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WOULD FRANTZ FANON HAVE SUPPORTED THE OCT. 7 MASSACRE? HIS BIOGRAPHER
ISN’T SO SURE  
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Etan Nechin
February 2, 2024
Haaretz
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_ How did a single chapter from a book written over six decades ago
by a Black psychiatrist, who never discussed the Israel-Palestine
issue, become widely cited in relation to October 7? A new biography
explores the life of Frantz Fanon. _

Frantz Fanon at a press conference of writers in Tunis, 1959., Frantz
Fanon Archives / IMEC

 

NEW YORK – On the morning of October 7, as images of the torn fence
between the Gaza Strip and Israel proliferated on social media, so too
did quotations by Frantz Fanon.

The writings of this Martinique-born philosopher, psychiatrist and
leftist, who is noted for his work on racism, anti-colonialism and
violence, have become emblematic of Algeria's struggle for
independence from France in the 1950s and early '60s. On Black
Saturday
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his quotes were used to argue that the massacre conducted by Hamas was
a direct and inevitable reaction to "colonial" oppression by Israel.
One of the most-quoted lines that day, taken from Fanon's seminal work
"The Wretched of the Earth," states: "Colonialism is not a thinking
machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence
in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with
greater violence."

Fanon, whose life was cut short at age 36 in 1961, has posthumously
lent his voice to an array of causes – stretching from America's
civil rights movement to Pan-Africanism, resonating particularly with
Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestinian activists. "The Wretched of the
Earth" and "Black Skin, White Masks" have entered the academic canon,
regularly appearing on humanities department syllabi. For his
champions, he occupies the role of post-colonial herald, a prophet of
insurgency, articulating the sentiments of the downtrodden.

Yet the breadth of Fanon's intellect and the nuances of his political
stance often remain in the shadows for those who invoke him.

In his extensive new biography "The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary
Lives of Frantz Fanon,"
[[link removed]] Adam
Shatz ventures beyond the conventional view of Fanon as an icon of
political violence and the Algerian revolution. He offers a
three-dimensional portrait of the man, situating him within the
context of his own life and times, while also engaging with the
intellectual milieu that shaped – and was in turn shaped by – his
revolutionary ideas.

There are existing biographies of Fanon, but Shatz – by day the U.S.
editor of London Review of Books [[link removed]] – says
he was motivated to write his because he felt that none of the others
"had captured the passion, the tragic passion, of Fanon's life in
psychiatry, activism and writing."

Adam Shatz, author of "The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of
Frantz Fanon." Credit: Sarah Shatz

"Fanon was somewhat of a dreamer, a utopian, who thought that the
upheaval of revolution or the shock of violence could address
deep-seated issues. This didn't happen."

In an interview at his Brooklyn home, he says he sought to write
something "that would situate Fanon in a larger group of writers and
revolutionaries addressing the same predicament: not only how to
dismantle the colonial order, but to create something better in its
place. A powerful additional motivation was the Trump presidency
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and the unfolding drama in France over Islam, 'integration,' police
violence and jihadism – the embers of Algeria could still be felt
there."

West Indian skin, French mask

The book's opening chapters explore the genesis of Fanon's philosophy,
mapping it back to his youth and the stark contrast between the
profound disjunction between his nascent hopes and the realities he
later confronted. It illustrates how his theories were a synthesis of
thoughts crafted in solitude at his writing desk and those forged in
the wider arena of social and political engagement.

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Fanon was born in the French West Indies to a middle class family in
July 1925. Initially, he did not even perceive himself as Black; he
identified as French – a sentiment echoed by all of his peers on the
island of Martinique. The phrase "_nos ancêtres les Gaulois_" ("Our
ancestors the Gauls") was a mantra for Martinican children like Fanon,
despite their African heritage.

The complexities of race and class on the island influenced Fanon,
particularly the "pigmentocracy" that permeated society. However, his
family's relative comfort shielded him to some extent – until the
Vichy government's arrival in 1940 unveiled a more sinister side of
France characterized by racism and fascism.

This prompted the teenage Fanon to volunteer for the Free French
Forces, where he confronted a colonial army rife with racial
hierarchies. Despite being treated as an "honorary European" (Fanon
was injured and received the Croix de Guerre military decoration), he
saw firsthand the disparities in how Arabs and Africans were treated,
and grappled with the irony of fighting against Nazism
[[link removed]] in
an army practicing its own form of racial supremacy.

