Fanon as Example and Figure: A Conversation Between Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Let me say from the outset that it would be a mistake to make Fanon into a clay model for revolution,” says Gayatri Spivak. I’ve asked her about Göran Olson’s 2014 celebrated documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, which she prefaced. Herself the author of an influential body work that includes A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and more recently a translation of Aimé Césaire’s play A Season in the Congo, she engaged Olson’s film in signature critical mode. As a counterpoint to the documentary, her preface avoids the often repeated story of Fanon as a champion of counter-violence.  “Instead,” she says, “one must understand that in the initial chapters of The Wretched of the Earth, which a lot of people read as an apology of violence, Fanon is actually claiming complicity with what was surrounding him. That is, the violence of colonization.” “I will be as violent as they are, when they hold my life as worth less than theirs,” says Frantz Fanon, the healer. 

Josie Fanon - Remembered by Assia Djebar

"At the beginning of autumn 1961 Frantz Fanon, a West Indian psychiatrist who has recently acquired, the same year, an international reputation with the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, returns to Tunis to see the G.P.R.A. He's been the representative of the 'Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic' in Ghana and Guinea. That is where he felt the first onset of his illness. His wife, Josie, was to tell me at length about those days of waiting and uncertainty in Tunis. The verdict seems worrying: lukemia has made its presence known. They quickly decide that Fanon should get the best care possible: he agrees to go for treatment to the United States. In New York the Algerian delegation to the United Nations includes among its members some of Fanon's personal friends.

Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, women, veils, and land.

by Ria Faulkner, World Literature Today, 1996

Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the "Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies.