The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  But the encounter that really shook me, unsettled me, captivated me and that was to have a profound effect on my own life was my meeting with Frantz Fanon. A native of Martinique, born in the same year as me, Fanon had signed up to fight the Germans in Europe, had been wounded in combat and been awarded the Croix de Guerre. His life had been turned upside down, as had mine, though very differently, by Sartre’s book Réflexions sur la question juive. It was through reading the book on his return to Martinique after the war to pass his baccalauréat that Fanon became acutely conscious of being black. He came back to France, studied medicine in Lyon while simultaneously taking courses in philosophy – in particular those of Merleau-Ponty – and psychology. His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks], might be regarded as his response to Sartre, his ‘Reflections on the Black Question’, in which, while acknowledging his debt to Sartre and the giant leap the writer had helped him make, he clearly distinguishes himself from Sartre in a radical attempt to force everyone to drop their masks, beginning with those white people who, for all their compassion and their good intentions, made no attempt whatsoever to experience the flavour of black life: for them, it was enough to believe in the abolition of slavery, the recognition of négritude, for example, as sensible and necessary steps towards reconciling all of humanity. Fanon is infinitely more violent and demanding: just as Jews are not the creation of the anti-Semite – as I had told Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir when I returned from my first trip to Israel – so blacks will finally be free of the white masks glued to their skin only through struggle, by becoming the sole authors of their own freedom. In 1953, Fanon was named head of department at the Blida psychiatric hospital, in Algeria, where – incurring the hostility of his colleagues and the authorities – he practised a true ethno-psychiatry, long before the term existed, refusing to see the sick merely as a collection of symptoms and linking mental illness to colonial alienation. In the early stages of the uprising in Algeria, he was contacted by the officers of the ALN (Armée de la libération nationale) and the political wing of the FLN. He unhesitatingly joined them, resigned his post as a doctor, was deported from Algeria in January 1957 and joined the FLN in Tunis where he began working with El Moudjahid.

  My abiding memory of the first afternoon I spent with Fanon in El Menzah, a suburb of Tunis, in the apartment where he lived with his wife and son, is the absolute emptiness of the place – nothing on the walls, not a stick of furniture, no bed, nothing. Fanon was lying on a sort of pallet, a mattress on the floor. I was immediately struck by his fiery dark eyes, black with fever. He was already suffering from leukaemia, which he knew would prove fatal, and was in terrible pain. He had just come back from Accra in Ghana where he had been sent by the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic – as ambassador to Nkrumah. It was in Accra that he had been diagnosed with leukaemia and repatriated to Tunis where he was now waiting to leave for the USSR to be treated. He had only just arrived in Tunis, which explained the emptiness of the apartment. Péju and I sat on the floor next to the mattress where Fanon lay and listened to him talk about the Algerian revolution for hours, stopping several times when the pain became unbearable. I put my hand on his forehead, which was bathed in sweat, and awkwardly tried to dry it, or I held his shoulder gently as though by mere touch I might ease his pain. But all the while Fanon spoke with a lyricism I had never before encountered, he was 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. He questioned me about Sartre, about Sartre’s health, and I could sense the affection, the admiration he felt for the man. Critique de la raison dialectique had been published in April, and Frantz had managed to have a copy sent to Ghana where he began reading it. He had recently finished it, something that had required considerable effort and concentration for a man suffering from leukaemia, though his philosophical acuity was still dazzling.

