1 A SMALL PLACE
A FEW YEARS AGO, at Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, an exhibition organized by the Tate Modern, I came upon a reference, in a wall text, to a cultural conference in Lagos that Frantz Fanon was said to have attended in 1975—a remarkable feat for a man who had died fourteen years earlier. Then again, to be a prophet is to float free of the time and space coordinates that confine the rest of us. If you do a Google search on Fanon, you’ll see him described variously as an African, a West Indian, an Algerian, and a Muslim. (He’s almost never described as a Frenchman, although legally he was.) Fanon’s fate has been to be remembered as a traveling ambassador for the wretched of the earth, if not a brother from another planet. But Fanon came from somewhere: the city of Fort-de-France, capital of Martinique.
Martinique is one of the islands in the Lesser Antilles chain, which runs from Grenada to the Virgin Islands. One of France’s vieilles colonies, the “old colonies” acquired under the Ancien Régime, it had been a French possession since 1635, though it briefly passed into British hands on two occasions in the eighteenth century. It is a “small place,” as Jamaica Kincaid has written of her own island, Antigua, where “the masters left, in a kind of way,” and “the slaves were freed, in a kind of way.” Martinique was a slave colony, based on the production of sugar, until emancipation came in 1848 and rum replaced sugar as its principal export.
Fort-de-France, where Fanon grew up, became the island’s cultural and economic center in 1902 after the previous capital, the city of Saint-Pierre, was destroyed by an eruption from Mount Pelée that killed its thirty thousand inhabitants in a few minutes, burying them in hot volcanic ash and igniting the sugar and rum held in ships at the port. Originally known as Fort Royal or “Foyal”—locals still call themselves “Foyolais”—Fort-de-France had always been a poor cousin to Saint-Pierre. Although its population grew rapidly in the early twentieth century, it remained a sleepy town, plagued by “leprosies, consumption and famines,” in the words of the poet Aimé Césaire. An American journalist infuriated the city’s elites when he called it a “stinking pearl,” but “oh how warranted” this was, Fanon’s older brother Joby wrote, describing Fort-de-France as a “failed city … flat, sprawling, dirty, with drains that were nothing more than open sewers.”
During Fanon’s childhood Martinique was a French colony, where children descended from African slaves were taught about their “ancestors, the Gauls.” The first three words Frantz learned to spell were Je suis français, “I am French.” The administration was run by a Creole elite of mixed French and African ancestry; only a few thousand white descendants of the planter class, the békés, remained on the island. In March 1946, Martinique would become an overseas department of metropolitan France, represented by four deputies and two senators, after a campaign led by Césaire, then the mayor of Fort-de-France, who argued that his people’s interests were best served by remaining a part of France rather than seeking independence.
Throughout his life, Fanon would express frustration that Martinique’s people and their leaders had never taken their destiny into their own hands. Martinicans, as he saw it, were free but—as Kincaid wrote—only “in a kind of way.” They had removed their chains only to submit to the more insidious domination of reflexes learned under slavery: intricate hierarchies based on skin tones and worship of the ways of the métropole. Prisoners of the white gaze they had internalized and made their own, they could no longer see themselves. They “looked at life with black skins and blue eyes,” as the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who was born five years after Fanon, observed of West Indians of their generation.
Yet it was a stroke of luck to have been born in Martinique between the two world wars. Martinique fueled Fanon’s sense of revolt and gave him his first taste of struggle. Its writers—Césaire above all—would supply him with a vocabulary for thinking about what it meant to be Black and colonized in a white-dominated world. Martinique was a small place, with all the constrictions and provincialism that implies. But it was also one of the centers of the revolution in Black thought known as Négritude. While Fanon would ultimately distance himself from most of Négritude’s intellectual premises, he remained faithful to its most fundamental aspiration, the emancipation of Black humanity not only from political and economic domination but also from the tyranny of assimilation to white values.
Fanon benefited in another way from his early years in this backwater of empire. The islands of the Antilles are often parodied as places of languorous indolence, where those who can afford to do so pursue pleasure at the expense of reflection while the poor drown their suffering in rum. Fanon himself tended to think of Martinique in these terms: he never forgave it for not being Haiti, whose people had overthrown slavery in a violent revolution, rather than waiting for emancipation to be “granted” by their oppressors. Like most of his fellow islanders, he seems to have been unaware of the Martinican slave revolt of 1848, which immediately preceded emancipation, or of the sporadic slave uprisings that had rocked the island throughout its history.
