Dignity is Essential: An interview with Alice Cherki

ALICE CHERKI is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author. Born in Algiers, 1936. She knew Frantz Fanon well, working by his side in Algeria and Tunisia as a psychiatrist, and sharing his political commitment during the war of independence in Algeria.

Alice Cherki has lived in France since 1965. She is co-author of the books, Retour à Lacan (Fayard, 1981) and Les Juifs d’Algérie (Editions du Scribe, 1987), and author of La frontière invisible (Editions des Crépuscules, 2009) Frantz Fanon, portrait (Seuil, 2000) translated into English by Nadia Benabid and published as Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (Cornell University Press, 2006) and Mémoire anachronique (Editions De L’aube, 2016).

Gaele Sobott: Can you talk a little about the history of your family, your place of birth and your childhood?

Frantz Fanon: A democratic philosopher

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

If there’s a philosopher of the moment it is, by some distance, Frantz Fanon. This is not surprising given that Fanon offers compelling accounts of the pathologies of both the colony and the postcolony – spaces that some of the young people at the fore of the new ferment in South Africa feel they must inhabit simultaneously.

Alice Cherki's 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait'

Reviewed by Zamakhize Mkhize

Alice Cherki provides us with a book about Fanon’s life which she describes as “an effort to convey, despite its shortcomings and incompletion, an epoch, a life and a body of work often viewed as inadmissible” (Cherki, 2000:4). Cherki is motivated by Fanon’s reluctance to speak about his private life. This text takes many forms as it is not only a biography of Fanon’s life based on written sources and interviews but it also constitutes a memoir. Cherki knew Fanon in the period between 1955 when he arrived in Algeria to work as a psychoanalyst until his death in 1961. The significance of these years is that they constitute the time period of Fanon’s critical involvement in the fight for Algerian independence.

Response to Alice Cherki's 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait'

by Jocelyn Coldrey

Alice Cherki, a trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked under Fanon at both Bilda and in Tunis, was also an active comrade in the Algerian wage for independence, gives personal insight into fragments of Fanons life as well as the contemporary relevance his work and way of thinking (Cherki, 2006 and Martin, 2004: 165). The book gives a representation of Fanon as a person, exposing his temperament in a textual portrait. Cherki does not write a meticulous biography of Fanon’s life but rather draws to light certain experiences and ways of the world which enable the Fanonian reader to historically contextualize not only what he was exposed to at the time of his writing but also his mode of being in reality. She claims that it is “important to reconstruct the journey if one is to rein in the profusion of attributes that have been imputed to Fanon” (2006: 1). In harnessing her personal interaction with Fanon, and what she found out from other people, she places particular importance on the parallels between the way Fanon viewed psychiatric patients and colonized subjects.  Ultimately her portrayal of Fanon’s life remains true to his belief that “[o]ne must not relate one’s past but, but stand as a testimony to it” (2006: 1).

A Response to Alice Cherki's 'Frantz Fanon: A Portrait'

by Mbali Baduza

Alice Cherki’s biography of Frantz Fanon is anything but a monotonous read. From the descriptions of Fanon’s childhood to his death, Cherki helps us conceptualise Fanon the personality, Fanon the human.

Other than Cherki’s defence of Fanon in the question of violence which has been widely used to prosecute him, I was struck by a theme that carries the book: Fanon’s belief in the potential of the human. Fanon’s faith in the potential of the human, reminds me of a book I have recently read, Antonio Negri and Cesare Casarino’s In Praise of the Common. In the preface, Casarino says that “[t]he common is legion”, meaning that the common refers to a number of people. Put differently, the common refers to ‘The People’ i.e. all human beings.

Alice Cherki: Fanon, et apres? - Pourquoi enseigner Fanon aujourd'hui?

Frantz Fanon: A Portrait by Alice Cherki

"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon’s discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared. . . . Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own life, and it was for this reason that he was so engaging and disarming—so alive."— from the Introduction