Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (/ˈfænən/, US: /fæˈnɒ̃/; French: [fʁɑ̃ts fanɔ̃]; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time". For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national liberation movements and other freedom and political movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Early life

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French single territorial collectivity. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of African slaves, and worked as a customs agent. His mother, Eléanore Médélice, was of Afro-Martinican and white Alsatian descent, and worked as a shopkeeper. Frantz was the third of four sons in a family of eight children. Two of them died young, including his sister Gabrielle, with whom Frantz was very close. His family was socio-economically middle-class. They could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, at the time the most prestigious high school in Martinique, where Fanon came to admire one of the school's teachers, poet and writer Aimé Césaire. Fanon left Martinique in 1943, when he was 18 years old, in order to join the Free French forces.

Martinique and World War II

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval troops were blockaded on Martinique. Forced to remain on the island, French sailors took over the government from the Martiniquan people and established a collaborationist Vichy regime. In the face of economic distress and isolation under the blockade, they instituted an oppressive regime; Fanon described them as taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists". Residents made many complaints of harassment and sexual misconduct by the sailors. The abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French Navy influenced Fanon, reinforcing his feelings of alienation and his disgust with colonial racism. At the age of seventeen, Fanon fled the island as a "dissident" (a term used for Frenchmen joining Gaullist forces), traveling to Dominica to join the Free French Forces. After three attempts, he made it to Dominica, but it was too late to enlist. After the pro-Vichy Robert regime was deposed in Martinique in June 1943, Fanon returned to Fort-de-France to join the newly created, all black 5e Bataillon de marche des Antilles [fr].

He enlisted in the Free French army and joined an Allied convoy that reached Casablanca. He was later transferred to an army base at Béjaïa on the Kabylia coast of Algeria. Fanon left Algeria from Oran and served in France, notably in the battles of Alsace. In 1944 he was wounded at Colmar and received the Croix de guerre. When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany along with photojournalists, Fanon's regiment was "bleached" of all non-white troops as Fanon and his fellow Afro-Caribbean soldiers were sent to Toulon (Provence). Later, they were transferred to Normandy to await repatriation.

During the war, Fanon was exposed to more white European racism. For example, European women liberated by black soldiers often preferred to dance with fascist Italian prisoners, rather than fraternize with their liberators.

In 1945, Fanon returned to Martinique. He lasted a short time there. He worked for the parliamentary campaign of his friend and mentor Aimé Césaire, who would be a major influence in his life. Césaire ran on the communist ticket as a parliamentary delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. Fanon stayed long enough to complete his baccalaureate and then went to France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry.

France

Fanon was educated in Lyon, where he also studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures. During this period, he wrote three plays, of which two survive. After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon did a residency in psychiatry at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole under the radical Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the role of culture in psychopathology.

In 1948 Fanon started a relationship with Michèle Weyer, a medical student, who soon became pregnant. He left her for an 18-year-old high school student, Josie, whom he married in 1952. At urging of his friends he later recognized his daughter, Mireille, although he did not have contact with her.

In France while completing his residency, Fanon wrote and published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people. Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral dissertation, submitted at Lyon, entitled "Essay on the Disalienation of the Black", which was a response to the racism that Fanon experienced while studying psychiatry and medicine at university in Lyon; the rejection of the dissertation prompted Fanon to publish it as a book. For his doctor of philosophy degree, he submitted another dissertation of narrower scope and different subject. Left-wing philosopher Francis Jeanson, leader of the pro-Algerian independence Jeanson network, read Fanon's manuscript and as a senior book editor at Éditions du Seuil in Paris, gave the book its new title and wrote its epilogue.

After receiving Fanon's manuscript at Seuil, Jeanson invited him to an editorial meeting. Amid Jeanson's praise of the book, Fanon exclaimed: "Not bad for a nigger, is it?" Insulted, Jeanson dismissed Fanon from his office. Later, Jeanson learned that his response had earned him the writer's lifelong respect, and Fanon acceded to Jeanson's suggestion that the book be entitled Black Skin, White Masks.

In the book, Fanon described the unfair treatment of black people in France and how they were disapproved of by white people. Black people also had a sense of inferiority when facing white people. Fanon believed that even though they could speak French, they could not fully integrate into the life and environment of white people. (See further discussion of Black Skin, White Masks under Work, below.)

Algeria

After his residency, Fanon practised psychiatry at Pontorson, near Mont Saint-Michel, for another year and then (from 1953) in Algeria. He was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. He worked there until his deportation in January 1957.

