being said however, Cherki alerts the reader to the fact that “the three
departments of France that constituted Algeria at the time were a pure fiction
that never succeeded in masking that this was a colonized territory.”(2000:38)
In fact she says that “it took the recently arrived Fanon very little time to
understand that Algeria had in fact never been French.” (2008:38)
In
trying to create another version of French motherland, the Algerian community
was deeply racially stratified and no one except the actual European
administrators had a legitimate claim to citizenship. This cultural subjugation
was thin a veneer for hierarchical exclusion because it did not speak to a
system of coexistence between the coloniser and the colonised. The quest for ‘model citizenship’ which the
colonized society was meant to aspire to, resulted in high levels of
discrimination amongst differing cultural groups and that in turn transpired
into a pervasive culture of racist intolerance in Algeria. Cherki in fact notes
that “racism was habitual; it was unperturbed , understood, and viewed as
entirely natural” within that society. (2000:44)
Fanon
was undoubtedly averse to this kind of cultural subjugation and theorised about
these exclusionary forms of power in France with his publication of Black Skin White Mask as well as his
subsequent paper in Algeria entitled Racism
et culture.
I would argue that it was here where Fanon
started to really grapple with the nature of the French Imperial power and
their occupation of Algeria. It is at this point that he revisits his ideas on
racism in Black Skin, White Mask and
really starts to unpack how the colonial occupation, and the inherent racism and
alienation therein, were repackaged into ideas of elite French culture. I would
argue that France’s colonial occupation of Algeria reflects a kind of modernity
which starts to inscribe a set of value systems that inform a ‘kind/ way of
being’. It is a protracted kind of racism, which is inherently more damaging because it starts
to prescribe ‘a kind of normative
standard’ which is at its core exclusionary to most of the inhabitants of the
colony. Cherki reflects, what I have
referred to as a protracted and insidious kind of racism, by saying that
“biological racism, with its scientific aspirations, gives way to cultural
racism, which, has been quietly bolstered by a modernity that places account
not on skull formation, or skin colour, or the shape of a nose, but on ways of
existing.”(2000:87)
Further
to this, I would contend that in pursuing a career in psychiatry , Fanon was
trying to establish a serious conversation between those who were markedly
absent from the societal space, like his patients in Blida who had occupied a
site of negated subjectivity by virtue of their institutionalised geography , and those that were rendered visible by the
colony. Cherki points to this in saying that “the patients suffering follows
from his exiled condition as ‘a man (sic) who dies anew every day, living in a
feeling of total insecurity, threatened emotionally and isolated socially’,
excluded from the agora, deprived of the right to a real
existence.”(2000:17)
This
level of consciousness that he was able to tap into in his psychiatric work, was a consciousness that he himself
shared by virtue of his ‘othered identity and personhood ’ in the colony. I
imagine that Fanon really came to this consciousness through his own painful
experiences after his involvement in World War Two where “he had fought in a
war of racial equality and human brotherhood (sic) only to find himself
isolate, ignored [and] the subject of contempt.”(2000:13)
In
trying to further understand the psychological, philosophical and political predispositions
that lodged themselves into Fanon’s consciousness, I think that it is important
to interrogate both the physical and the metaphysical world that a black
subject might encounter from the moment of birth. Cherki gives the reader a
sense of this world in arguing that “this white world rules and exists as the
sole referent, not only in political and economic terms but in all other
registers as well; linguistic, cultural, mythical, while supplying the values
that constitute the subject from the moment he(sic) enters the world.”
(2000:26)
For the
purposes of this discussion, I will be focusing
specifically on the nature of
language and the linguistic dimension of ‘the world’ that was theorised by
Fanon and subsequently described by Cherki. In Black
Skin, White Mask Fanon opens with a
chapter on The Negro and Language.
Fanon understands the phenomenon of language to be of basic importance and in
so doing accounts for this presupposition by telling the reader that “it is
implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.”(1952:8)
The
linguistic practices of a culture can effectively work to affirm your presence
as a subject ,or, to deny it. For Fanon and his contemporaries the French
linguistic paradigm acted as an incessant denial of their personhood. Cherki argues that “the experience of finding
oneself trapped in the Master’s dominant and exclusive language was one that
was deeply shared by Algerians of Fanon’s generation.” (2000:26)
I would
argue that the means with which language could work as a form of alienation
were and continue to be fundamentally profound because of the inherent nature of
language: which is inextricably tied to knowledge making, meaning and the cultural and conceptual ideas adopted by a society. If one
is outside of that linguistic domain, they effectively are outside of the
ideas, value systems and principles that underpin that societal framework.
