by Hilton Als
Nevertheless, he brilliantly captured the psychological impact of revolt on an oppressed people, their transformation into historical subjects. In effect, the revolution was achieving what he had hoped to do inside the walls of Blida: the “tense immobility of the dominated society,” he wrote, had given way to “awareness, movement, creation,” freeing the colonized from “that familiar tinge of resignation that specialists in underdeveloped countries describe under the heading of fatalism.” Revolution, it turned out, was the cure for the “North African syndrome.”
By the time L’An V appeared, Fanon had been pushed aside as the FLN’s media spokesman in Tunis. His replacement was the information minister of the newly formed Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), M’hammed Yazid, a suave diplomat with strong ties to the French left, which Fanon had scornfully lectured. Fanon became a traveling ambassador and in March 1960 was appointed to Accra as the FLN’s permanent representative. The United Kingdom of Libya supplied him with a vrai faux passeport that identified him as Omar Ibrahim Fanon. He took to his new assignment with characteristic zeal.
Algeria’s liberation, he wrote in El Moudjahid, would be “an African victory,” a “step in the realization of a free and happy humanity.” Fanon saw Algeria’s war of decolonization as a model for all of Africa and first made his case—against the more conciliatory positions of his host, Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah—at the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Accra, where he led the FLN delegation and gave an electrifying speech advocating armed struggle as a uniquely effective route to national liberation. Few of Africa’s leaders were prepared to sign up. Most were cultural nationalists like Senegal’s president Léopold Senghor, who advocated African unity while accepting French interference in defense and economic policy—and siding with France at the UN against Algerian independence. Fanon was infuriated at having to argue the merits of the Algerian cause to Africans, and in one speech he nearly broke into tears.
Africa, Fanon believed, needed unyielding militants like his friend Ramdane. He was impressed by Sékou Touré, the ruthless dictator of Guinea, and once confessed that he had a “horror of weaknesses”; Touré appeared to have none. Fanon’s closest allies at the conference in Accra were Patrice Lumumba, soon to be the first prime minister of independent Congo, and Félix Moumié, a revolutionary from Cameroon. In September 1960, Lumumba was overthrown in a Belgian-sponsored coup, a prelude to his assassination. Two months later Moumié was poisoned in Geneva. “Aggressive, violent, full of anger, in love with his country, hating cowards,” Fanon wrote of his murdered friend. “Austere, hard, incorruptible.”
In November 1960, hard on the heels of Moumié’s death, Fanon undertook a daring reconnaissance mission. The aim was to open a southern front on the border with Mali, so that arms and munitions could be transported from Bamako across the Sahara. He was accompanied by an eight-man commando unit led by a man named Chawki, a major in the Algerian Army of National Liberation (ALN). They flew from Accra to Monrovia, where they planned to pick up a connecting flight to Conakry. On arriving they were told that the plane to Conakry was full and that they would have to wait for an Air France flight the following day. Suspecting a trap by French intelligence, they drove two thousand kilometers into Mali; later they learned that the plane had been diverted to Côte d’Ivoire and searched by French forces. The drive to Mali took them through tropical forest, savannah, and desert. Fanon was beguiled; in his notes on the journey, he sounds like a man possessed. “With one ear glued to the red earth you can hear very distinctly the sound of rusty chains, groans of distress,” he wrote. The gravest threat to Africa’s future, he said, was not colonialism, which was dying its inevitable death, but the “great appetites” of postcolonial elites, and their “absence of ideology.” It was his mission, Fanon believed, to “stir up the Saharan population, infiltrate to the Algerian high plateaus. . . . Subdue the desert, deny it, assemble Africa, create the continent.” Unlike Algeria, Africa could not create itself; it needed the help of men with energy and vision. He was calling for a revolutionary vanguard, but his rhetoric of conquest was not far from that of colonialism.
The reconnaissance mission came to nothing: the southern Sahara had never been an important combat zone for the FLN, and there was little trust between the Algerians and the desert tribes. Reading Fanon’s account, one senses that his African hallucinations were born of a growing desperation. This desperation was not only political, but physical. He had lost weight in Mali, and when he returned to Tunis in December, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Claude Lanzmann, who met him shortly after his repatriation to Tunis, remembers him as “already so suffused with death that it gave his every word the power both of prophecy and of the last words of a dying man.” Fanon pleaded with the FLN to send him back to Algeria. He wanted to die on the field of honor, and he missed the fighters of the interior, whom he described to Lanzmann as “peasant-warrior-philosophers.”
The request was denied. Still, he made himself useful to the soldiers in Tunisia. At an army post he gave lectures on the Critique of Dialectical Reason, in which he devoted special attention to Sartre’s analysis of “fraternity-terror,” the feelings of brotherhood that grow out of a shared experience of external threat. He had experienced this sort of fraternity in Blida and with Major Chawki in the desert, and he saw it again in the soldiers of the ALN. Many were from rural backgrounds, uncompromising people of the kind he trusted to maintain the integrity of the revolution throughout the Third World. It was to these soldiers that he addressed The Wretched of the Earth, dictated in haste as his condition deteriorated.