This contradiction was Fanon's first jolt toward political
consciousness, a feeling reinforced after the war when he faced
rejection from French women who refused to dance with a Black
liberator.

The U.S. cover of "The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of
Frantz Fanon" by Adam Shatz. Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

After his release from the army, these experiences drew him
to Négritude
[[link removed]] –
a cultural and political movement among French-speaking Black
intellectuals that emphasized African values and heritage, and
protested colonialism and racial discrimination. He was also drawn to
the works of Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, playwright and
politician who would become his first mentor. Fanon moved to France to
continue his studies, eventually enrolling in medicine at the
University of Lyon, where he specialized in psychiatry.

"A pivotal moment for Fanon occurred in France, described in 'Black
Skin, White Masks,' when a little white boy is traveling on the train
with his mother and points to Fanon and says 'Look _maman_,
a _nègre_.' Here's a little boy and yet he's already a 'racial
expert': he already comes to associate a Black man like Fanon with
danger, with menace, and Fanon realizes that in the eyes of the
French, he is a Black man," Shatz says. "He is not simply a French man
of color, as he was raised to believe; he does not enjoy the anonymity
of a typical French person. And I think that is certainly the primal
scene in Fanon's work."

This incident challenged Fanon's belief in the French promise of color
blindness and propelled him toward exploring various philosophies.
These included Negritude, Senegalese statesman and poet Léopold
Sédar Senghor's mystical understanding of Black consciousness, and
eventually European existential philosophy – which he found in the
pages of Les Temps Modernes, the magazine edited by Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir.

"You have to imagine Fanon as a man on a quest for identity during his
time in Lyon. He found himself in a city that felt desolate, markedly
homogeneous in its demographic, save for a small community of North
African men. As a physician, Fanon came to treat these individuals.
And in doing so, they left a significant imprint on his evolving sense
of self," Shatz notes.

Intrigued by iconoclastic psychiatric thinkers aligned with Marxism
and surrealism who delved into madness in provocative ways, Fanon saw
psychiatry's goal as liberating individuals from internal complexes
that obstructed their social interactions. He characterized mental
illness as a "pathology of freedom," devising his own discourse on
restoring a person's sense of identity and belonging, particularly
after experiences of marginalization or mental health challenges.

In Lyon, Fanon's encounters with North African migrant workers led to
a pivotal realization about the "pathology of colonialism and racism."
Recognizing that these diagnoses overlooked the deeper, systemic
issues stemming from oppression, Fanon was inspired to develop his
concept of disalienation. This approach aimed not only to heal
individual psychological distress, but also to address and mend the
collective trauma caused by colonial and racist structures. This
revelation bridged Fanon's medical practice with his anti-colonial
activism, forming a foundational element of his broader philosophical
and political work.

"Fanon didn't invent anything or create new concepts; he was a
bricoleur, crafting a syncretic language from psychiatry, Negritude,
phenomenology and anti-colonialism. The language he developed is
highly distinctive, though the concepts are often used for
convenience," Shatz explains.

I think Afro-pessimism and decolonial thought share the same kind of
historical fatalism that defines much of Zionism. For classical
Zionism, a Jew in exile is living in a kind of hell, where it's always
possibly 1939.

Adam Shatz

"Fanon's work, while deeply invested in the collective endeavor of
liberation from the shackles of colonial dominance, economic
exploitation and political oppression, does not solely focus on these
broader societal issues. He also maintains a profound interest in the
psyche of the individual, advocating for the liberation of colonized
individuals from psychological complexes such as despair, passivity,
feelings of futility and a perceived incapacity to influence
historical events," he says. "It's important to recall that Fanon is
not simply a revolutionary who infuses his political writings with
psychiatric insights. He is a revolutionary critic of psychiatry."

Although Fanon's first book, 1952's "Black Skin, White Masks," was
born from this period, Shatz writes that "it is neither a memoir nor a
clinical study, but rather an unusual mixture of genres and discursive
registers: analytic and poetic, despairing and hopeful, solemn and
sarcastic."

The biographer places "Black Skin, White Masks" within the broader
historical and intellectual era, capturing the post-World War II
revolutionary spirit that swept through Europe and the developing
nations of the "global south." On a journey of self-discovery, Fanon
began to reject his initial mentors. This period was marked by
national liberation movements, the influence of Marxism and the push
for decolonization – a context within which Fanon found resonance
and, ultimately, his place.

