books and articles – and one film121 – on Fanon contains very little that is of relevance to a biographer, not least because they construct a Fanon who exists outside time and space and in a purely textual dimension.122 Little will be said about them here. Although there are obvious exceptions – notably Françoise Vergès, whose essays on Fanon and psychiatry are very valuable123 – few of the authors concerned stray far away from the most familiar of his texts and appear to have consulted nothing produced by the FLN. Post-colonial theorists’ enthusiasm for Derrida and Lacan tends to blind them to Fanon’s debts to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, not to mention the similarities between his work and that of his contemporaries Albert Memmi and Jean Amrouche. In a way, the very sophistication of the post-colonial readings of Fanon is the source of their weakness. Such sophistication can co-exist with the crude empirical errors that put Martinique under ‘Nazi occupation’. Psychoanalytic readings of Fanon may or may not be valid in their own terms, but it is futile to try to turn Fanon into the psychoanalyst he was not or, like Bhabha, to read him as a black Lacan in the making. He was a psychiatrist working in a very specific and important tradition and in purely quantitative terms his papers on psychiatry greatly outweigh his scattered (and often muddled) allusions to psychoanalysis. Bhabha’s claim that there is no ‘master narrative’ in Peau noire, masques blancs has surely to be countered by the argument that there is most definitely a master narrative at work in L’An V de la révolution algérienne and Les Damnés de la terre. It is the narrative of the Algerian Revolution. It may be difficult to believe in it at the beginning of a new millennium, but Fanon did believe in it and died for it.
The ‘post-colonial Fanon’ is in many ways an inverted image of the ‘revolutionary Fanon’ of the 1960s. Third Worldist readings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs; post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that text and studiously avoid the question of violence. The Third Worldist Fanon was an apocalyptic creature; the post-colonial Fanon worries about identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity, but he is no longer angry. His anger was a response to his experience of a black man in a world defined as white, but not to the ‘fact’ of his blackness. It was a response to the condition and situation of those he called the wretched of the earth. The wretched of the earth are still there, but not in the seminar rooms where the talk is of post-colonial theory. They came out on to the streets of Algiers in 1988, and the Algerian army shot them dead. They have subsequently been killed in the thousands by authoritarian Algerian governments and so-called Islamic fundamentalists. Had he lived, Fanon would still be angry. His readers should be angry too.
Despite the inversion, there are constants in the presentations of Fanon, and not least a tendency towards hyperbole. The editors of Blackwell’s Critical Reader opine that Fanon was ‘one of the most influential figures in Third World revolutionary thought – equalled in influence only, perhaps, by Karl Marx’.124 Faced with such inflated claims, one can only wonder what became of Fidel Castro, Amilcar Cabral, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, General Giap and so many others. Hyperbole such as this does Fanon no favours and does not do him justice. It is exaggerations of this kind that prompted one of Fanon’s Algerian comrades, Mohammed Lebjouai, to remark: ‘Fanon is one of the greatest revolutionaries that Africa has ever known, and yet almost none of his theories proved to be accurate.’125 Lebjouai exaggerates too, but it is quite true that Fanon was often wrong – disastrously so when it came to analysing developments in Angola. Recognizing that Fanon could be – and often was – wrong is part of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called ‘the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon’.126 Resisting the temptations of hagiography, to which Fanon’s first biographer certainly surrendered, is part of the same process.127 A biography of Fanon must begin with the reconstruction of a dimension that has been erased from almost all accounts of his life.
The eradication of the specifically French and Martinican dimension of Fanon’s colonial experience has been a gradual process, and it began with Charles Lam Markmann’s seriously flawed translation of Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon refers at three points to an image of a grinning Tirailleur sénégalais (a black colonial infantryman) who is eating something from a billy can. He is saying ‘Y a bon Banania’, which is an advertising copy-writer’s idea of how an African says ‘C’est bon, Banania’. In the English translation, this becomes ‘Sho’ good’ and then ‘Sho good eating’.128 The tirailleur has become the caricatured black of the Deep South, and he is supposedly eating ‘some chocolate confection’.129 In the original, he is actually eating something very specific, and with specific connotations. Banania is a ‘breakfast food’ made from banana flour, cocoa and sugar that was first marketed in 1917. Posters of the tirailleur and his dish of Banania were still a familiar sight in the France of the 1940s and 1950s; the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor wanted to rip them down from all the walls of France.130 Such posters helped to convince the Fanon who went to study in France that he was not, as he had been taught to believe, a French citizen from Martinique who was just like any other French citizen, but a nègre who was no better than a colonial black. The Americanization of Fanon wrought by the translation thus erases a very specific dimension of his text. It also creates the categories of ‘the almost white, the mulatto and the black’; Fanon himself speaks of ‘la békaille, le mûlatraille et la négraille’.131 There were white colonialists in France’s black African colonies and in North Africa, but there were no békés there. The béké, the island-born white Creole descended from the original French planters, is unique to the French West Indies. Fanon’s Americanization can also take the grotesque form of the projection on to Europe of ‘racial’ categories specific to the United States, as when Lewis R. Gordon observes that ‘Arabs and North Africans are defined in the racial constructions that dominate the European world as Caucasian’.132 ‘Caucasian’ is not simply used in its American sense (i.e. ‘white’) in France; the Petit Robert dictionary defines caucasien as ‘from the Caucasus, the family of languages from the Caucasus region, including Georgian’. Arabs and North Africans are called many things in French – most of them appallingly insulting – but they are never called ‘Georgians’ or ‘Caucasians’.
The ‘Banania’ example relates to an aspect of colonialism that is specifically French and that can be incorporated into a broader colonial experience only at the cost of a serious loss of focus. A Senegalese like Senghor could react to the Banania poster with the same anger as a Martinican like Fanon. But Peau noire also contains phrases that no Senegalese could have written. Martinican mothers did not, as the translation would have it, ‘ridicule’ their children for speaking Créole; they called them ‘tibandes’ to remind them that they were ‘better’ than the little gangs ([pe]tites bandes’) of children who worked in the sugarcane fields, and should behave accordingly.133 At one point, Fanon uses the adverb ‘souventefois’,134 which looks to a French reader like either a misprint or a strange combination of souvent and maintes fois; it is simply the Creole version of souvent, or ‘often’. The Anglo-Americanized Fanon asserts, ‘And to declare in the tone of “it’s all my fault” that what matters is the salvation of the soul is not worth the effort’; the Martinican Fanon states that it is pointless to adopt ‘a “crabe-ma-faute” attitude’.135 In fairness to Markmann, it has to be said that the expression is almost untranslatable. Its literal meaning is ‘a my-fault-crab’, but in English the beast is known as a fiddler crab. Martinique’s fauna includes an extraordinary variety of crabs, and the crabe-ma-faute is a denizen of the mangrove swamps and other wet places that resembles a miniature armoured vehicle. One of its claws is much larger than the other, and the creature appears to be beating its chest and saying a mea culpa. Only a Martinican, or possibly a Guadeloupean, would use this expression. Fanon ‘lived, fought and died Algerian’, but he was also a product of French culture and French colonialism. He was also born a native son of Martinique.
Martinique is not, remarks its finest contemporary poet and novelist, ‘an island in Polynesia’.1 Whilst this statement may appear to be so self-evident