In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon characterized decolonization as an inherently violent process, a zero-sum struggle between settler and native. Albert Memmi had made a similar argument in his Portrait du Colonisé, published in 1957 with a preface by Sartre. But Fanon dramatized this struggle with unprecedented force, as an inexorable, epic battle whose outcome was not only the destruction of the Western-dominated colonial world, but the destruction of the culture and values that sustained it. The future of world history was being written in blood by the peoples without history, the “blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians” who had made Europe prosperous with their “sweat and corpses.” The initial stages of decolonization would be cruel and fumbling, as the colonized adopt “the primitive Manichaeism of the colonizer—Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel.” But eventually, he predicted, they would “realize . . . that some blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and their interests.” The war of national liberation, he said, must transcend “racism, hatred, resentment” and “the legitimate desire for revenge,” and evolve into a social revolution.
The arguments in The Wretched of the Earth, particularly its romantic claims about the “revolutionary spontaneity” of the peasantry, were deeply influenced by Fanon’s relationship with the ALN. The ideal of a rural utopia was, as Harbi notes, a “credo of the army,” which depicted itself as the defender of Algeria’s peasantry, and Fanon had persuaded himself that, unlike the proletariat, the peasantry were incorruptible because they had nothing to lose. In fact there was something to Fanon’s claims about Algeria’s peasantry: while the people who joined the maquis were not farmers, many of them were country people who had maintained their political and cultural traditions, and who had always regarded the French as invaders who would eventually be forced to leave. But Fanon’s depiction of the peasantry as a population uncontaminated by French culture would help to underwrite a project he had always dreaded, the nostalgic “return to the self.” Houari Boumediene, the leader of the external forces in Tunisia and later Algeria’s president, may have dismissed Fanon as “a modest man who . . . didn’t know the first thing about Algeria’s peasants,” but he grasped the usefulness of Fanon’s position. Like his arguments about the veil, Fanon’s celebration of peasa
nt wisdom provided the army with—in Harbi’s words—a “rationalization of Algerian conservatism,” and a populist card to play in its power struggles with the urbane, middle-class diplomats of the GPRA, and the Marxists within the FLN.
The same was true of Fanon’s claim that violence alone would lead to victory. By the late 1950s, the FLN understood that it could never defeat the French army, and that there would eventually be a negotiated settlement. International opinion became a critical battlefield, and the principal fighters on it were representatives of the GPRA: as the historian Matthew Connelly has argued, the war was as much a “diplomatic revolution” as a military challenge. But the heroic myth of armed struggle, which Fanon did much to burnish, allowed the leaders of the ALN to present themselves, rather than the GPRA, as the real victors, and impose themselves as the country’s rightful rulers.
For all that Fanon meant his book to be a manifesto for the coming revolution, The Wretched of the Earth is perhaps most prophetic as an analysis of the potential pitfalls of decolonization. While Fanon defended anticolonial violence as a necessary response to the “exhibitionist” violence of the colonial system, he also predicted that “for many years to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaught.” He also knew that Sartre’s “fraternity-terror” could turn inward, with lethal consequences. The idea that solidarity under arms would give way to social revolution was questionable, however. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in a perceptive critique of his work, the sense of comradeship in war “can be actualized only under conditions of immediate danger to life and limb,” and tends to wither in peacetime, as it did after independence. The taste of power that violent revolt provided was fleeting; the suffering and trauma of national liberation wars would cast a long shadow. Fanon himself had seen that anticolonial violence was driven not only by a noble desire for justice, but by darker impulses, including the dream of “becoming the persecutor.” He also predicted that leaders of postcolonial African states were sure to entrench themselves by appealing to “ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism”: he was anticipating the Mobutus and Mugabes of the future, the “big men” who would drape themselves in African garb, promote a folkloric form of black culture, and cynically exploit the rhetoric of anticolonialism—even, in the bitterest of ironies, Fanon’s own words.
One of the earliest readers of Fanon’s manuscript was his hero, Sartre. Fanon first contacted him in the spring of 1961 through his publisher, François Maspero, to ask for a preface: “Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.” The admiration was mutual: to Sartre, Fanon was more than an intellectual disciple; he was the man of action Sartre never forgave himself for not having been during the Nazi Occupation. In late July 1961, they met for the first time in Rome, where they were joined by Beauvoir and Lanzmann. Their first conversation lasted from lunch until 2 a.m., when Beauvoir announced that Sartre needed a nap, much to Fanon’s irritation. Over the next few days, Fanon spoke endlessly in what Lanzmann calls a “prophetic trance.” He urged Sartre to renounce writing until Algeria was liberated. “We have rights over you,” he said. “How can you continue to live normally, to write?” He was scornful of the picturesque trattoria where they took him to eat. The pleasures of the Old World meant nothing to him.
