by Paddy O'Halloran
Biographers are set a difficult task in Frantz Fanon. Apart from recounting the narrative of the
subject’s life and situating him or her within a history, a biographer—at
least, a good one—will lend meaning to the subject’s life, or, better yet, will
elucidate for the reader the meanings which the subject ascribed to his or her
life by action and consequence. Gleaning
the importance from Fanon’s life, a life which, despite its brevity, was
brimming with meaning, proves a trying adventure.
David
Macey’s ponderous volume on Fanon (2000) illustrates this difficulty well;
either Macey is too shy, or Fanon too inscrutable, but whatever the case,
through most of the book’s five hundred pages Fanon remains elusive—there and then
gone in a forest of historical detail.
Alice Cherki’s slim ‘portrait’ ([2000] 2006), which is here the focus,
does better, yet she frequently and apologetically reminds the reader of
Fanon’s reticence about himself, what she calls his ‘extreme discretion’ in
personal revelations (2006, 80). She
goes so far as to say that he was ‘entirely incapable […] and would not have
known how to begin talking about himself’ (2006, 6). Fanon, the man, even to someone who knew him
personally, as Alice Cherki did, is obscured in a self-imposed mystery; the
details of his life were, to him, ‘extraneous’ (Cherki, 2006, 1). For those who did know him, it was mainly in
his day-to-day social and professional interactions, his past remaining, for
the most part, behind him and undiscussed.
Fanon, in this reserve, and by avoiding any moments of open
self-mythologizing stymies the biographers in one of their favorite pastimes,
scouring their subject’s life for early signs of and motivations for their
later deeds; he is, for a biographer, the rare hero that resists oracular
intervention.
Another reason that Fanon persistently evades his
biographers is that his writings and ideas loomed so thunderously in the
atmosphere of racism and revolution that obtained in the 1950s, and of decolonization
in the 1960s. Nor are his ideas less
tempestuous in retrospect. Biographers,
Cherki included, spend much of their time on description and interpretation of Fanon’s
political writing, and on the reception of his words by others, then and now. For
example (among many available), Cherki writes several pages about his articles for
El Moudjahid, and devotes an entire
chapter to The Wretched of the Earth
(2006, 106-111; 170-184). From the time
they were published, and continuing since his death, Fanon’s books and ideas have
been subjected to critique and interpretation, translation and suppression,
sometimes to appropriation and distortion (Cherki, 2006; Lazarus, 2011). They have had a longer life in the public eye
than he.
This is
not unusual of course, that a person’s ideas are more well-known and more often
discussed than that person’s everyday life; indeed, who, without the benefit a
biography, would know anything intimate about Fanon, or about anyone else, for
that matter? However, there still is the
impression, unique to Fanon among biographical subjects, of opacity. The man that produced ideas of such force,
articulated so eloquently and powerfully, seems, maybe of his own volition, to stand
only at a great remove behind them, obscured by the cloud formed of the
coalescence of his words. Achille
Mbembe, too, senses this tangibility of Fanon’s thoughts, writing of Fanon’s
‘metallic thinking’ and of his work as ‘a weapon of steel’ for the oppressed
(2012, 26). Faced with ideas so utterly physical,
and a man who defies substantiation in ink and paper, it is no wonder that all
approaches to Fanon are either cut through the thicket of his words, or,
alternately, laid with the paving-stones of his ideas.
Fanon,
no doubt, would be pleased by the biographical conundrum his life presents.
‘One should not,’ he once said, ‘relate one’s past, but stand as a testimony to
it’ (Cherki, 2006, 1). In spite of this,
it is clear that Fanon was principled in standing as testimony to the present, and of working for a future. ‘His’, says Mbembe, ‘is a metamorphic
thought’ (2012, 26). Similarly, Cherki
writes that ‘Fanon was a tireless militant for the idea of culture in motion
and continually altered by new situations’; he was a man, she quotes another
who knew him, ‘always in motion’ who ‘knew how to pull others into this motion’
(2006, 210; 128). Principle, alteration,
motion: these are the trademarks of a revolutionary.
That
Fanon was a revolutionary is not in question.
Perhaps just how extensive was his revolutionary character and thought
may not be completely acknowledged. His
expressions of understanding and resistance to racism are well known, as is his
work for the Algerian revolution and for African decolonization generally. A very important facet of Fanon as a
revolutionary, though, is his work as a psychiatrist. Working in both Algeria and Tunisia, Fanon
was diligent in practicing a profoundly humanist and culturally sensitive form
of psychiatry that was as important in his life as the independence of Algeria
or the expression of humanity by black people.
Cherki describes how, at the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville,
‘Fanon wasted no time in implementing’ a model of sociotherapy that ‘[sought]
not only to humanize the institution but to transform it whole cloth into a
therapeutic environment’ (2006, 65) and also how his ‘desire to change the
therapeutic approach to madness and his commitment to seeing that change
through was evident in the upheaval he caused in such a short time’ in the
racist, European institution of psychiatry as it was practiced in Algeria when
he arrived there (2006, 68). He was
quick to recognize and correct errors in his approach, as when he changed the
unsuccessful activities intended for male, Muslim patients to suit
culturally-accepted norms (Cherki, 2006, 70).
His fight against the anti-social, against racism and colonialism was
not only joined in the world outside the psychiatric hospitals where these
struggles were manifested in open warfare, but within the hospitals;
psychiatry, he said, ‘[had] to be political’ (Cherki, 2006, 72).
Fanon, it must be remembered, died very young, his life
‘cut short’ in the oft-used but here especially apt phrase employed by Cherki,
at the age of thirty-six. There was no resolution to his ideas, no tempering or
levelling by his own further exploration.
There could be no completion to his projects in politics or in medicine
in which he could play a part; no conception of his life’s meaning as whittled
out in the reductive years of old age. The
course of his thought, as of his life, was ‘cut’, almost literally,
mid-sentence. What hope has a biographer
when, contemplating a ‘complete’ Fanon, he or she encounters innumerable blank
pages that cannot be filled? They encounter
the sudden edge…and must either retreat into detail or plunge into a space
where only ideas exist, un-rooted, any longer, in a living Frantz Fanon but
carried forward by a process of constant motion and revolution wherein his
‘metallic’ politics must expand or contract with the temperature of the times;
his life’s meaning changing shape at the forges of innumerable thinkers and
actors.
Citations
Cherki, Alice.
([2000]2006) Frantz Fanon: A Portrait,
trans. Nadia Benabid. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Lazarus, Neil. (2011) The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Macey, David. (2000) Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta
Books.
Mbembe, Achille. (2012)
‘Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon’, African Studies 71: 19-28.