Fanon's methods of treatment started evolving, particularly by beginning socio-therapy to connect with his patients' cultural backgrounds. He also trained nurses and interns. Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, after having made contact with Pierre Chaulet at Blida in 1955. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French soldiers and officers who carried out torture in order to suppress anti-colonial resistance. Additionally, Fanon was also responsible for treating Algerian torture victims.

Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabylia region, to study the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. His lost study of "The marabout of Si Slimane" is an example. These trips were also a means for clandestine activities, notably in his visits to the ski resort of Chrea which hid an FLN base.

Joining the FLN and exile from Algeria

By summer 1956 Fanon realized that he could no longer continue to support French efforts, even indirectly via his hospital work. In November he submitted his "Letter of resignation to the Resident Minister", which later became an influential text of its own in anti-colonialist circles.

There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. The ruling intentions of personal existence are not in accord with the permanent assaults on the most commonplace values. For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And the conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.

Shortly afterwards, Fanon was expelled from Algeria and moved to Tunis where he joined the FLN openly. He was part of the editorial collective of Al Moudjahid, for which he wrote until the end of his life. He also served as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government (GPRA). He attended conferences in Accra, Conakry, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville, Cairo and Tripoli. Many of his shorter writings from this period were collected posthumously in the book Toward the African Revolution. In this book Fanon reveals war tactical strategies; in one chapter he discusses how to open a southern front to the war and how to run the supply lines.

Upon his return to Tunis, after his exhausting trip across the Sahara to open a Third Front, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He went to the Soviet Union for treatment and experienced remission of his illness. When he came back to Tunis once again, he dictated his testament The Wretched of the Earth. When he was not confined to his bed, he delivered lectures to Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) officers at Ghardimao on the Algerian–Tunisian border. He traveled to Rome for a three-day meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre who had greatly influenced his work. Sartre agreed to write a preface to Fanon's last book, The Wretched of the Earth.

Death and aftermath

With his health declining, Fanon's comrades urged him to seek treatment in the U.S. as his Soviet doctors had suggested. In 1961, the CIA arranged a trip under the promise of stealth for further leukemia treatment at a National Institutes of Health facility. During his time in the United States, Fanon was handled by CIA agent Oliver Iselin. As Lewis R. Gordon points out, the circumstances of Fanon's stay are somewhat disputed: "What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia."

Fanon subsequently died from double pneumonia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961 after finally having begun his leukemia treatment, although far too late. He had been admitted under the name of Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital in Rome after being wounded in Morocco during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was buried in Algeria after lying in state in Tunisia. Later, his body was moved to a martyrs' (Chouhada) graveyard at Aïn Kerma in eastern Algeria.

Frantz Fanon was survived by his French wife, Josie (née Dublé), their son, Olivier Fanon, and his daughter from a previous relationship, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France. Josie Fanon later became disillusioned with the government and after years of depression and drinking died by suicide in Algiers in 1989. Mireille became a professor of international law and conflict resolution and serves as president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Olivier became president of the Frantz Fanon National Association, which was created in Algiers in 2012.

Black Skin, White Masks

Black Skin, White Masks was first published in French as Peau noire, masques blancs in 1952 and is one of Fanon's most important works. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon psychoanalyzes the oppressed Black person who is perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world that they live in, and studies how they navigate the world through a performance of Whiteness. Particularly in discussing language, he talks about how the black person's use of a colonizer's language is seen by the colonizer as predatory, and not transformative, which in turn may create insecurity in the black's consciousness. He recounts that he himself faced many admonitions as a child for using Creole French instead of "real French", or "French French", that is, "white" French. Ultimately, he concludes that "mastery of language [of the white/colonizer] for the sake of recognition as white reflects a dependency that subordinates the black's humanity".

The reception of his work has been affected by English translations which are recognized to contain numerous omissions and errors, while his unpublished work, including his doctoral thesis, has received little attention. As a result, it has been argued Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence (it would be more accurate to characterize him as a dialectical opponent of nonviolence) and that his ideas have been extremely oversimplified. This reductionist vision of Fanon's work ignores the subtlety of his understanding of the colonial system. For example, the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks translates, literally, as "The Lived Experience of the Black" ("L'expérience vécue du Noir"), but Markmann's translation is "The Fact of Blackness", which leaves out the massive influence of phenomenology on Fanon's early work.

Although Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks while still in France, most of his work was written in North Africa. It was during this time that he produced works such as L'An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne in 1959 (Year Five of the Algerian Revolution), later republished as Sociology of a Revolution and later still as A Dying Colonialism. Fanon's original title was "Reality of a Nation"; however the publisher, François Maspero, refused to accept this title.

Fanon's three books were supplemented by numerous psychiatry articles as well as radical critiques of French colonialism in journals such as Esprit and El Moudjahid.