But small places, by virtue of their isolation, can create, in some, an insatiable hunger for learning and travel. “The appetite for knowledge that agitates distant lands that have been newly brought into awareness of themselves is unimaginable,” the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant remarks in his 1958 novel, La Lézarde (The Ripening). Glissant, who knew Fanon, described Fanon’s decision to become an Algerian as the only real “event” in the modern history of the French West Indies. The hunger that would lead him to Algeria was nourished in Fort-de-France.
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FANON IS WIDELY CELEBRATED as a tribune of the oppressed, but his childhood was, by Martinican standards, a privileged one.
Félix Casimir Fanon, his father, was a customs inspector, his mother, Eléonore Félicia Médélice, a shopkeeper who sold hardware and drapery. The Fanons did not mix with the békés, but they had impeccable middle-class credentials: servants, piano lessons for their daughters, even a weekend home outside Fort-de-France. They lived next door to a family of shopkeepers from Italy. Frantz’s ancestors on his father’s side were free people with property. His great-grandfather, the son of a slave, had started out as a blacksmith, a well-respected nègre à talents (Black man with skills), before purchasing a plot of farmland where he grew cocoa. Eléonore, Fanon’s mother, had something even more precious than land in colonial Martinique: white ancestry. Her mother’s forebears were originally from Strasbourg, in Alsace, where they had settled in the late seventeenth century, fleeing religious persecution in Austria. The name “Frantz” was probably an homage to her Alsatian roots. Like many members of the lower Martinican bourgeoisie, the Fanons were socialists who fiercely identified with the Republic that had ended slavery and allowed their family to prosper. They were, if anything, more French than the French, residents of the vieilles colonies who were horrified at the thought of being mistaken for the nègres in the African colonies that France had acquired in the nineteenth century.
Born on July 20, 1925, Frantz was the fifth of the couple’s eight children. There has been much speculation about his troubles in the family. An early biographer claimed that he was stigmatized for being its darkest-skinned member, something Joby Fanon vehemently denied. Alice Cherki, a psychoanalyst who interned with Fanon, speculates that he “never had that imperceptible but very real core of serenity that is instilled in the sons of unconditionally supportive and loving mothers.” Yet Fanon, in letters home during the war, expressed great devotion to his mother, while making no secret of his contempt for his often-absent father, who worked long hours and seemed to take little interest in his children. The accounts we have of his family life, superficial as they are, present no evidence of anything unusual, much less traumatic. Fanon would later argue that, insofar as colonized West Indians suffered from an “abandonment neurosis”—a term he borrowed from the psychoanalyst Germaine Guex—it derived not from dysfunctional parenting but from the neglect of their colonial masters, who had supplanted parental authority only to “inferiorize” children of the outre-mer. In Fanon’s writing, the symbolic father represented by France would count much more than biological fathers such as Félix Casimir Fanon.
Fanon was something of a wild child—so turbulent that Eléonore Fanon sometimes joked that he must have been exchanged with her real son at the hospital. He got into brawls and at one point cut another boy with a razor blade. Nonetheless, most of his adventures were harmless. In his memoir of his younger brother, Joby Fanon describes how, after dusk, they would climb over the gates of the fruit and vegetable market and steal mangoes, apricots, and oranges, “more for the thrill of it than out of hunger.” Frantz was a passionate footballer, and in early adolescence he became an even more passionate reader, devouring classic works of French literature at the Schœlcher Library. In Joby’s reminiscence: “We were truly free.”
Frantz, for his part, had no nostalgia for his childhood.
In her biographical portrait of Fanon, Alice Cherki writes of a conversation with him in which he recalled being perplexed—and then furious—when his teacher told him he owed his freedom to a dead white man. The white man in question was the French politician Victor Schœlcher, who drafted the 1848 decree announcing the abolition of slavery in all the vieilles colonies and was later elected to the National Assembly as a representative of Martinique and Guadeloupe.*
The son of a wealthy porcelain manufacturer, Schœlcher developed a loathing of slavery while on a sales trip to the New World in 1829. Traveling through Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, and Cuba, he was especially horrified by the racial character of slavery. On his return to France, he condemned the exploitation of slaves in an article titled “Des Noirs,” but he stopped short of calling for immediate emancipation, suggesting instead a gradual process of manumission over some forty to sixty years. It was only when he learned that plantation owners refused to educate their slaves that he turned against gradualism and came out in favor of “the immediate abolition of slavery”—the subtitle of his 1842 account of his trip to the West Indies. Tireless in his advocacy of abolition, he served as undersecretary for the colonies and president of the Commission on Slavery, and became, in effect, the architect of the post-slavery order in the Antilles. The novelist Victor Hugo offered a telling description of the ceremony at which Schœlcher announced the final abolition of slavery, held in Guadeloupe on May 19, 1848: “When the governor proclaimed the equality of the white race, the mulatto race, and the black race, there were only three men on the platform, representing, so to speak, the three races: a white, the governor; a mulatto, who held the parasol for him; and a Negro, who carried his hat.”
