to his other sisters, and closer still to Joby, his elder by two years. They shared a bed, played the same sports and had the same friends. Their strong mutual affection remained unspoken: overt displays of affection were to be avoided at all cost. One of their shared passions was football. This was not unusual: Martinique had many teams, and the 1930s have been described as the golden age of Martinican football.86 While they were at primary school, the Fanon brothers were too young to play league games, but they took an active role in the informal matches that were played on the Savanne on Sunday mornings. There were no pitches marked out on the Savanne so these were impromptu affairs, but Fanon, an outgoing personality with an easy ascendancy over others of his age, created ‘his’ club, which he called ‘Les Joyeux Compagnons’. It was on the football field that Fanon first met long-standing friends like Pierre Marie-Claire Mosole, Marcel Manville and Charles Cézette, the son of a grocer living in the rue Périnnon. All three would fight alongside him in the Second World War.
In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon describes the Savanne in jaundiced terms: ‘Imagine a space two hundred metres long and forty metres wide, with its sides bounded by worm-eaten tamarind trees, with the immense war memorial, the fatherland’s gratitude to its children at one end, and the Central-Hôtel at the other; an unevenly paved and tortured space, with pebbles that roll under your feet.’87 There are strategic reasons why Fanon describes the Savanne – and the rest of Fort-de-France – in such negative terms,88 but for the boy who played football there it was a space of freedom and offered a welcome escape from the choking grid of narrow streets. The negative description is intended to counter the ‘exoticist’ descriptions given in books like Sonson de la Martinique, a very poor novel published in 1932:
Who hasn’t heard of Fort-de-France’s Savanne? It must be as famous as the Cannebière and the place des Quinconces. Well, Martinicans think so at least. They say that it is so famous because sailors from all over the world have always been in the habit of mentioning it when they get home: its welcomingly tree-lined walks, cooled by the breeze that comes from the far horizon, the Pitons du Carbet whose sharp teeth stand out against the blue of the sky, its huge sandalwood trees and its shady little wood which shelters children accompanied by their das by day and, by night, homeless vagabonds and lovers.89
Other pastimes were rather less innocent than football. When they could escape their mother’s supervision, Joby and Frantz were also members of a juvenile gang known as ‘la bande raide’, whose territory extended from the abattoir on the banks of the canal Levassoir to the Pont de chaines in the Terres-Sainville. For reasons that no one can now explain, Frantz – as always, the dominant figure and organizer – was known as ‘Kabère’, whilst Joby was ‘Pipo’. Although they were from time to time involved in scuffles with rival gangs like the Terreur de la Grosse Roche, the boys’ activities were usually confined to minor mischief. Writing to his mother in 1947, Fanon recalled with some amusement how a teacher called Madame Philoctète had had to write to his father to complain about the ‘infamies’ committed by ‘his rascal of a son’. The boys stole marbles from shops, and found their mother’s shop an irresistible target. When they could, they sneaked into cinemas and sporting events without paying. Such activities did not pass unnoticed in the closely knit society of Fort-de-France and were quickly reported to the boys’ parents, who were convinced that they would end up in prison. The high point of their criminal career was, however, a piece of childish devilry which caused annoyance and scandal but no real harm. Using stolen safety-pins they fastened together the best dresses of a group of ladies in church, and then watched the chaos that ensued when they tried to stand up to take communion. Imbued with the prim values of the Pensionnat Colonial rather than those of the street, the Fanon sisters were as scandalized as their parents.
Fanon’s talent for mischief and football went hand in hand with a remarkable degree of self-possession. One incident, which reportedly occurred when he was eight, was potentially serious. The fourteen-year-old Félix had a friend called Kléber Gamess, and one day he ‘borrowed’ his father’s revolver to impress the Fanon boys. Félix was out on an errand, and Kléber went to wait for him in Frantz’s room. Slipping off the safety catch, he began to clean the gun, not realizing that it was loaded. Accidental pressure on the trigger realized a shot that could have killed Frantz, but the only injury was to Kléber’s finger. Shouting down to his mother that the noise had been caused by a toy car backfiring, Frantz bandaged the boy’s finger with a torn sheet and then took him to hospital, telling Eléanore that they were just going out for a walk. Forty years later, Félix commented: ‘It was in his nature to be like that. Playing soccer, it was the same thing. He never got excited; he was always very efficient.’90
As he reached his teens, the footballer and apprentice juvenile delinquent began to spend less time on the Savanne and the street, and took to reading in the Bibliothèque Schoelcher. The library is Fort-de-France’s strangest public building. Built of cast-iron and glass, designed to resemble a pagoda, decorated with coloured mosaics and surmounted by a glass dome, it was first erected in the Tuileries gardens in Paris in 1887 and then dismantled and shipped in pieces to Martinique, where it was re-erected on a swampy patch of ground adjacent to the Savanne in 1893. The entrance lobby is emblazoned with the name of the philosophers of the age of enlightenment: Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire. The library originally held the estimated 10,000 volumes from the personal library of Victor Schoelcher. Most of the Schoelcher bequest was destroyed by the disastrous fire of 1902, and the library acquired a rather sinister reputation. In the late 1940s, an English visitor was warned by a local lady not to touch any of the books because they were all ‘infected with leprosy germs’.91 Neither the comparative poverty of the library’s holdings nor talk of leprosy germs deterred Fanon from spending hours in this polychrome building, where he read as widely as possible, concentrating on the classical French literature and philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Outside the library, books were not easy to come by and one of the reasons why Peau noire is so replete with quotations and references is simply that its author spent his youth in a book-poor town, and then found himself in the book-rich culture of a major French university. He had been let loose in a large library, and he took advantage of it.
This adolescent initiation into French classicism was the culmination of a process which had begun long ago. At primary school, Fanon had made good progress but he had done so at a price. Like any other child, he was discouraged from speaking the Creole that is in effect the first language of any Martinican. Creole is a rich mixture of French, African survivals and fragments of the many European languages spoken in the eastern Caribbean by planters, traders, slavers and merchants. It developed out of the lingua franca that allowed white masters to communicate with black slaves on the plantations, and is spoken by békés and blacks alike. The use of Creole can at times create a feeling of Martinican identity that transcends the usual divisions. It is said that when violent riots hit Fort-de-France in 1959, some local békés escaped physical assault or worse by addressing the rioters in Creole; metropolitans who could speak only French were not so lucky. Fanon’s own attitude towards Creole was ambivalent and even contradictory. In 1952, he agreed with Michel Leiris that it would gradually die out or be reduced to residual status by the spread of (French) education;92 six years later, he argued that Creole was an ‘expression of the Antillean consciousness’ and that it might even provide the linguistic basis for a West Indian Federation to which Martinique could belong.93
Syntactically, Martinican Creole resembles a simplified form of French, but its vocabulary is a rich gumbo of many things. Fanon had been taught that it was not a language, but a patois that was midway between petitnègre (literally ‘little-negro’, this is the French equivalent to pidgin English) and French. Lessons learned at school were reinforced at home, where children who lapsed into Creole were told by their mothers that they were tibandes, or no better than the children who worked in the cane fields.94 The shift from Creole to French is an important aspect of the donning of the white mask that covers the black face, and it is one of the major themes of Fanon’s first book: ‘The black West Indian will become all the whiter, or in other words come closer to being a true man, to the extent that he makes the French language his own.’95 Fanon does not speak of his schooldays in very specific terms, but education in Martinique was – and is – an induction into linguistic and cultural