A Dying Colonialism

A Dying Colonialism is a 1959 book by Fanon that provides an account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria fought their oppressors. They changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as “primitive,” in order to destroy the oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression. The militant book describes Fanon's understanding that for the colonized, “having a gun is the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death.” It also contains one of his most influential articles, "Unveiled Algeria", that signifies the fall of imperialism and describes how oppressed people struggle to decolonize their "mind" to avoid assimilation.

The Wretched of the Earth

In The Wretched of the Earth (1961, Les damnés de la terre), published shortly before Fanon's death, Fanon defends the right of a colonized people to use violence to gain independence. In addition, he delineated the processes and forces leading to national independence or neocolonialism during the decolonization movement that engulfed much of the world after World War II. In defence of the use of violence by colonized peoples, Fanon argued that human beings who are not considered as such (by the colonizer) shall not be bound by principles that apply to humanity in their attitude towards the colonizer. His book was censored by the French government.

For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only "language" the colonizer speaks. Thus, violent resistance is a necessity imposed by the colonists upon the colonized. The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature.

His participation in the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale from 1955 determined his audience as the Algerian colonized. It was to them that his final work, Les damnés de la terre (translated into English by Constance Farrington as The Wretched of the Earth) was directed. It constitutes a warning to the oppressed of the dangers they face in the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a neo-colonialist, globalized world.

An often overlooked aspect of Fanon's work is that he did not like to physically write his pieces. Instead, he would dictate to his wife, Josie, who did all of the writing and, in some cases, contributed and edited.

Fanon was influenced by a variety of thinkers and intellectual traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Négritude, and Marxism.

Aimé Césaire was a particularly significant influence in Fanon's life. Césaire, a leader of the Négritude movement, was teacher and mentor to Fanon on the island of Martinique. Fanon was first introduced to Négritude during his lycée days in Martinique when Césaire coined the term and presented his ideas in Tropiques, the journal that he edited with Suzanne Césaire, his wife, in addition to his now classic Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming). Fanon referred to Césaire's writings in his own work. He quoted, for example, his teacher at length in "The Lived Experience of the Black Man", a heavily anthologized essay from Black Skins, White Masks.

Fanon has had an influence on anti-colonial and national liberation movements. In particular, Les damnés de la terre was a major influence on the work of revolutionary leaders such as Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X in the United States and Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba. Of these only Guevara was primarily concerned with Fanon's theories on violence; for Shariati and Biko the main interest in Fanon was "the new man" and "black consciousness" respectively.

With regard to the American liberation struggle more commonly known as The Black Power Movement, Fanon's work was especially influential. His book Wretched of the Earth is quoted directly in the preface of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton's book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation which was published in 1967, shortly after Carmichael left the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In addition, Carmichael and Hamilton include much of Fanon's theory on Colonialism in their work, beginning by framing the situation of former slaves in America as a colony situated inside a nation. "To put it another way, there is no "American dilemma" because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them" (Ture Hamilton, 5). Another example is the indictment of the black middle class or what Fanon called the "colonized intellectual" as the indoctrinated followers of the colonial power. Fanon states, "The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world" (47). A third example is the idea that the natives (African Americans) should be constructing new social systems rather than participating in the systems created by the settler population. Ture and Hamilton contend that "black people should create rather than imitate" (144).

The Black Power group that Fanon had the most influence on was the Black Panther Party (BPP). In 1970 Bobby Seale, the Chairman of the BPP, published a collection of recorded observations made while he was incarcerated entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. This book, while not an academic text, is a primary source chronicling the history of the BPP through the eyes of one of its founders. While describing one of his first meetings with Huey P. Newton, Seale describes bringing him a copy of Wretched of the Earth. There are at least three other direct references to the book, all of them mentioning ways in which the book was influential and how it was included in the curriculum required of all new BPP members. Beyond just reading the text, Seale and the BPP included much of the work in their party platform. The Panther 10 Point Plan contained 6 points which either directly or indirectly referenced ideas in Fanon's work including their contention that there must be an end to the "robbery by the white man", and "education that teaches us our true history and our role in present day society" (67). One of the most important elements adopted by the BPP was the need to build the "humanity" of the native. Fanon claimed that the realization by the native that s/he was human would mark the beginning of the push for freedom (33). The BPP embraced this idea through the work of their Community Schools and Free Breakfast Programs.

Bolivian indianist Fausto Reinaga also had some Fanon influence and he mentions The Wretched of the Earth in his magnum opus La Revolución India, advocating for decolonisation of native South Americans from European influence. In 2015 Raúl Zibechi argued that Fanon had become a key figure for the Latin American left. In August 2021 Fanon's book Voices of liberation was one of those brought by Elisa Loncón to the new "plurinational library" of the Constitutional Convention of Chile.