Not surprisingly, Schœlcher’s vision of abolition revealed the limits of Black freedom under colonial capitalism. The old plantations were not broken up, nor were former slaves provided with land. Instead, slave owners received compensation for the loss of their property in slaves, while freed men and women remained on the land, producing cash crops. The hostility of white settlers to integration—they especially dreaded the prospect of having to accept people of mixed racial ancestry as equals—ensured the preservation of informal segregation in Martinique and other West Indian societies. Schœlcher himself discovered in 1881 that of the 138 government officials in Martinique, 99 were white, 38 colored (of mixed race), and only 1 Black: a policeman. As the historian Robin Blackburn has written, “While Schoelcher’s humanitarianism and good intentions could never be in doubt, his paternalistic social republicanism became the integument linking the colored population to French colonialism.”
Fanon, who later characterized the colonial world as a “world of statues … crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip,” visited the Schœlcher Monument when he was ten years old, on a class trip. The monument, built in 1887, was in La Savane Park, a grassy square where he played football on Sundays, which in Black Skin, White Masks he would bitterly describe as “lined by worm-eaten tamarind trees down each side,” adding, “Yes, this town is a miserable failure. This life too.” The centerpiece of the monument depicted Schœlcher standing on a pedestal as a freed slave looked up at him with gratitude. The inscription hailed him as a hero who had liberated the slaves from their chains. La Savane was also the site of the Schœlcher Library, an imposing, pagoda-like structure made of cast iron and glass, which had been first erected in the Tuileries Garden in Paris and then shipped in pieces to Martinique, where it was reassembled, its entrance lobby adorned with the names of Rousseau, Voltaire, and other philosophers of the French Enlightenment.
Why is Schœlcher a hero to us? Fanon remembered having asked his teacher. And why hasn’t anyone told us about what existed prior to slavery? What, in other words, is our history?
Fanon would eventually come to see the history he had been taught as an invasive form of cultural colonization. He writes in Black Skin, White Masks:
In the Antilles, the black schoolboy who is constantly asked to recite “our ancestors the Gauls” identifies himself with the explorer, the civilizing conqueror, the white man who brings truth to the savages, a lily-white truth. The identification process means that the black child subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude … Gradually, an attitude, a way of thinking and seeing that is basically white, forms and crystallizes in the young Antillean. [Once he grows up, he is] a crucified man. The environment that has made him (but which he has not made) has torn him apart.
To be Black and colonized is to inherit a world your ancestors haven’t made, and to be condemned to mimicry. An impossible mimicry, because wearing a white mask will not make you white, much less set you free; on the contrary, it reinforces alienation and self-loathing.
It is hard to imagine the ten-year-old Fanon thumbing his nose at the Schœlcher Monument: the mask was on too tight for such acts of rebellion. But one can easily imagine the older Fanon remembering, with horror and shame, that he hadn’t.
* * *
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, war broke out in Europe. That same day, Admiral Georges Robert departed from Brest on the cruiser Jeanne d’Arc, to take up his new post as high commissioner for the French West Indies and commander in chief of the West Atlantic Fleet. The destination of Robert’s military flotilla was Fort-de-France, the base of France’s West Atlantic theater of operations. As trenches were dug in La Savane and schools closed in preparation for air raids, panic spread among middle-class Martinicans that the war would reach the island. Fanon’s mother had a more pressing concern: Frantz and Joby were wandering the streets and getting into trouble, in spite of her increasingly desperate efforts to impose discipline. (In one of her more fanciful attempts to keep them at home, she had forced them to wear their sisters’ dresses.) In November, she sent her boys to study in Le François, a town on the Atlantic Coast where their uncle Édouard taught French. “Be irreproachable,” she told them.
