for Fanon’s worldview: a perspective defined by belonging to a majority, yet one unjustly limited by racial discrimination. Landownership stayed in the hands of a ruling white plantation class after emancipation. Labor continued to be provided by black Martinicans, augmented by indentured immigrants from India, primarily Tamils from French-controlled Pondicherry. As a result, political power remained among elite whites and békés—Creole whites who descended from the original French settler community.11
Middle-Class Life in Fort-de-France
The recorded history of the Fanon family starts in the 1840s with his great-grandfather, who was the son of a slave but himself a free man. Fanon’s great-grandparents and grandparents owned small farms. His parents, Félix Casimir Fanon (1891–1947) and Eléanore Médélice Fanon (1891–1981), lived in urban Fort-de-France, working as a civil servant and shopkeeper, respectively (map 1.2). They had eight children, Frantz being the fifth. His mother was métisse—which may have granted Fanon some status, due to Martinique’s racial politics—with part of her family being from Strasbourg in the Alsace region along the border of Germany and France. The Germanic name “Frantz” is understood to be a gesture toward this familial past. Given the professional occupations of his parents, Fanon was born into relative privilege—a first-generation, middle-class milieu—even if the degree of affluence possible in Fort-de-France at the time was limited.12
The population of Fort-de-France approximated 43,000 people during the 1930s, a decade after Fanon’s birth, signaling the small scale of its economy and urban life generally. While it maintained all the essentials of a Caribbean port city with commercial facilities and a French naval installation, business activity was minimal and largely local after the decline of sugar’s profitability at the end of the nineteenth century. Fort-de-France had long been Martinique’s center of government, but the historical and cultural hub of the island had been its first settlement, Saint-Pierre, once known as “the Paris of the Caribbean.” Saint-Pierre experienced a cataclysmic downfall in 1902 with the volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée that emitted a cloud of toxic gas, killing 30,000 people in its wake. Fort-de-France consequently swelled in size in the decades that followed. Urbanization delivered a mix of benefits and drawbacks. The promise of work and financial opportunity for Martinicans without land competed with everyday problems of poor living conditions, inadequate sanitation, and disease due to an expanding urban population. Smallpox, leprosy, and tuberculosis were common.13
Map 1.2 Martinique.
Fanon himself escaped the worst of these conditions. His family accrued enough wealth for household servants, private schooling, and a second home. Fanon never wrote about or discussed this relative affluence. Indeed, Alice Cherki, in her memoir of Fanon, recalls his persistent privacy, writing, “Every time Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to know some particular concerning Fanon’s life, Fanon avoided answering by dismissing the information as extraneous.”14 Though Sartre, as a strong admirer of Fanon, was undoubtedly interested in the origins of his philosophy, Fanon’s youth sharply contrasted with the lives of those he advocated later in his adulthood, particularly in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon was not an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, emerging from a lower-strata milieu.15 He instead grew up in comfort with his attention focused on school, sports, and play. His family was not overtly political and, from a cultural outlook, French. Though his father maintained a certain distance from his children, Eléanore was an active presence, cultivating a rich family life. Fanon played soccer and frequented the local public library—the Bibliothèque Schoelcher—as a teenager. Joby Fanon, his older brother, recalled him being something of a mischievous troublemaker—a quality that portended of his future, as well as undermining a common caricature of Fanon as the angry man, humorless in disposition.16 Most significant, Frantz Fanon attended private school at the Lycée Victor Schoelcher—which, like the library, was named after the famous French abolitionist—where, as a student, he fortuitously crossed paths with Martinican poet, intellectual, and politician Aimé Césaire.17
Césaire was born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe to the far north of the island. His family moved to Fort-de-France after he himself received a scholarship to study at the Lycée Schoelcher. Raised in lower middle-class circumstances—his father a government worker, his mother a seamstress—Césaire excelled academically like the younger Fanon, receiving a second scholarship to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1934 and later the École Normale Supérieure—among the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in France. Founded during the French Revolution in 1794, it graduated such esteemed intellectual figures as Sartre, philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), and philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), among many others. After completing a master’s thesis, Césaire returned to Martinique to teach. During his brief four-year tenure at the Lycée Schoelcher, Césaire taught not only Fanon but also Glissant, who credited Césaire as being a teacher of influence by assigning texts by the poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) and the novelist André Malraux (1901–1976), whose work introduced interrelated questions of aesthetics and politics.18
Nevertheless, these personal connections were delicate. Although Césaire and Fanon would always share a special affinity—Césaire would later write a eulogy for Fanon in the journal Présence africaine—generational and political differences emerged, as seen in Black Skin, White Masks, perhaps an unsurprising development given the hierarchy between teacher and student and their contrasting career ambitions.19 This point is nevertheless important, to avoid an oversimplification of Martinican politics or intellectual life. Still, Césaire provided a vital role model for Fanon—a black intellectual who took advantage of the opportunities of French education and culture, but who was unafraid of confronting latent undercurrents of racism and political chauvinism.20
Négritude
Négritude is essential for understanding the political culture of Martinique prior to and just after the Second World War. For Fanon, this black Francophone movement was his first formative intellectual influence. Often associated with the then-popular aesthetic of surrealism, Négritude had more complex origins than this common view can convey. As the literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards has detailed, it drew upon multiple sources and venues across the Atlantic world, comprising a black internationalism, to use an expression by one of its vital predecessors, Jane Nardal (1902–1993).21 Established in Paris during the 1930s by Césaire, Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), and Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978), it encompassed a range of literary figures. Senghor was from Senegal in French West Africa, which he would later lead to independence, becoming its first president in 1960. Damas came from French Guiana in South America, though he also studied at the Lycée Schoelcher in Martinique, where he and Césaire first met as students. But equally important were the sisters Jane and Paulette Nardal (1896–1985) as well as Césaire’s wife, Suzanne (1915–1966), all of whom were from Martinique and helped shape Négritude’s meanings.22
Given its transatlantic geography, this intellectual movement must be understood as cosmopolitan in formation, but defined by perspectives from the margins of the French Empire. Like New York and London, Paris attracted writers, artists, and intellectuals from around the world, with gifted students from France’s colonies attending its universities. But such cosmopolitanism was not circumscribed by imperial boundaries. Through the Nardal sisters, Césaire and his collaborators engaged the Harlem Renaissance and the efflorescence of African American cultural life during the same period, which marked the appearance of such figures as Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), and Claude McKay (1889–1948). The Black Atlantic and the alternative modernity it posed against European culture, as argued by sociologist Paul Gilroy, fully emerged during the first half of the twentieth century through the concurrent rise of Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, and Négritude.23
Like the former two movements, Négritude confronted the effects of racial discrimination and political