Fanon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and others. His work was a key influence on the Black Panther Party, particularly his ideas concerning nationalism, violence and the lumpenproletariat. More recently, radical South African poor people's movements, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (meaning 'people who live in shacks' in Zulu), have been influenced by Fanon's work. His work was a key influence on Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, as well.

Fanon has also profoundly affected contemporary African literature. His work serves as an important theoretical gloss for writers including Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah, Senegal's Ken Bugul and Ousmane Sembène, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Ngũgĩ goes so far to argue in Decolonizing the Mind (1992) that it is "impossible to understand what informs African writing" without reading Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.

The Caribbean Philosophical Association offers the Frantz Fanon Prize for work that furthers the decolonization and liberation of mankind.

Fanon's writings on black sexuality in Black Skin, White Masks have garnered critical attention by a number of academics and queer theory scholars. Interrogating Fanon's perspective on the nature of black homosexuality and masculinity, queer theory academics have offered a variety of critical responses to Fanon's words, balancing his position within postcolonial studies with his influence on the formation of contemporary black queer theory.

Fanon's legacy has expanded even further into Black Studies and more specifically, into the theories of Afro-pessimism and Black Critical Theory. Thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Calvin Warren, and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson have taken up Fanon's ontological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic analyses of the Negro and the "zone of non-being" in order to develop theories of anti-Blackness. Putting Fanon in conversation with prominent thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers, and focusing primarily on the Charles Lam Markmann translation of Black Skin, White Masks, Black Critical Theorists and Afropessimists take seriously the ontological implications of the "Fact of Blackness" and "The Negro and Psychopathology", formulating the Black or the Slave as the non-relational, phobic object that constitutes civil society.

Fanon's writings

• Black Skin, White Masks (1952), (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: Grove Press)
• A Dying Colonialism (1959), (1965 translation by Haakon Chevalier: New York, Grove Press)
• The Wretched of the Earth (1961), (1963 translation by Constance Farrington: New York: Grove Weidenfeld)
• Toward the African Revolution (1964), (1969 translation by Haakon Chevalier: New York: Grove Press)
• Alienation and Freedom (2018), eds Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, revised edition (translation by Steve Corcoran: London: Bloomsbury)

Books on Fanon

• Anthony Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (1999, New York: Routledge)
• Gavin Arnall, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (2020, New York: Columbia University Press)
• Stefan Bird-Pollan, Hegel, Freud and Fanon: The Dialectic of Emancipation (2014, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.)
• Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology Of Oppression (1985, New York: Plenum Press), ISBN 0-306-41950-5
• David Caute, Frantz Fanon (1970, London: Wm. Collins and Co.)
• Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon. Portrait (2000, Paris: Éditions du Seuil)
• Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (2001, New York: Crossroad 8th Avenue), ISBN 0-8245-2354-7
• Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary (2014, United States: Lexington Books)
• Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971, Grove Press)
• Irene Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1974, London: Wildwood House), ISBN 0-7045-0002-7
• Nigel C. Gibson (ed.), Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (1999, Amherst, New York: Humanity Books)
• Nigel C. Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003, Oxford: Polity Press)
• Nigel C. Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2011, London: Palgrave Macmillan)
• Nigel C. Gibson (ed.), Living Fanon: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2011, London: Palgrave Macmillan and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press)
• Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (2017, London: Rowman and Littlefield International and The University of Witwatersrand Press)
• Alexander V. Gordon, Frantz Fanon and the Fight for National Liberation (1977, Moscow: Nauka, in Russian)
• Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995, New York: Routledge)
• Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said (2015, New York, Fordham) ISBN 9780823266081
• Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, & Renee T. White (eds), Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996, Oxford: Blackwell)
• Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (2015, London: Pluto Press)
• Christopher J. Lee, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press)
• David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2012, 2nd ed., London: Verso), ISBN 978-1-844-67773-3
• David Marriott, Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being (2018, Palo Alto, Stanford UP), ISBN 9780804798709
• Richard C. Onwuanibe, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon (1983, St. Louis: Warren Green)
• Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), ISBN 9780374176426
• Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press)
• T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.)
• Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (1969, trans. 1974, Monthly Review Press)

Films on Fanon

• Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (a documentary) (1996, San Francisco: California Newsreel)
• Frantz Fanon, une vie, un combat, une œuvre, a 2001 documentary
• Concerning Violence: Nine scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defense, a 2014 documentary film written and directed by Göran Olsson that is based on Frantz Fanon's essay "Concerning Violence", from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth.
• Luce: The main character of the movie wrote a paper about Frantz Fanon and is said to be inspired by his ideology.