Casimir Fanon was furious that his wife had moved his boys without his approval, but Frantz adored his bachelor uncle, and Édouard was impressed by his nephew’s writing skills. One of Frantz’s first literary efforts was a school paper inspired by a story he had heard during a class trip to a plantation house. According to the guide at the plantation, the owner, a wealthy béké, had hidden his gold in the basement with the help of one of his slaves and then proceeded to murder the slave, burying him next to the gold so that the man’s ghost would protect his treasure from thieves. Frantz’s paper was a schoolboy’s tale of buried treasure, of course. But it was also a striking anticipation of the mature Fanon’s view that if you lifted the veil of European opulence, you were likely to find “the cadavers of nègres, of Arabs, Indians, and Asians.”
In June 1940, France fell to the Germans, and Admiral Robert declared his allegiance to Marshal Philippe Pétain. An eighty-year-old hero of World War I, Pétain had signed an abject armistice with Nazi Germany, dividing France into an occupied northern zone and a southern “free” zone governed by a collaborationist regime based in Vichy. Fanon learned of the armistice just after his fifteenth birthday. The Allies, worried that the three hundred tons of gold taken to Martinique from the Bank of France would end up in Nazi hands, drew up plans to overthrow Robert’s government, but in May 1942 they recognized his authority in exchange for a promise of neutrality. As a result of this agreement, the Béarn, France’s only aircraft carrier, remained grounded, and the ships in the Fort-de-France harbor were immobilized under US supervision, leaving thousands of French naval personnel on shore. All of a sudden, Martinicans could no longer eat meat, since the cows were reserved for the white soldiers who, in Fanon’s words, “submerged” the island. “We made practically everything in order to survive—soap, salt, copra oil, and shoes made out of old car tires and tiles,” Joby recalled.
Opponents of Vichy’s “national revolution” faced a wave of state terror during the Tan Robé—Creole for “Robert’s Time.” (Casimir Fanon fell under suspicion as a member of the Freemasons.) “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the motto on the facade of the Schœlcher Library, where Fanon would go to read, was changed to “Work, Family, Fatherland,” the Vichyite catechism. In the town of La Trinité, on the Atlantic Coast, Victor Hugo Street was renamed Marshal Pétain Boulevard. Racism, of course, was by no means absent from Martinique before the Tan Robé: an awareness of skin color distinctions permeated everyday life. As Fanon wrote, when a mother described her child as “the darkest of my children,” she meant the least white; indeed, for many Martinicans, “salvation … consists in magically whitening oneself.” Black officials in starched white shirts were said to resemble “prunes in a bowl of milk.”
But racism had been obscured, or at least somewhat blunted, by the fact that the island’s affairs were largely run not by the white békés but by Creoles of mixed racial ancestry. Fanon himself had had few encounters as a child with the békés until the Tan Robé, when they mounted a political offensive with the backing of the occupation regime. While the regime stopped short of a complete purge of mayors of color, the political class became increasingly white. Members of the fleet flagrantly displayed their disdain for the local population. Sailors propositioned women in the street as if they were prostitutes. One sailor fell asleep in a movie theater on top of several Black audience members.
Glissant has described the Martinique of the 1940s as “a land that was learning the new violence of the world, after so much violence that had been forgotten.” But the violence of slavery had been not so much forgotten as repressed, and memories of it rapidly resurfaced. Some Martinicans feared that slavery might be reinstated. After all, Napoleon had restored the peculiar institution in 1802, eight years after the French Revolution abolished it, at the urging of Empress Joséphine, the daughter of a Martinican planter with three hundred slaves.* It took another forty-six years before France definitively abolished slavery.
The language of resistance to the Robert regime reverberated with the metaphors of plantation society. Blacks who fled the island for Saint Lucia or Dominica during the Tan Robé called themselves “maroons,” runaway slaves. The historian Julius S. Scott has observed that, ever since the late eighteenth century, the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions, there had been a “close symbolic connection between experience at sea and freedom” in the West Indies. To take to the sea was to become a masterless rebel, a potential importer of seditious ideas about freedom and self-determination. It was also to risk being drowned, and to join the millions of Africans who had been thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.
