and he did not forget the experience.52 The tone of Peau noire, masques blancs and his other early texts indicates that Fanon’s political views were at this time a product of his own anger and a spontaneous sympathy with the ‘wretched of the earth’ rather than of any interest in party politics.
The outgoing side to his personality that had made him the dominant figure in games of football in Martinique now made Fanon an imposing participant in the Association lyonnaise des étudiants de la France d’Outre-mer, or Overseas Students’ Association. Sadly, there appear to be no extant records of that small organization’s activities. Fanon’s forceful personality also made him very attractive to the women he encountered in the caféteria and meeting rooms of the Association générale des étudiants, or Students’ Union. It probably helped that Fanon, who could be seductively charming when he wanted to be, always dressed very smartly and conservatively, as Martinicans of his generation tended to do (the habitually dishevelled Manville was, even in later life, a conspicuous exception to the rule). His contacts were not restricted to his contemporaries. He was in touch with the Martinican Louis-Thomas-Eugène Achille, who taught English at the prestigious Lycée du Parc – still regarded as Lyon’s best school. Born in 1909, a prolific writer of articles on black issues and an authority on negro spirituals (he had recorded with the ‘Park Glee Club de Lyon’),53 Achille, whose brother taught at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, was a Catholic and of a different generation to Fanon. But they had experiences in common, and Fanon could recognize himself in Achille’s anecdote about going on a Catholic pilgrimage in June 1950. Seeing a ‘tanned’ man in his flock, the priest in charge approached him with the words ‘You done left big Savanne, why come long us?’ The impeccable French of Achille’s courteous reply meant that it was the priest who was left embarrassed by the exchange.54 His good French did not, however, make it any easier to find a hotel in Paris; the hotels refused to take in the black pilgrims ‘simply because the Anglo-Saxon guests (who, as everyone knows are rich and negrophobic) might have moved out’.55 Although novelists like Richard Wright, who lived in France from 1947 onwards, and musicians like Bud Powell found Paris less hostile than the United States, the city was by no means free of racism. Like Achille, the American novelist Chester Himes recalled being turned away from the cheap hotels frequented by young white Americans: ‘They said they couldn’t rent to noirs; their clients wouldn’t like it.’56 An Algerian would have found it even more difficult to find a room.
At the beginning of his second year in Lyon, Fanon wrote to his mother to tell her that the days when his teachers had had to complain to her about his bad behaviour were long gone, that he was working very hard and that he was anxious to bring her the joy she had always taken in her children’s academic success. He was, he said, making up for lost time, and outlined an ambitious programme: a second diploma in February, his second medical exams in June and then, at an unspecified date, a non-resident post in a Lyon hospital.57 He did not in fact keep to this programme, and made another change of direction as his studies progressed, but he was working hard and not only at his medicine. The footnotes to Peau noire indicate that he was reading very widely, and that his reading was by no means restricted to medical textbooks. The plethora of notes and quotations is an indication of a major change that had occurred when he moved from Fort-de-France to Lyon: he had moved from a book-poor to a book-rich culture, from the limited resources of the Bibliothèque Schoelcher to the bookshops and libraries of a large university town, and he was taking advantage of the facilities on offer. He was reading journals like Esprit, the voice of the Catholic left, and Sartre’s Les Temps modernes and Présence africaine, which began publication in 1947. He read quite extensively in philosophy, showing a particular interest in the Hegelian-existentialist strand that was so important in the immediate post-war years, and attended lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but later told Simone de Beauvoir that he found the philosopher ‘distant’ and never tried to speak to him.58 The opening words of the first chapter of Peau noire come directly from his study of phenomenology: ‘I attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language. Hence, I believe, the necessity of this study, which should provide us with one element that will help us to understand the for-others [pour autrui] dimension of the man of colour.’59 The appeal of phenomenology was that, as will be argued in Chapter 5, of all the philosophical discourses available to him in the late 1940s, this was the philosophy that could be best adapted to an analysis of his own ‘lived experience’. The classics of French phenomenology – Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant – are obviously not treatises on racism and anti-racism, but they provided tools that were much better suited to the analysis of ‘the lived experience of the black man’ than either Marxism or psychoanalysis.
In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon’s vocabulary is that of the modernism of the 1940s. And it is the modernity of his non-medical reading that is so striking: most of the books cited in Peau noire were published in the period 1947–50, which makes it likely that its final composition dates from 1950–51. Richard Wright’s Native Son and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (which appeared in translation in 1947 and 1948, respectively) were of obvious interest to someone intent on analysing the lived experience of the black man, but it is also significant that they were part of the new ‘committed’ culture so actively promoted by Les Temps modernes in particular and provided a contemporary counterbalance to Présence africaine’s more traditionalist approach to African culture. The novels were also his main – if not sole – source of information about race relations in the United States. When he contrasts the surprise expressed by Americans in Paris on seeing so many racially mixed couples with Simone de Beauvoir’s experience of hostility from an old lady when walking through New York with Wright, he is, although he gives no reference, alluding to a book published in 1948.60 Whilst Fanon’s reading was wide, it was also very selective and tightly focused. He was reading philosophy and psychology in order to find the theoretical tools to analyse his lived experience, and fiction, poetry and drama to illustrate it. He read Beauvoir’s account of her travels in America and of her friendship with Wright, but there is no direct evidence that he knew her Le Deuxième sexe.61 Feminism was not on Fanon’s agenda. He refers to and cites Sartre’s play La Putain respectueuse, which was inspired by the Scottsboro (Alabama) affair of 1931, in which nine young black men were sentenced to the electric chair for the alleged rape of two white prostitutes and served long terms of imprisonment (the last of the Scottsboro boys was finally freed in 1951), but not the novels of his Les Chemins de la liberté (‘Roads to Freedom’) trilogy, which do not deal with the race question.62 His knowledge of the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier was restricted to a reading of his account of a journey through France’s West African colonies.63
Fanon was now beginning to write, but nothing has survived from this period. He used a roneo machine in the Students’ Union to produce a small magazine entitled Tam-tam (Tom-tom), and appears to have been its sole contributor as well as its editor. Whilst nothing is known of its content, the title has a very Césairean ring to it – the word tam-tam appears in the title of three of the poems included in Césaire’s first collection64 – and suggests that Fanon was experimenting with some variant of negritude. Although sections of Peau noire, masques blancs reveal a certain gift for narrative, he does not appear to have tried his hand at prose fiction but he was very interested in the theatre and frequented the Théâtre de la Comédie, where he saw early stage productions of Roger Planchon, who was director there from 1952 to 1957.65 The interest in drama explains some features of Peau noire, in which Fanon makes use of an almost theatrical delivery and writes fragments of dialogue that are most effective when read aloud. By 1949–50, he had written three plays. They remained unpublished and were never performed, even though a very optimistic Fanon sent at least one of them to the actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault, who never replied. One friend recalls having seen them in manuscript and, whilst she has no real memory of their content, does remember that they were ‘not very good’.66 According to Fanon’s widow, the manuscripts were lost during one of the many moves that took them from Lyon to Algeria, from Algeria to Tunis, and then to Accra. In a rare interview, she recalled only that they dealt with ‘philosophical themes’ and above all with that of ‘action’.67 This, together with the titles – Les Mains parallèles (‘Parallel Hands’),