and then re-copy them in their best writing into expensive notebooks. The hand-copied texts circulated through the lycée like clandestine documents.121 Césaire could begin a class by entering the room and saying: ‘Rimbaud: the power of revolt’, and would declaim classical verse as he stood perched on a chair. His pupils dubbed him ‘the green lizard’ because he wore a green checked suit. This was a sign of affection; the green anoli lizard (anolis carolinensis) is a popular little creature.
Césaire has said little about his former pupil. The tribute to him that he published in Présence Africaine celebrates Fanon’s revolutionary virtues in an almost florid rhetoric, but gives little sense of any personal affection, or indeed of any great personal acquaintance with its subject.122 Césaire’s one contribution to the 1982 Mémorial International held to honour Fanon, which his Parti Populaire Martiniquais did nothing to support, was a poem published in the PPM’s paper Le Progressiste, but not included in the collected Poésie. It ends
par quelques-uns des mots obsédant une torpeur
et l’accueil et l’éveil de chacun de nos maux
je t’énonce
FANON
Tu rayes le fer
Tu rayes le barreau des prisons
Tu rayes le regard des bourreaux
guerrier-silex
vomi
par la gueule du serpent de la mangrove123
[I speak your name
FANON
with some words that obsess a torpor
the welcome and awakening of all of our ills
You lash the iron
You lash the prison bars
You lash the gaze of the torturers
Silex-warrior
spat
from the mouth of the snake in the mangrove swamp]
Although he would always be able to cite from memory long passages from the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Césaire’s other poems, Fanon’s attitude towards Césaire and the negritude with which he is associated was complex and ambivalent, and would change considerably between their first encounters and the publication of Peau noire in 1952. For the moment, the astonishing thing about Césaire was that: ‘For the first time, we saw a lycée teacher, and therefore an apparently respectable man, saying to Antillean society that it is fine and good to be a nègre.’124 It was a rare voice that dared to say this in late 1939, and attempts would soon be made to still it through censorship. The atmosphere in Fort-de-France had changed during Frantz and Joby’s stay in Le François. The stinking trenches were still there on the Savanne, but the feverish panic of 1939 had given way to a sullen mood of depression. Martinique was now living ‘An Tan Robè’, as the saying went in Creole. It was living ‘in Robert time’.
It had, on the whole, been an unexceptional boyhood, typical of a child of the Martinican middle classes. Fanon was at times unruly and a worry to his parents, but he could also work hard and he did well at school. He enjoyed the usual pleasures of sport and going to the cinema. He had experienced no major traumas and, like any other child, perceived his own existence as perfectly normal. He was French and identified with the French culture in which he had been brought up and educated. There was nothing in his background to suggest that he would become a major icon of revolutionary Third Worldism. Although his father is said to have been a freemason – which, in French terms, made him a supporter of the secular left – his family had no history of political activism, or even of any interest in politics. When Fanon returned to Fort-de-France from Le François, the major traumas were still ahead of him. Life in Tan Robè would bring his first serious encounter with racism and would teach him a lesson that would be reinforced in the army and then again by life in metropolitan France: whilst he thought he was French like any other French person, many of his fellow French nationals saw him as simply one more nègre.
On 25 March 1941, the Compagnie des Transports Maritimes’ steamer Capitaine Paul Lemerle left Marseille, bound for Fort-de-France. The passenger manifest made for interesting reading. The 350 passengers on board included Victor Serge and his family, the novelist Anna Seghers, the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the painter André Masson, and André Breton, the magus of surrealism, who paced the few empty spaces on the crowded deck, dressed in a thick overcoat and looking ‘like a blue bear’.1 Their departure from Marseille was the first stage on a circuitous journey that would eventually take them all to the USA. Together with an Austrian metal-dealer and a Tunisian with a Degas canvas in his suitcase who claimed, somewhat improbably in the circumstances, to be going to New York for ‘only a few days’, Breton and Lévi-Strauss soon found that they had boarded a ship with only two passenger cabins and a total of seven proper bunks. Most of the passengers spent an uncomfortable voyage sleeping on the straw-mattressed bunk beds that had rapidly been constructed in the hold. All had good reasons for leaving France. In May 1940, the German army’s rapid advance through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes had routed the French. On 14 June, the Wehrmacht entered Paris unopposed.
The Third Republic, which had changed Martinique so much, no longer existed. On 16 June, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the eighty-year-old hero who had defended Verdun in 1916 and was now head of the newly established Etat français (‘French State’), concluded that further resistance was impossible. On 22 June, he signed a humiliating armistice with Germany that divided France into an occupied northern zone and a southern ‘free’ zone under the control of a ‘Vichy regime’ eager to collaborate with Germany.2 Pétain’s actions were perfectly constitutional, as he derived his powers from the last government of the Third Republic. Communists, Jews and surrealist subversives were, however, well aware that, whatever the constitutional status of the Etat français may have been, any life they could lead under Vichy would be an uncomfortable one.
Life on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle was not comfortable either. The ship limped across the Mediterranean to Oran, west to the Straits of Gibraltar and on to Casablanca and then Dakar before heading out into the Atlantic. So much time was spent avoiding British patrols and hugging the coastline that Lévi-Strauss was convinced that she was carrying some clandestine cargo. After a month at sea, the ill-assorted company reached Martinique, where they had an unfriendly reception. For the military interrogators who boarded the ship, the non-French passengers were enemies, whilst their French companions were traitors who had deserted their country in its hour of need.3 Lévi-Strauss was accused of being ‘a Jewish freemason in the pay of the Americans’.4 Denied the baths they were longing for, all but three of the passengers – a rich béké, the mysterious Tunisian and Lévi-Strauss himself – were interned under armed guard in the Lazaret camp on the south side of Fort-de-France’s great natural harbour. As its name suggests, Le Lazaret was once a leper hospital; the site it occupied on the Pointe-du-Bout peninsula is now a concrete hotel complex.
The internees were finally released, not because of humanitarian concerns on the part of the authorities, but because local tradesmen in Fort-de-France argued that their continued detention was depriving the town of a potential source of income.5 As it happened, there was little for them to spend their money on. Lévi-Strauss was not impressed by what he saw on landing in Fort-de-France for the first time:
At two o’clock in the afternoon, Fort-de-France was a dead town: it was impossible to believe that anyone lived in the ramshackle buildings which bordered the long market-place planted with palm trees and overrun with weeds, and which was more like a stretch of waste-ground with, in its middle, an apparently forgotten statue, green with neglect, of Joséphine Tascher de la Pagerie, later known as Joséphine de Beauharnais.6
Breton’s experience