  He talked to us about the ALN, the djounoud [combatants], explaining that the men from the interior were more true, more pure. This dialectic between interior and exterior I grasped only dimly at the time; it would be years before I fully understood it, but it has existed in most liberation movements. Fanon esteemed those of the interior so highly they became polymaths who not only fought the French by force of arms with utter purity and self-denial, but also studied philosophy. The men over there, he told us in a confiding tone that brooked no argument, had begun reading Critique de la raison dialectique. This was not true, as we will see later, but in that room in El Menzal, Fanon’s passionate words made it impossible to doubt the existence of these peasant-warrior-philosophers. He talked with the same conviction, the same persuasive power about Africa, about the whole continent, about African unity and brotherhood. Before being appointed ambassador to Ghana, he had gone to Accra in 1958 as leader of the FLN delegation at the first All-African People’s Conference. Among the other delegates was Patrice Lumumba from the Congo, Holden Roberto of the Union of Peoples of Northern Angola, Félix Moumié of the Union des populations du Cameroun, representatives of the ANC (African National Congress) from South Africa, who, after Les Damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth] was published, were lucidly to choose the path of violence. Lumumba and Moumié, as we know, were murdered two and three years respectively after the congress. Dr Omar’s speech was a sensation. Contrary to the ‘positive action’ advocated by Nkrumah, Fanon saw a generalized armed struggle as the only hope for the emancipation of the African continent groaning beneath the weight of the various colonial powers, and cited Algeria as a model, as the spearhead in a struggle that would have to be ruthless: ‘And in our struggle for liberty,’ he concluded, ‘we should plan actions that will strike at the heart of the imperialists – we will have to act with force and, truth be told, with violence.’

  All this I would learn later, but in the apartment in El Menzah, as he propped himself up on his elbow and announced like a visionary that Africa, the Africa of his dreams, would not experience the Middle Ages as Europe had, one could not but be carried along by his words, could only subscribe to his glorious utopian ideal. I know that when I returned to Paris I was still completely carried away by this man whom I believed to be the keeper of the truth, and of the truth as a secret. There was a secret in truth, and he held it. All this I told Sartre and did so in such terms that he felt he too had to meet Fanon, something unusual for him.

  After that first time, I met Fanon alone several times, always in Tunis, though not always in the El Menzah apartment. He seemed much better, he had periods of remission from the leukaemia. One of his closest friends was Omar Ousedik, a Kabyle or Berber from the north, a likeable man whom Frantz trusted completely and in front of whom he could speak freely. By questioning Fanon more closely, I learned that his relationship with the Algerian people and theirs with him were not as simple as I had first believed. He was one of them and yet was not, because he was Martiniquais and black. His loyalty was unconditional, but he constantly had to reaffirm it, to prove it. He knew about the rivalries, the often fierce power struggles within the FLN, but when he talked to me about them, he constantly used the word ‘secret’, ‘secret’, repeating it ten times in the course of a conversation. I realized that Fanon himself was afraid. Abane Ramdane, one of the worthy leaders of the FLN and a close friend of Fanon, had just been murdered in Morocco, having fallen into a trap set by Boussouf, Ben Tobbal and Krim Belkacem, members of the FLN’s all-powerful central committee, the Comité de coordination et d’exécution. Abane Ramdane was determined to maintain the primacy of political authorities over the ALN and that of the wilayahs, or provinces, over the Armée des frontières, something that the colonels in the ALN profoundly disagreed with. The image of a united front that the FLN liked to project to the outside world, particularly to those who supported it, was merely a façade, a pretence. There were bloody purges, savage executions. Amirouche, for example, the leader of Wilayah II, brainwashed by the French secret services into believing he
had been betrayed, had decimated his own troops, subjecting them to excruciating tortures and summary executions – a massacre known by the name ‘Bleuite’. They called themselves brothers, but it was what Sartre in Critique de la raison dialectique referred to as fraternity-terror: each brother was a potential traitor to the others.

  It should be understood that, from a purely military standpoint, the French army had done an efficient job. The Moriceline, running along the Tunisian–Algerian border, left the inland wilayahs completely isolated; they were equally hemmed in along the border with Morocco and any attempts to supply them with weapons or provisions failed, resulting in terrible losses. As for the FLN itself, it had been widely infiltrated. Many people talked, and not only under torture. The French had numerous informants with a variety of reasons for their betrayal: fear, revenge, power, money. There were also rivalries between clans and tribes, the conflict between the Kabyles and the Arabs. Ousedik, Fanon’s Kabyle friend, who was very light-skinned, whispered or put a finger to his lips when he spoke, and even then only in code. I didn’t care, I was not there as a journalist, what was important to me was to maintain their trust and hear as much as they wanted me to hear. It was during this period that Fanon began to write Les Damnés de la terre – not writing, in fact, but dictating. He read a number of passages to me with one thought in mind: he wanted Sartre to read it and write the preface.