The békés’ enthusiasm for Pétain’s national revolution was hardly surprising: they were seeking to restore their power. But there were also Martinicans of color who sided with Vichy. One of them was Lucette Céranus Combette, a striking young woman from Fort-de-France who wrote an autobiographical novel under the pseudonym Mayotte Capécia. Combette came from a poor family; by the age of thirteen she was working at a chocolate factory. When a lieutenant in Admiral Robert’s forces began courting her, she recognized an opportunity to escape her station. She embraced the Vichy social set with zealous calculation, attending its galas alongside her white partner and pouring scorn on the Black infantry units that would eventually help overthrow the Robert regime in July 1943—“nègres of the lowest category,” she called them. Fanon would write damningly of Capécia’s novel, Je suis martiniquaise (I Am a Martinican Woman), in Black Skin, White Masks, in a chapter about Black women who take up with white men in the hope of “lactifying” themselves. Fanon’s ridicule of Capécia and other “frenzied women of color, frantic for a white man” has long provoked justifiable charges of sexism from feminist scholars. But he had reasons other than misogyny to despise Capécia, a notorious symbol of “horizontal collaboration” in Martinique. By then he was a war veteran, and she had slept with the enemy.
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ALISTAIR HORNE, IN HIS classic account of Algeria’s decolonization, A Savage War of Peace, might well have had Fanon in mind when he remarked that “one of the more curious and less easily explained sidelights of the Algerian war was the presence in its more violent aspects, on both sides, of so many from a profession dedicated to saving human life.” But Fanon became a soldier long before he gave any thought to a career in medicine.
It was in early 1943, on the night of their brother Félix’s wedding, that he told Joby of his decision to join the Free French Forces. An increasing number of young men—known collectively as the Dissidence—had been fleeing the island at night in fishing boats rowed by passeurs (smugglers), to head for the British island territories of Dominica and Saint Lucia, to the north and south, respectively, of Martinique. More than four thousand Martinicans would take to the sea to join the Free French Forces under the command of Charles de Gaulle. Some never made it to their destination: the distance from Martinique to the other two islands was little more than twenty miles, but the waters were exceptionally dangerous, subject to fierce Atlantic currents, and full of sharks.
Aware of the risks involved, and “less carried away by patriotic declarations,” Joby discouraged him, but to no avail. “I could not make Frantz see reason,” he wrote. According to Joby, Frantz believed that the Vichy officials on the island were “false Frenchmen, indeed Germans in camouflage.” In Frantz’s thinking at the time, the representatives of a country devoted to liberty, equality, and fraternity couldn’t be racist: France’s official ideology was universalist and therefore intrinsically anti-racist. Joseph Henri, a Black professor of philosophy who taught both Frantz and Joby, strongly disagreed. When Henri, a radical pacifist, discovered that some of his students were preparing to join the Free French Forces in Dominica, he warned Joby and his classmates not to get mixed up in a white man’s war. “Fire burns and war kills,” he said. “The wives of dead heroes marry men who are alive and well. What is happening in Europe is no concern of ours. When whites are shooting each other, it is a blessing for Blacks.” When Joby reported Henri’s warnings to his brother, Frantz is said to have replied that when freedom is at stake, it concerns everyone, whatever their color. Or so legend has it, and legend is, frustratingly, often all that we have to go on. This noble rejoinder, which feels as if it were written for the stage, has been cited as evidence of Fanon’s humanist universalism. Which, to be sure, it was. Fanon recognized that Nazism was the enemy of human decency and had to be defeated. But what’s equally striking here is Fanon’s impatience with—imperviousness to—his teacher’s appeal to racial solidarity.
Fanon still didn’t quite see himself as Black. Like most middle-class Martinicans of color, he had grown up thinking of himself as a French West Indian. When he watched Tarzan, he identified with the Lord of the Jungle, not the Africans—the real nègres. When his mother found fault with his behavior, she said, in Creole, “Ja nègre”—“You’re already becoming a Negro.” Like all French children, he had been raised on tales of the tirailleurs sénégalais (Senegalese riflemen)—the colonial infantrymen from Africa. “We knew about them,” he wrote, “from what the veterans of 1914 had told us: ‘they attack with bayonets, and when the going gets tough, they charge through the hail of machine gun fire brandishing their cutlasses … They cut off heads and make a collection of ears.” He caught his first glimpse of the Senegalese riflemen shortly before the war, when a group of tirailleurs, stationed in French Guiana, passed through Fort-de-France. He saw these African soldiers much as white French children did: brave and savage, fascinating, and somewhat frightening. “We eagerly scoured the streets for a sight of their uniforms,” he wrote, “the red tarboosh and the belt, that we had heard so much about.” Casimir Fanon invited two of the infantrymen to dinner, much to his son’s wide-eyed delight. As he would admit in Black Skin, White Masks, his racial self-understanding was not so different from that of Mayotte Capécia, who “saw herself as white and pink in her dreams.” In colonial Martinique, this illusion was considered normal.
Copyright © 2024 by Adam Shatz