Frantz Fanon

Life and career

Early life

Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, which was then part of the French colonial empire, into a middle class family. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, worked as a customs officer. Fanon's mother, Eléanore Médélice, who was of Afro-Caribbean and Alsatian descent, was a shopkeeper.

Fanon was the third of four sons in a family of eight children. Two of his siblings died young, including Fanon's sister Gabrielle, with whom he was very close. The young Frantz Fanon was an avid football player, and played the sport in Martinique, later organizing football matches for patients and staff while working at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria.

World War II

In June 1940, the German victory in the Battle of France resulted in the French Third Republic capitulating to Nazi Germany. Martinique came under the control of French Navy elements under Admiral Georges Robert, who were loyal to the collaborationist Vichy regime in France. The war disrupted imports from Metropolitan France to Martinique, leading to major shortages on the island, while Robert's authoritarian regime repressed Martinican Allied sympathizers, hundreds of whom escaped to nearby Caribbean islands. Fanon later described the pro-Vichy regime in Martinique as taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists". In January 1943, he fled Martinique during the wedding of one of his brothers, and travelled to the British colony of Dominica in order to link up with other Allied sympathizers.

Robert's regime was overthrown by a local uprising in June 1943, which Fanon would later acclaim as "the birth of the [Martinican] proletariat" as a revolutionary force. Following the uprising, Fanon "enthusiastically" returned to Martinique, where the pro-Allied Free French leader Charles de Gaulle had appointed Henri Tourtet as the colony's new governor. Tourtet raised the 5th Antillean Marching Battalion to serve in Free French Forces (FFL), and Fanon quickly enlisted in the unit at Fort-de-France.

He underwent basic training before boarding a troopship bound for Morocco in March 1944. After Fanon arrived in Casablanca, he was shocked to discover the extent of racial discrimination in the FFL. Fanon was transferred to a Free French military base in Béjaïa, Algeria, where he witnessed firsthand the antisemitism and Islamophobia of the pieds-noirs, many of whom had supported racist laws promulgated by the Vichy regime.

In August 1944, Fanon embarked on another troopship at Oran to participated in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of German-occupied Provence. After the American VI Corps secured a beachhead, Fanon's unit came ashore at Saint-Tropez and advanced inland. In Doubs, he participated in several engagements near Montbéliard and was seriously wounded by shrapnel, which resulted in him being hospitalized for two months. Fanon was awarded a Croix de Guerre by Colonel Raoul Salan for his military service. In early 1945, he rejoined his unit and fought in the Battle of Alsace.

After German forces had been pushed out of France and Allied troops crossed the Rhine into Germany, Fanon and his fellow black troops were removed from their formations and sent southwards to Toulon as part of de Gaulle's policy of removing non-white soldiers from the French army. Fanon was transferred to Normandy to await repatriation to the West Indies.

France

Fanon was educated at the University of 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 white medical student, who soon became pregnant. He left her for an 18-year-old high school student, Josie, whom he married in 1952. At his friends' urging, he later recognized his daughter, Mireille, although he had no contact with her. Paulin Joachim, who knew Fanon, said that on a number of occasions he had seen Fanon hit Josie.

In Lyon, 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 a 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 the University in Lyon. The rejection of the dissertation prompted Fanon to publish it as a book.

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. Frantz argued that racism and dehumanization directed toward black people caused feelings of inferiority among black people. This dehumanization prevented black people from fully assimilating into white society and into full personhood. This caused psychological strife among black people, as even if they spoke French, obtained an education, and followed social customs associated with white people, they would still never be regarded as French or a Man. Instead, black people are defined as "Black Man" rather than "Man". See further discussion of Black Skin, White Masks under Work, below.

Algeria

After his residency, Fanon practiced 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 sociotherapy 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 (FLN), 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. 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 of conducting clandestine activities, notably during 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 he could no longer support French efforts, even indirectly, through 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 returned 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."

On 6 December 1961, Fanon died from double pneumonia at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He had begun leukemia treatment but 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 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, founded in Algiers in 2012.

Works

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 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 that 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.

Black Skin, White Masks has been criticized as sexist and homophobic. Among other statements, the book contains the remarks, "Just as there are faces that just ask to be slapped, couldn't we speak of women who just ask to be raped", and "when a woman lives the fantasy of rape by a black man, it is a kind of fulfillment of a personal dream or an intimate wish", and "the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual".

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.

Influences

Fanon was influenced by a variety of thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, and the intellectual traditions of Marxism and Négritude. Aimé Césaire, a leader of the Négritude movement, was a particularly significant influence.

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

Legacy

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, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau 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.

For the American liberation struggle 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). 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".

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". 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".

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. 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.

Works

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

Williams, James S. (2023). Frantz Fanon, Reaktion Books.

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)

Films on Fanon

Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask, a 1996 documentary (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 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.

Fanon , a 2025 biopic directed by Jean-Claude Barny about Frantz Fanon's life and involvement in the Algerian independence movement.

Artworks

During a short residency for the 2011 Lyon Biennale, South African artist Tracey Rose conceived the video installation artwork In the Castle of My Skin, titled after the book by George Lamming. The four-hour artwork is a faux audition for the five-year-old French boy described in Black Skin, White Masks. The artist said the artwork arrived as a vision whilst walking through Lyon late one night. At the time, she was not aware that Fanon had lived there nor that Black Skin, White Masks had been written during Fanon's years there.