engaged in rebutting these precepts of violence (which includes arming for self-defence) ought to find his book a fundamental challenge, and for this reason, if for no other, Fanon should be read by the non-violent activists, and by people who are simply opposed to violence.98
William V. Shannon for the New York Times wrote, ‘The statements of H. Rapp Brown and other young radical Negro leaders are in accord with Fanon’s exalting of violence for therapeutic reasons.’99 At the opposite extreme of the political spectrum, a spokesman for the ‘counterculture’ could claim that: ‘The important literature now is the underground press, the speeches of Malcolm [i.e. Malcolm X], the works of Fanon, the songs of the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin.’100 Fanon was one of Stokely Carmichael’s ‘patron saints’,101 and Eldridge Cleaver could claim that ‘every brother on a roof top’ could quote Fanon.102 Unlike the French Third Worldists, most of Fanon’s American readers appeared not to have noticed that Les Damnés de la terre is, at least in part, a book about Algeria and not America. Carmichael seems not to have realized that his patron saint was simply not a black nationalist.
Further afield, similar images of Fanon as global theorist of revolution proliferated. It was argued that the war of liberation waged by FRELIMO in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique ‘verified’ Fanon’s theses about the cleansing and unifying function of violence.103 Visiting the office of a Palestinian organization in Amman in 1968, a journalist noticed a pile of books in the corner: Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Régis Debray’s Guevarist handbook on guerrilla warfare.104 In Cuba, a ‘Movimento Black Power’ flourished briefly at the end of the 1960s, and its members, who adopted ‘Afro’ hairstyles, met to discuss Fanon and other black writers. Most were arrested in 1971.105 In the Canadian province of Quebec, militants of the separatist Front de Libération Québecoise (FLQ) defined themselves as the ‘white niggers of North America’. One of the FLQ’s spokesmen wrote of himself that he was a ‘Québecois proletarian, one of America’s white niggers, one of the “wretched of the earth”’.106 Interestingly, he, like Maschino, invokes the composite Fanon–Nizan. Another spokesman for the FLQ argued that the Québecois’s use of the French language was the mark of his blackness, and that to speak French in front of an ‘Anglo coloniser’ was an act of self-decolonization to be described in Fanonian terms.107 It was, that is, assumed that an analysis made of the Algeria of 1959 could be transposed directly to the Québec of 1968: ‘Prior to 1954, speaking Arabic and rejecting French as both a language and a modality of cultural oppression was a privileged and day to day form of singularization, of national existence.’108
Two related processes are at work here. On the one hand, Fanon is being given an abstractly heroic status worthy of Maschino’s anonymous revolutionary. It is being forgotten that he was also ‘a particular case’. After all, Fanon was a psychiatrist and he was born in Martinique. On the other hand, the self-identification of civil rights workers, black power activists and Québecois separatists with Fanon’s wretched of the earth necessarily involves the misrecognition of exaggeration. In the United States, civil rights workers did encounter terrible violence and the protests of the Black Panthers did meet with armed repression. But they were not faced with General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Parachute Division and the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion. When Fanon speaks of ‘violence’, he is speaking of the French army’s destruction of whole villages and of the FLN’s bombing of cafés, or in other words of total war and not of limited low-level conflict. The extreme violence of the Algerian war was, fortunately, not reproduced in the United States or Canada. In some cases, the desire to be the wretched of the earth borders on the ludicrous, as members of the Parti National Occitan and Basque separatists claim Fanon as their patron saint,109 or when Breton Nationalists equate the black’s creation of negritude with the Breton’s construction of a ‘Breton personality’ and conveniently overlook Fanon’s comment that, whilst it is true that the Breton language was suppressed by a centralizing French state, its suppression was not the result of a black/white divide or of a white civilizing mission in a non-white country.110
For a short period after his death, Fanon was viewed as ‘the most original and articulate spokesman for a theoretical tendency which represents an important strand in the thinking of the Third World’.111 Some twenty years later, Les Damnés de la terre could be dismissed in France as ‘A dated work, a book of witness . . . Mao Tse-tung, Guevara, Fanon: three voices for a Tricontinental, fostering the illusions of a western youth that had been won over by a new Third-Worldist myth.’112 With the decline of Third Worldism, attention has shifted away from Les Damnés de la terre and back to Peau noire, masques blancs, which is more widely read now (at least in Britain and the United States) than at any time since its publication in 1952.113 The paradox is that, whilst Peau noire, masques blancs is read more and more intensely, fewer and fewer of Fanon’s other works are read at all.
The new interest in Fanon’s first book is a product of the emergence of post-colonial studies as a distinct, if at times alarmingly ill-defined, discipline. A canonical text defines the post-colonial field as comprising ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’.114 Despite the inclusive ‘all’, ‘culture’ effectively means ‘literature’ and the focus is inevitably on the English-speaking (or, more accurately, English-writing) world. Post-colonial theory developed in and around university departments of English and it is difficult not to see it as a continuation of English literature by other means. A ‘cultural studies’ approach to literature and an attempt to expand and challenge the canon reinforces, that is, the academic hegemony of ‘Eng. Lit’. Fanon is one of the very few non-Anglophones to be admitted to the post-colonial canon, and alarmingly few of the theorists involved realize – or admit – that they read him in very poor translations. The most obvious example of the problems posed by the translations is the title of the fifth chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon’s ‘L’Expérience vécue de l’homme noir’ (‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’) becomes ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The mistranslation obliterates Fanon’s philosophical frame of reference, which is supplied by a phenomenological theory of experience, but it also perverts his whole argument; for Fanon, there is no ‘fact of blackness’. The world is, in his view, experienced in particular ways by ‘the black man’ (sic), but that experience is defined in situational terms and not by some trans-historical ‘fact’. In 1995, London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) – obviously quite oblivious to translation problems – hosted a season of exhibitions, screenings and events inspired by Fanon’s writings; a year later, the related conference proceedings were published as The Fact of Blackness.115
The danger is that Fanon will be absorbed into accounts of ‘the colonial experience’ that are so generalized as to obscure both the specific features of his work and the trajectory of his life. Edward Said can cite Fanon and W. B. Yeats in a single paragraph.116 And whilst it is difficult to disagree with Homi K. Bhabha’s comment that the force of Fanon’s vision ‘comes . . . from the tradition of the oppressed, the language of a revolutionary awareness that, as Walter Benjamin suggests, “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule”’,117 it is startling to find that he makes no mention of Martinique. The argument that ‘one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks [is] that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master narrative that provides a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche’118 is no less jarring, though it is less alarming than a Fanon Critical Reader, which tells the reader that ‘In Fanon’s seventeenth year, Martinique was under occupation by the Nazis’.119 It was not. Growing up in Martinique was a very specific, even peculiar, ‘colonial experience’ and, whether or not one believes in the relevance of master narratives, Peau noire does provide an autobiographical background of social and historical facts. Fanon himself prefaces Peau noire, masques blancs by restricting the validity of his observations and conclusions to the French West Indies.120 Given that he never visited Guadeloupe, this can only mean that, whatever post-colonial theorists may say, Fanon himself thought he was writing about Martinique.