by Nigel Gibson, June 2013, Algiers
When Sliman Hachi, the
director of the Centre National de Recherche Préhistorique Anthropologiques et
Historique (CNRPAH), announced that Olivier Fanon had donated his parents’
books to the Centre, the question that Matthieu Renault and I asked was, “When
could we take at look at them?” We were in Algiers for a conference on “Africa
Today and Fanon” organized by CNRPAH and Matthieu was leaving the next day. The
library was a mixture of Frantz and Josie Fanon’s books, so during a break in
the conference I asked Olivier Fanon about the collection. Apparently, these
were the books that his father had left when he left the country in December
1956 and, as far as I understand, Josie had boxed them up and taken them to Lyon. We can only assume that they developed a new library in Tunis. Certainly, notes Alice
Cherki, Fanon liked to frequent the bookstore owned by a Monsieur Levy and at
one point asked his assistant Marie-Jeanne Manuellan to purchase everything in
the shop by Freud.
We were not totally sure
that books published between 1956 and 1961 were only Josie’s since it was not
impossible that Josie came back to Algeria with both her books and her
husband’s. Nevertheless Matthieu and I made a working assumption that we would
not consider anything published after 1956 (including, for example, a whole
slew of Mao writings published in 1960) since we could only speculate about
what happened to the books Fanon had accumulated in Tunis. Of the 1400 books in
the collection, there are roughly 440 that were published in or before 1956.
Though we couldn’t be sure which of the 440 were Frantz’s and which were
Josie’s (assuming that they didn’t share books), we based our search on the
titles in the Centre’s catalogue. It soon became clear that while there were
many books from Fanon’s days in France (and referenced in Black Skin White Masks) there were many important volumes that
weren’t in the collection. In other words, essential books that Fanon would
have definitely owned, like Césaire’s Notebooks
to the Return to my Native Land, Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache de langue française, Sartre’s Anti-Semite
and the Jew and Being and Nothingness
and so on. Nonetheless, for the short time we had available, there would be
plenty of material to look at.
We had, perhaps mistakenly, understood from Hachi
that we would not have access to the full donation but have to ask for books
individually. I had the image of a national library (not the British but the
Welsh one actually, which I visited when I was an undergraduate at Aberystwyth
35 years ago) with librarians going into the stacks and bringing back volumes.
But when we arrived at the Centre, the staff was a little surprised. The books
were in boxes behind a wall of bookshelves. This meant carrying boxes of books
and negotiating the narrow space behind the bookshelves. In other words, the
catalogue had created an alphabetical/ numerical order but that order didn’t
translate to the boxes. That work had not yet been done. The indexers have
simply taken books out of the boxes, typed in the author names and titles and
put them back in boxes. There was no rhyme or reason why a book was in one box
or another and inside the boxes the books were often poorly packed. The boxes
themselves weren’t uniform. These were the kind of boxes any one would use to
move books: electronics boxes, moving boxes, and so on in all shapes and sizes
and some too big and consequently difficult to move when full of books.
Matthieu was interested
to find De Beauvoir’s Second Sex and
CLR James’ (the first edition of his book had mistakenly named him P.I.R.
James) Black Jacobins. I was
interested in checking the Marx and Lenin volumes and we both wanted to
look at Kojéve’s Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel and Hegel’s Phenomenology.
As we worked our way
through the boxes we would skirt Josie’s books, avoid the collected works of
Kim Il Sung and Mao, and pass on the many editions of Fanon’s works in
translation. I came across some Freud
volumes. The Introduction to
Psychoanalysis was quite heavily marked up and included such unorthodox
comments as “Freud is a paranoiac” and “you are mad in Austria!” Fanon seemed
particularly interested in the notes on infantile sexuality in Three Essay on the Theory of Sexuality,
but at times seemed equally skeptical: “You exaggerate,” he writes, and notes
that Bachelard is better (referring to Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire). He also had some fun with Jung, writing in
Jung’s Man in Search of his Soul,
“Jung is doing sorcery.” Many times in Freud and Jung’s texts (and certainly
not only reserved for them) he writes “Salaud,” or just plain “faux.” Then we came across Kojéve and also Hegel’s Phenomenology. Kojéve’s lectures had extensive
markings and in The Phenomenology Fanon had marked up the passages he quoted in Black
Skin White Masks. But he didn’t stop there. There was also underlinings in
the section on Reason.
After each box, we’d
pack the books up again. Just before 4 p.m. we had gone through about 15 boxes.
I looked around the side of the bookcases, and reckoned that there was at least
another 30 to go. The library was closing, so we had to go, but we would return
tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. On the way back to where we were staying we stopped
at the library of the Dominican Fathers on rue Didouche Mourad to search for one of
Fanon’s (unsigned articles) in the short-lived journal Conscience Maghribine. Unfortunately they closed at 3.30 p.m. So
that would have to wait for another day.
By the time we arrived
at the Centre the next day, the staff had moved out some boxes for us. We began
moving through with great speed, only to stop upon finding something
interesting, such as Fanon’s notes in Dufrenne’s Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence. Then I came across Black Jacobins. But sadly it was clean. Nothing there. I came
across a book by Daniel Guerin who had contacted Fanon in 1955. I flicked
through, looking for any comments. Another copy of Black Jacobins. Same result. Some of the books still had uncut
pages that clearly showed that they hadn’t been read. So Fanon hadn’t read the
James or the three volumes of Hegel’s Aesthetics.
The latter was not surprising. But we did come across Nietzsche’s Geneology of Morals and The Birth of Tragedy (the latter not
noted in the catalogue), and Dante’s Divine
Comedy, though we still hadn’t found Merleau-Ponty. Sense and Nonsense was there, somewhere, and I was particularly
interested in checking his essay on Marxism
and Philosophy (which of course mentions Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness famously referenced in Edward
Said’s “Travelling theory revisited—the only Lukács the library includes is Existentialism ou Marxism but there was
nothing written in it). Finally De Beauvoir. Matthieu was happy to find that
Fanon had marked the pages on Hegel, and was also interested by the fact that
Fanon highlighted the following idea of The
Second Sex: “Where customs forbid violence, muscular energy cannot be the
basis for domination.” But still we were
hoping for more. On the other hand,
Madinier’s Conscience et Amour,
a work we had not heard of was quite marked up. Matthieu did some on sight
translations, the same with Jeanson’s La
Phenomenology. Still another 20
boxes to go. Taking books out, putting them back again, we were running out of
time.
We came across a number
of pamphlets by Lenin. One title, “The Failure of the Second International” was
marked up, especially the sections on social chauvinism and parts 3 and 4 of The Civil War in France collected in a
volume with the 18th Brumaire.
The latter (there were two copies) sadly had little to offer (suggesting that
he had worked with another copy), but Fanon had clearly read the Introduction to a Critique of Political
Economy (which I think speaks to his comments about Marxism in The Wretched) as well as Plekhanov’s Fundamental Questions of Marxism which
was not surprising given the time.
We looked through about
thirty boxes. Ten or so were left but we ran out of time (and perhaps the
patience of the staff since moving the boxes was labor intensive and the
collection is not yet set up to view). We did find Sartre’s What is Literature and saw that Fanon
had highlighted Sartre’s remarks about Richard Wright; and we did find a marked
up copy of Wright’s Black Boy though Native Son was not included in the
collection. A comment in Situations II
seemed to sum up our day: “Society without classes”—“utopia, but beautiful,”
writes Fanon in the margins.