Fanon had recently undergone treatment in the Soviet Union, where he was prescribed Myleran, and was experiencing a brief period of remission. But in Beauvoir’s account of the meeting in Rome, he comes across as a haunted man, beset by self-doubt and remorse, full of apocalyptic foreboding. The days after independence would be “terrible,” he predicted, estimating that tens of thousands would die in power struggles. The score-settling among Algerian rebels seemed to horrify him nearly as much as French repression. He blamed himself for failing to prevent the deaths of Ramdane and Lumumba, and struck Beauvoir as “upset that he wasn’t active in his native land, and even more that he wasn’t a native Algerian.” When Beauvoir shook his feverish hand, she felt as if she were “touching the passion that consumed it.”
A week after Sartre filed his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon was admitted to a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland—his only visit to the United States, a country he called “a nation of lynchers.” He was shocked, he told a friend, not that he was dying, but that he was dying in Washington of leukemia, when he “could have died in battle with the enemy three months ago.” He died on December 6, 1961, just as his book was appearing in Paris, where it was seized from bookshops by the police. In New York, Algerian diplomats gave it as a Christmas gift. Beauvoir saw his picture on the cover of Jeune Afrique, “younger, calmer than I had seen him, and very handsome. His death weighed heavily because he had charged his death with all the intensity of his life.”
Algeria achieved its independence in July 1962. It would soon become a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and play host to the ANC, the PLO, the Black Panthers, and other national liberation movements, many of them deeply influenced by Fanon. But over the years independent Algeria—austere, pious, socially conservative—bore less and less resemblance to the country Fanon had hoped for. Even if he had lived, it’s not clear he would have ever been at home there, any more than Che was in postrevolutionary Havana. For all that he said to Beauvoir about his desire to put down roots, Fanon was too nomadic a spirit to remain for long in any one place.
The only country that he could have called home, besides the page, was the emancipated future, a secular messianism he shared with Walter Benjamin. He worried that newly independent countries would fall into the same trap as the advanced countries of the West: the fetishism of production rates and the despoliation of the environment that Adorno and Horkheimer bemoaned in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Fanon was not Jewish, but he had an elective affinity with the “non-Jewish Jews,” many of them Marxists, who so powerfully shaped European critical thought during the 1930s and 1940s.
In Fanon’s writing, the crimes of Nazism and imperialism are indissolubly linked: he saw colonized Algerians and Africans, like Jews, as victims of a hypocritical Europe. This linkage, which Fanon shared with Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism, would recede with Israel’s emergence as, in Deutscher’s words, the Prussia of the Middle East, as an adversary of liberation struggles in the Third World. As the historian Enzo Traverso has argued in The End of Jewish Modernity, the “exhaustion of the Jewish cycle of critical thought” set in with Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and Jewish intellectuals went from being the West’s greatest internal critics to some of its most impassioned defenders. Since then, the traditions of Jewish critical thought and postcolonialism have gone their separate ways, with notable exceptions such as Edward Said, a Palestinian literary critic steeped in the writings of Eric Auerbach and Adorno, and his friend Tony Judt, a London-born Jewish historian who became an eloquent champion of a binational state in Israel-Palestine. Fanon, in retrospect, can be seen as one of the last threads connecting these traditions, and it is striking that Arendt defended him against caricatured interpretations of his writings on violence, and never once took issue with his critique of Western imperialism. She could have done so only at the risk of contradicting her Origins of Totalitarianism.
It is no wonder, then, that one of the most striking critiques of Fanon, by turns tender and damning, should have been written by a Jewish anticolonial theorist who converted to Zionism. Albert Memmi shared much with Fanon. He was a man in-between, and never quite at home, as a Jew from Tunisia, educated in Paris, who stood between the colonizer and the colonized. He wrote novels and nonfiction, worshipped Sartre, and practiced child psychology in Tunis when Fanon was stationed there for the FLN, although the two never met. In a fascinating essay, “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” published in 1971, Memmi characterized Fanon’s life as a thwarted quest to belong. The “germ of Fanon’s tragedy,” Memmi argued, was his alienation from Martinique, his homeland. Once the dominated
man recognizes that he will not be accepted by the dominant society, “he generally returns to himself, to his people, to his past, sometimes . . . with excessive vigor, transfiguring this people and this past to the point of creating counter-myths.” This was what Césaire had done, he suggested, by returning home from the grandes écoles of Paris, inventing Négritude, and becoming his people’s representative in the Assemblée Nationale. Fanon, however, had failed to return; instead, after realizing he could never be fully French, he transferred his fierce identification with the country that had spurned him to Algeria, the country that was battling France for its independence. Once Muslim Algeria proved too “particularist,” it was subsumed by something still larger: the African continent, the Third World, and ultimately the dream of “a totally unprecedented man, in a totally reconstructed world.”
In fact, Fanon never disavowed his Martinican roots, or his love of Césaire’s writing, from which he drew his images of slave revolt in The Wretched of the Earth. Even so, Memmi captures something that Fanon’s admirers in today’s antiracist movements tend to overlook: his ambivalence about his own roots, and his relentless questioning of the “return to the self.” For Memmi, a North African Jew disillusioned with Arab nationalism, identity had become destiny. And in his essay on Fanon, he wrote as if primordial ethnic identification—and the contraction of empathy it often entails—were the natural order of things, and Fanon an outlier, if not a failure, for defying it.