  Every time I visited, he said, ‘You’re never going to learn anything about the Algerian revolution here in Tunis; everything here is corrupt, you need to go there,’ there being what Fanon referred to as ‘the interior’, the men reading Critique de la raison dialectique, the pure warrior-philosophers. In fact, the men he referred to were not from the interior at all, they were the Armée des frontières, whom the people of the interior despised, but I did not know that then. The Armée des frontières was made up of veteran combatants from the ‘interior’ who had crossed over, first to Morocco and later to Tunisia, and created an influential organization that alone wielded power and whose political influence would make and unmake successive Algerian governments. Most of the members had joined the FLN years earlier and were now high-ranking officers. This Armée des frontières was first and foremost a political army. The true ‘interior’ – the Algerian wilayahs themselves – had been bled dry and were incapable of mounting any significant attacks against the French. From a military standpoint the French army had clearly won the battle, an argument often used by the generals who spearheaded the Algiers putsch to justify their break with de Gaulle.

  Fanon organized my trip into what he called ‘the interior’ and, on the eve of my departure, invited me to dinner at his place in El Menzah with a thin, self-effacing man from Blida called Benyoucef Benkhedda, a pharmacist by profession, who had just been appointed head of the Provisional Government. He was a compromise candidate and shortly after independence he stood down. Over dinner, Fanon gave me his final recommendations: ‘You absolutely must ask to meet with Colonel Houari Boumediène. Oh, you’re so lucky! How I’d love to be going with you!’ Fanon left for Moscow two days later where doctors were waiting for him.

  An FLN driver came to pick me up at five o’clock in the morning to take me from Tunis to Ghardimaou on the Algerian border. It was here that the ALN had their headquarters. The driver visibly took pleasure in terrifying me, driving at top speed on appalling roads to impress me, to test me, maybe to kill me. After a few hours, we arrived in the courtyard of a large sunlit barracks where young men in civilian clothes were wandering around. A number of them immediately gathered around me; they were friendly and spoke excellent French. They led me to a large room with a long, broad table, a real conference table. They had me sit at one end as more and more men filed in and casually sat down around me, taking the chairs facing me and to my right. Slowly, the table filled up, mostly with men in civvies, then, finally, a tall, pale, red-haired man who came and sat on my left at the head of the table – the only empty seat. He did not say a single word during the discussion but kept a transistor radio pressed to his ear from beginning to end. The men began gently questioning me about recent events in France. They knew everything – there had been a tentative initial attempt at negotiations at Lugrin, but they had just broken down. While knowing exactly who I was and what we had done for them, they blamed the French people as a whole, me included, as though I had some role in it. I told them they were talking to the wrong person, that there was no point saying these things to me.

  The discussion went on for some time; they meticulously reviewed everything that was going on in France before asking why I had wanted to meet them, why I had wanted to come here. I answered, ‘Dr Fanon told me that until I met you, I would never understand the Algerian revolution, never understand your struggle.’ They continued to interrogate me, eventually asking me exactly what I wanted. I gave my answer: ‘I want to spend some time with ALN units.’ Four or five people only had been asking questions, the others had said nothing. One of the five now asked, ‘Do you like danger?’ I replied that I didn’t like danger for danger’s sake, but that I had found myself in many dangerous situations and had been forced to deal with them, that I too had been a Resistance fighter, a maquisard, that I had fought in the war. I added, ‘Dr Fanon strongly advised me to meet your leader, Colonel Boumediène.’ He was on a mission, they said, and they did not know when he would be back; they added that I would not be staying there in the barracks but would be taken out that afternoon. Did I have the physical stamina, they asked; I told them I had. Could I hike for hours in the mountains, they asked; now beginning to feel a little worried, I said, ‘I think so.’ As I left the table after the frugal lunch I had barely had the opportunity to eat, the questioning having been so relentless, I asked again, ‘Is there a chance I can meet Colonel Boumediène?’ It would not be easy, I was told: ‘The colonel is out on an inspection detail at the moment. We’ll see when you get back, but it’s not very likely.’