This is
why it was important for Fanon to find new strategies of knowledge and
meaning-making within the context of that language. Cherki writes that “Fanon wished to go beyond
meaning, to write inside the sensory dimension of language in order to give
rise to a new way of thinking that would depend on something more than
conceptual jockeying.” (2000:27)
It would
be my estimation that in order to do this, Fanon felt that one had to
propel that language into motion. One
can see this in the way that Fanon’s books were written. They were
characterised by Fanon, dictating to his wife Josie, whilst pacing up and down the room. Cherki points to
this in saying that ‘rhythmically, Fanon’s work is “underscored by a body in
motion and the cadences of the breathing voices.” (2000:27)
This in
my opinion is Fanon’s attempt at disrupting the colonial language by breathing
his own person into its literary form. In the unconventional writing that
characterises Black Skin, White Masks
and Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is
able to reclaim his subjectivity in the literary form of the French
language. Cherki argues that “Fanon’s
ideas teach us how to defy the defeated norms and expose the discourse and the
acts that are devised to turn subjects into objects.” (2000:222)
I would
argue that the declamatory proclamations that coloured Fanon’s work have also lodged themselves into the
consciousness of West African Fictional writers in the form of a literary
device called Translingualism. Translingualism is a form of literary
resistance to the hegemony of Western languages. It is an attempt to
reconcile literature with a kind of cultural authenticity. Through the insertion of African philosophy,
ideas and African folklore this literary device attempts to displace the
hegemony of the English language by reinscribing into standardised formal
English, the linguistic rules of African language. In an article entitled The Non-Ijo Reader and the Pragmatics of
Translingualism, Patrick Scott argues that device uses “the potential
flexibility of English to Africanise their style by manipulating rhythm and register and lexicon; using a kind
of pidgin for colloquial speech to represent in English the multilingualism of
African society.”(1990:77)
Prolific
Nigerian authors like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and
Ben Okri make use of this device in their respective fictional works. It would
be my assertion that this kind of linguistic resistance is an attempt to
subvert the imperial language so that the ‘perceived other’ can stake their
claim into the value systems that shape meaning and knowledge making
within in a society. I would argue that it is an attempt to
negotiate and reconcile with one’s own sense of freedom through a linguistic
framework that has locked them into a kind of ‘othered particularity.’ To some extent I would contend that in using
this literary device, the black subject not only calls for a recognition of their
difference, but calls for that difference because “it hears the mark of history
, including the history of domination.”(2000:32)
I think
it is an attempt to transcend from that which is particular to that which is
universal by reclaiming a plethora of voices and affirming them as legitimate
and tangible subjectivities. I think that this strategy serves as a challenge
to the kind of modernity which Cherki contends is profiting “from the
diminishing of the subject”. (2000:221)
Furthermore,
I think that both Fanon’s approach to written verse and the nature of
translingualism challenge how “the other is repeatedly assigned to a less than
human status, until such time as the
other can be entirely excluded from humanity.” (2000:221)
The act
of ‘hearing history’ in this way presents itself in Cherki’s text through
Fanon’s critique of prominent psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s 1950 text entitled
Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of
Colonisation where he accounts for the colonial relationships within the
colony of Madagascar. One of the main criticisms that Fanon levelled against
Mannoni is that he had negated the presence of the Malagasy into an obscure
otherness by not accounting for their respective histories.
That
being said, we can see that for Fanon the act of historicizing a subject was
fundamentally important because it was so inextricably tied to a more
philosophical conversation of belonging. This conversation was effectively tied
to ones claim to humanity and the way in which one asserted their place within
humanity.
In attempting to ‘historicise Fanon’s
epoch’(2000:2) in this biography, I feel that Cherki is also trying to
establish a sense of placement for Fanon as a political and psychological
thinker of the human race. In fact in trying to do this, I think that Cherki is
emulating what she believes Fanon would have done for himself. I think that she
expresses this when she says that “Fanon was a helpless believer in humankind.
He believed that human beings, provided that they were in possession of
language and of their own history as subjects, could progress from difference
to the universal. (2000:35)
Works Cited:
Aldrich.
R. 2008. The French Empire: Colonialism and Aftermath. Sydney: Comparative
Imperial Transformations
Cherki.
A. 2000. Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press
Fanon.
F. 1986. Black Skin, White Mask. London:
Pluto Press
Scott.
P. Gabriel Okara’s ‘The Voice’: The Non –Ijo Reader and the Pragmatics of
Translingualism. Volume 21. No 3. Pp75 -88. Indiana University Press