given to stating the obvious. The questions ‘Where is Martinique?’ and even ‘What is Martinique?’ are not idle ones, and they are far from irrelevant to any understanding of Frantz Fanon. Fanon became Algerian or, to be more accurate, recreated and defined himself as Algerian, but he could eradicate neither the influence of the time and place of his birth nor the circumstances in which he grew up. His relationship with the island where he was born was complex and tormented but he was born on and of that island. In some respects, Fanon remained Martinican to his death.
For official purposes, Martinique is in France and its capital is Paris. In French atlases, especially those used in schools, the sheet depicting France often features three insets showing small islands that appear to float in either the western Mediterranean or the Western Approaches to the English Channel. Certain maps, including some on display in classrooms, adopt the same convention.2 Perhaps it was one such atlas or map which, in the 1970s, inspired a Martinican schoolchild to write in an essay that the island on which she lived was surrounded by ‘the Ocean, the North Sea and the English Channel’. Or perhaps it was the geography lesson in which she learned about the nature of promontories and peninsulas by studying the example of Quibéron, which is in Brittany, and not that of the spectacular Caravelle peninsula, which was clearly visible from the window of her classroom in La Trinité.3
The small islands depicted in the insets are, respectively, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion. Martinique and Guadeloupe are in the Caribbean; Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Since 1946, all three have been Départements d’Outre-Mer, or ‘Overseas Departments’, of the French Republic and they have, at least in theory, exactly the same status as the départements of Loire-Atlantique or Seine-et-Marne. The fourth DOM is Guyane, which, being part of the Latin-American land mass and lying between Belize and Brazil, cannot easily be depicted in this manner and tends literally to be off the map. Unlike Martinique, Guadeloupe or Réunion, it is not a popular holiday destination and very rarely impinges upon the metropolitan consciousness, except insofar as it is remembered as the home of Cayenne pepper, as the launch site for the Ariane rocket or as a training base for the Foreign Legion. It is probably best known for its offshore islands. These include Devil’s Island, once home to the hellish penal colony where Alfred Dreyfus spent the years 1895–99 after having been unjustly found guilty of treason, and from which ‘Papillon’ (Henri Charrière) escaped; first published in 1969, his account of his escape was one of the bestselling popular adventure stories of the 1970s.4 None of the DOMs is in Polynesia, but French Polynesia is a Territoire d’Outre-Mer (Overseas Territory) with a slightly different legal status.5
School atlases and geography lessons are not the only sources of the confusion as to just where Martinique lies. The covers of the brochures for exotic holidays on display in French travel agencies are often illustrated with photographs of a palm-fringed beach and over-printed ‘Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, Tahiti’. The beach and the palm tree could be in any of these places, and the casual browser could be forgiven for believing that Martinique is in Polynesia. If it does describe Martinique or Guadeloupe in any detail, the brochure may speak of emerald conical peaks, a sapphire ocean and rivers of crystal, pink and white villas and picturesque bamboo huts. It will certainly describe the humming birds shimmering amongst the magnolia flowers. All these clichés are borrowed from an exoticist novel of the 1930s,6 but they still figure in today’s enticing descriptions of exotic holidays.
The very fact that France has DOMs is, according to official discourse, proof that the existence of a nation implies neither territorial continuity nor ethnic uniformity; their ‘assimilation’ into France in 1946 marked ‘an important stage in the formation of the French nation’, and allowed France to ‘reassert its rejection of the racist theories that had recently cost humanity so dear’.7 Assimilation, or ‘departmentalization’, was viewed as an alternative to colonization, or even an alternative form of decolonization.8 The DOMs have long been French, but they have not always been part of France. Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane are the last remnants of the transatlantic Empire that was established by the France of the ancien régime and then lost to Britain in the eighteenth century. These were the ‘old colonies’. Under the terms of the Franco-British peace treaty of 1763, France ceded Canada to Britain, and most of Louisiana to Spain, and withdrew from her Indian possessions. Guadeloupe and Martinique were briefly under British control in 1762, but then reverted to France. Apart from a brief British occupation in 1794–1802, Martinique has been a French possession ever since. The concessions that were made elsewhere by France are an indication of the importance of her Caribbean possessions. They were a source of valuable commodities, especially sugar; Canada, in contrast, consisted of ‘a few acres of snow’, as Voltaire so famously wrote in Candide.
Insofar as it figures at all in the official record, Martinique tends to be subsumed into the general category of Départements d’Outre-Mer/Territories d’Outre-Mer. It does not merit a separate entry in the annual survey of world events published by Le Monde and Editions Gallimard. To find a trace of anything that occurred in Martinique means searching through all the entries for the DOM-TOMs. The search is all too often fruitless. One could read Le Monde or any other French newspaper for a long time without realizing that Martinique is in France. Inclusion goes hand in hand with exclusion. Bookshops classify works by Martinican authors in a category of not-quite-Frenchness that shelves them next to the ‘North African literature’, even though the authors in question are, unlike Algeria’s Rachid Boudjedra or Rachid Mimouni, French citizens. The Centre Georges Pompidou’s Bibliothèque Publique d’Information in Paris follows the same convention: West Indian literature is, like writing from Québec, North Africa and the former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, regarded as a subset of the literature of Francophonie, a generic term applied to French-speaking communities around the world. Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992 but it is not shelved in the same section of the library as the novels of metropolitan Goncourt winners.9
Even as it is insisted that Martinique is French, it is hinted that it is not quite in France. This is not a purely literary question. There is abundant sociological evidence that citizens from Martinique and the other DOMs are widely regarded as ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreigners’ when they visit what is supposed to be their own country.10 It is not uncommon for the Martinican who arrives in Paris and asks a policeman for directions to be asked to produce his residence permit. On stammering that he is a French citizen from a DOM and therefore the holder of a French passport, he will be told: ‘You should have said you were a West Indian. How am I supposed to know? OK, on your way.’ The policeman has just noticed an Arab who is a shade too dark to be honest and loses interest in the Martinican.11 This was Fanon’s experience too: ‘We [Martinicans] have often been stopped by police officers who have mistaken us for Arabs, and when they find out where we are from, they quickly apologize: “We know very well that a Martinican is not the same as an Arab”.’12
Even the armchair traveller who never leaves Paris quickly senses that there is something particular about this integral part of France. The Institut Géographique National map (sheet 3615 of the Editions spéciales de l’IGN) he or she has bought from the specialist Le Vieux Campeur bookshop in the rue du Sommerard features a symbol that is not to be found on a map of any metropolitan département. It is a stylized cock, and signals the site of a ‘Gallodrome’, known in Martinique as a pitt (from the English ‘cock pit’). Cock-fighting is a popular entertainment, and the birds are sometimes also pitted against poisonous snakes. The bets are high and large sums of money change hands. This would be illegal in metropolitan France. Guidebooks also give the impression that Martinique is a rather strange part of France. No Parisian visiting Brittany or the south coast of France needs to be reminded that it is inadvisable to use the familiar pronoun tu – which is usually reserved for children, relatives and close friends – when addressing a waiter or barman. Guidebooks to Martinique do have to warn visitors from la métropole against infantilizing its black French citizens with an over-familiar tu. The guidebooks do not point out the other uses to which tu can be put; when the policeman asks the ‘Martinican who looks like an Arab’ for his papers, he addresses him as ‘tu’. When Fanon was completing his medical studies in Lyon, he was a decorated and wounded war veteran. He was also black. The examiner presiding over his oral examination initially addressed