regular member of the team. Edouard Fanon was strict with his nephews, kept them to a tight timetable and insisted on disciplined schoolwork. They responded well to the regime he imposed and their work improved greatly, perhaps because they knew that any misbehaviour would be immediately reported to their formidable mother. Joby recalls that Edouard had a good influence on him and his brother and, at least for a while, he acted as their true father. It must have helped that there were few distractions in Le François. There were very few shops to steal from, and no cinema to sneak into without paying. Frantz’s behaviour did not occasion much cause for reproach, but there was one untoward incident. One day in late 1939, he failed to return to school after lunch. Eventually, he did reappear, but looked distinctly ill. At first, Edouard thought he was drunk, and he almost struck him in anger. It was not until years later that he found out what had happened. Frantz had slipped out of school, behind the church and into the mairie, a pleasant colonial style building whose upper storey is constructed in wood. Somehow, he had heard that a post-mortem was going to be performed on the victim of a drowning and he was determined to be present. Creeping unobserved into the room where the autopsy was to take place, he watched the dissection from beginning to end, and then staggered back to school feeling nauseous. As a medical student in Lyon, Frantz would never be good at dissection.
The only other notable incident known to have occurred in Le François came when Edouard took his class of twenty-three boys on an educational visit to the ‘château’ near Monnerot, a few kilometres to the north. The ‘château’ was in fact a typical plantation house, and the trip was an exercise in local history. The topic for the next day’s work was, predictably enough, ‘our day out’. Frantz handed in a carefully written essay centred on the story told to the class by the guide who had shown them around. It was one of the Caribbean’s many tales of buried treasure, but also a reminder of the violence of slave-time: long ago, the béké who owned the château buried his gold in the cellar with the help of a slave. He then murdered his slave and buried him beside the gold to ensure that his ghost would protect the treasure from would-be robbers. Edouard was impressed with his nephew’s work, and began to think that he might have some literary talent.
After almost two years in Le François, the brothers returned to Fort-de-France, which had not been invaded after all, and to the re-opened lycée. A very self-confident Frantz had decided that it was time to sit his baccalauréat a year earlier than he had been expected to. He was successful in the written papers that made up the first part of the examination at this time. Events ensured that it would be some time before he sat the oral and was awarded the qualification that would allow him to go to university in France. The examination scripts were marked by teachers from Guadeloupe, and their visit provides another example of the young Fanon’s sense of self and perception of others. One of the teachers, a philosophy specialist identified by Fanon only as ‘Monsieur B.’, was reputed to be ‘excessively black’, or ‘blue’ in local parlance, and Fanon and friends pursued him to his hotel to see just how black he was.113 Their curiosity was no doubt stimulated by the common belief, which Fanon admitted to being unable to explain, that Martinicans were superior to, and ‘less black’ than, Guadeloupeans. Guadeloupe had traditionally been less prosperous than Martinique, and its white population smaller. The historical explanation is that, whilst the British occupation of 1794–1802 meant that the Convention’s abolition of slavery in 1794, which proved to be temporary, did not apply in Martinique, it also spared the island the Terror instituted in Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues, the Jacobin commissioner. Unlike its sister island, Guadeloupe was quickly retaken by the French and 865 people were guillotined for having collaborated with the British. Many of the heads that fell belonged to white planters; a lot more whites fled the island, leaving Guadeloupe with a much ‘blacker’ population than Martinique.114 Fanon’s curiosity about a ‘blue’ philosopher from Guadeloupe, and the assumption of Martinican superiority that was its sub-text, was deeply rooted in colonial history.
It was on his return to Fort-de-France that Fanon first came into contact with Aimé Césaire.115 Césaire was not yet the politician who was to become the most important man in Martinique for almost fifty years. And he was not yet the most famous poet to be associated with negritude. The first version of his great Cahier d’un retour au pays natal had appeared in the Parisian journal Volontés in August 1939 – not the most auspicious moment to publish that scream of rage – but it cannot have been widely read even in France let alone Martinique. It was the second edition of 1947 that was to make him famous. In October 1939, Césaire was a twenty-six-year-old teacher who had failed to pass his agrégation after three years at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and four years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Césaire was born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe, a small settlement on the north Atlantic coast. The name means ‘low point’ and the village is on a low promontory that breaks the high cliffs of that dangerous coast. It was not a beautiful spot. The Corbière river flowed through it and across the volcanic beach – ‘the sand is black, funereal, you’ve never seen such black sand’116 – where dead cats and dogs were washed up from the sea: ‘heaps of garbage rotting away, furtive rumps relieving themselves’. Basse-Pointe was at the heart of the plantation system of the north. With a surface area of up to 200 hectares, the plantations here were bigger than those in the south and they produced sugar on a large scale (with the decline in the sugar industry, the plantations have now diversified into the production of bananas and pineapples). During Césaire’s childhood, the traditional plantation system was still largely intact and the sugar was cultivated by descendants of the Indian bonded labourers who replaced the old slaves from 1858 onwards. Basse-Pointe was (and is) home to Martinique’s largest concentration of Indians, or ‘coulis’. Césaire’s father was an économe (steward) on the Eyma plantation, which was within walking distance of Basse-Pointe itself, and the future poet’s early childhood was spent there. A line from the Cahier is presumably a memory of walking to school in Basse-Pointe: ‘Me on a road as a child, chewing a sugar-cane root’.117
The Cahier gives a poetically overstated account of a childhood spent in rural poverty, but the degree of personal exaggeration does not make it an unrealistic account of other Martinican lives:
At the end of the early morning, another little house that smells very bad in a very narrow street, a minuscule house which shelters in its entrails of rotten wood tens of rats and the turbulence of my six brothers and sisters, a cruel little house . . . and my mother whose tireless legs pedal, pedal day and night for our insatiable hunger, even at night I am woken up by those tireless legs pedalling by night and the bitter biting into the soft flesh of the night of a Singer that my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger day and night.118
Césaire’s mother did take in sewing, but the family was not especially poor. When he was twelve, Césaire won a scholarship to the Lycée Schoelcher and the entire family moved to Fort-de-France, where they lived in the rue Antoine Siger. The boy, whose father had now studied to gain a post in the tax service, made excellent progress at school; in 1934 he won a scholarship that took him to Louis-le-Grand, one of Paris’s most prestigious schools, and then on to Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS).
Césaire may not have passed the agrégation that might have given him a university career, but he was a good teacher. The post at the Lycée Schoelcher was his first and he taught there for only four years before going into politics, but his own immodest account of what he achieved as a teacher is not an inaccurate one: ‘I was a teacher. I gave courses on literature to une classe de première [equivalent to an English sixth form] . . . I had some disciples. That was very important. I trained a lot of young people – they’re men now – and some became friends, others enemies, not that that matters much. They all came out of me, out of my teaching. I was a teacher, and quite an effective one it seems, and I undoubtedly influenced a whole generation.’119 Many of his pupils, who included Edouard Glissant as well as Fanon, would have endorsed this self-appraisal. Marcel Manville speaks of Césaire’s ‘flamboyant’ teaching, and of the impact of his introduction to Lautréamont, the surrealists, Malraux and Rimbaud. This was, he recalls, ‘a literature charged with powder and contestation’.120
In 1958, Glissant paid tribute to his old teacher: ‘For my generation, he was an exemplary pedagogue, a man who awakened consciences and taught us everything that was not normally taught in