  We set off that afternoon. My guide was a young man of about twenty-five who moved along the steep paths as sure-footedly as a goat, never stopping for an instant. I followed him for eight hours into the mountains, seeing and hearing the French planes droning over the whole area. At night, exhausted, I was led into a blockhouse built deep underground. By the light of the sooty lamps, I saw several disturbing faces. These were ALN fighters and their leaders, true battle-hardened fighters who would slit the throat of a sheep or a man, who had a long record of fighting against France. I was the first Frenchman to reach this place. I stayed with them for a week, holding out under the brutal and very precise French bombing raids. I questioned them for hours and they told me about the battles, the ambushes; told me appalling stories of cruelty, barbarity and oppression. I encouraged them to talk about their lives and succeeded in striking up tentative friendships with one or two. They had all started out fighting in the wilayahs in the interior, but later had left the country – it was impossible to cross the Moriceline, they explained, every attempt to bring weapons or provisions across the line had failed, resulting in terrible losses. They even took me there: hiding a few hundred metres away, I was able to observe the formidable French defence network and its sophisticated alarm systems. I made copious notes. By the time I left, our goodbyes were heartfelt. I started back, guided by another djoundi.

  Arriving at the barracks, I was given a warm welcome: I had proved myself. A young ALN captain with magnificent blue eyes, one of those who had questioned me that first day, took me under his wing; he told me in almost poetic terms how moved he had been by the beauty of the dawn as the first shot of an ambush was fired in south Algeria. Knowing I was Jewish, he added, ‘After independence, we will have to send units to Israel.’ Seeing my astonishment, he explained, ‘Oh, there is much we can learn from the Jews.’ ‘What sort of things?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the kibbutzim, the irrigation, afforestation, improving the soil.’ This captain who guided me for the rest of my stay was Abdelaziz Bouteflika. As we know, today he is P
resident of the Republic of Algeria.

  I spent a week at the ALN headquarters, living with these men, eating at the same table, talking late into the night. They all spoke to me, and with remarkable candour, confiding private thoughts and secrets they barely dared speak of with their comrades. I was a midwife. Some of them took me aside to explain why polygamy was absolutely necessary, because so many of their brothers had been killed during the seven or eight years of the war: ‘You have to understand that we cannot leave our sisters in need, so each of us must take several wives.’ When I told Simone de Beauvoir about this later, she was absolutely horrified. The great hope for all of them was Ben Bella, imprisoned on the Île d’Aix, whom they were counting on being freed. On the eve of my departure, I spent the whole afternoon talking with two of the negotiators from Lugrin – one of whom would later briefly be Minister of Finance – when a third man joined us, the tall, pale, red-headed man with the transistor. We talked about what the Algerian political regime would be like, about Marxism, and so on, and I soon realized that their knowledge of Critique de la raison dialectique was limited to a seminar that Fanon had just given. That night, they organized a leaving party for me, an open-air feast with méchoui – whole sheep barbecued on spits. There were 300 men present. Obviously, I don’t speak a word of Arabic and there was a traditional Algerian storyteller acting out a great ALN victory against the French. Every time he pretended to be the French, 300 men burst out laughing. It was very violent. Afterwards, I found myself alone with Bouteflika who, eager to assess how my visit had gone, began, ‘As Colonel Boumediène told you this afternoon…’ I couldn’t believe it: the tall red-haired man with the transistor ‘on an inspection detail’ was him. He had not thought it appropriate to introduce himself, although I had seen him on my first day, then at every meal since I had returned from the mountains.