The guise of normality

Eleven months before the Algerian War of Independence
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1954, Fanon started working at a psychiatric institute just outside of
Algiers. "Fanon didn't come to Algeria as a revolutionary but a
colonial administrator," says Shatz. "It was not uncommon for France
to send 'assimilated' West Indian professionals to the colonies to
serve as examples of all the good things France had done for the
natives, to serve as models for Africans," he adds sarcastically.

"From the moment France colonized Algeria in 1830, it took the French
approximately 40 years to 'pacify' the country – an endeavor the
French considered pacification, but which for Algerians was a brutal
invasion. During this period, about one-third of the Algerian
population was decimated by violence and disease. By 1848, amid
ongoing colonization efforts, France had divided Algeria into three
departments and began governing the land as an integral administrative
part of France itself, effectively transforming Algeria into an
extension of France. Despite this, Algerians were not granted the
rights of French citizens; they were subjects and were not recognized
as citizens until the final stages of French rule.

"Algerians were violently uprooted, their lands confiscated, their
language relegated to that of a foreign tongue and they were, in
essence, turned into spectators within their own territory. For Fanon,
these experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation
constituted a profound psychological trauma. As I suggest in my book,
Fanon perceived colonialism not merely as an oppressive regime, but as
a pathological system that presented itself under the guise of
normality."

Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric
Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Credit: Frantz
Fanon Archives / IMEC

Shatz demonstrates how Fanon's work shaped his thought and vice versa
– whether implementing his radical psychiatric approaches on
Algerian patients, or traveling to the Algerian backwoods where he
witnesses local rituals and becomes enamored with the rural Algerians.
When the war begins, Fanon knows which side he's on: he is no longer a
Frenchman.

"He begins to think of himself as an Algerian. He's not a Muslim; he's
an atheist. He's not an Arab; he's a Black man from the West Indies.
And yet he begins to develop this fusional relationship with the
Algerian struggle – and in the course of that, he reimagines what it
means to be Algerian. He thinks of Algerian nationalism as a kind of
nationalism of the will, a nationalism that anyone can join. Arabs and
Muslims, who are colonized of course, but also European sympathizers
– or, for that matter, members of the Jewish minority," Shatz says.

Initially, Fanon sought to join the Algerian National Liberation Front
as a soldier, but the movement utilized his medical and intellectual
expertise in other critical ways. He operated a covert clinic to treat
wounded Algerian fighters, contributed writings to the army's El
Moudjahid publication and took on a variety of roles, including acting
as an ambassador for the provisional Algerian government. This period
of his life followed his expulsion from Algeria in 1956, during which
time he resided in Tunis and Accra (where he served as the movement's
traveling ambassador in Africa).

Shatz paints a broad picture of the region and portrays Fanon's
relationships with Algerian revolutionaries, white French Marxists who
came to support the revolution, and African leaders such as Patrice
Lumumba. He also highlights the blind spots that Fanon, in his zeal,
either overlooked or dismissed – including the Islamic component of
the Algerian struggle.

It's impossible to know what Fanon would have said about the Oct. 7
attack. But I don't think Fanon would have been surprised by the fact
that it happened. That the violence of oppression inevitably provokes
the counterviolence of the oppressed is, after all, a Fanonian theme.

Adam Shatz

"Fanon, I think, imagined that the anti-colonial revolution might
provide the kind of modernization that the French were claiming to
bring with their civilizational project," Shatz says. He highlights an
essay Fanon wrote in 1959 called "Algeria Unveiled": "It's a
captivating essay that explores the evolving symbolism of the veil,"
his biographer says. "For Fanon, the veil can represent both
subjugation and resistance. Fanon believed that through their
revolutionary actions – like the Algerian women who planted bombs
for the National Liberation Front – these women were not only
fighting against colonialism but also challenging patriarchy.

"He hoped that, post-independence, Algerian men would recognize and
embrace the women's rights to freedom and equality. However, the
outcome was different. While there's a vibrant feminist movement in
Algeria, the societal changes Fanon hoped for were not fully realized.
Fanon was somewhat of a dreamer, a utopian, who thought that the
upheaval of revolution or the shock of violence could address
deep-seated issues. This didn't happen."

Apostle of violence

One of the issues facing Shatz as a biographer was Fanon's aversion to
documenting his private life. "He kept things close to the chest. He
expressed disdain for those who wrote memoirs, viewing it as a
bourgeois pastime," he says. "The only real traces of Fanon's personal
life emerge in fleeting passages in his work, often masked by the use
of the royal we pronoun. Fanon's reluctance to write about himself
makes the task of his biographer particularly challenging."

Yet while the book may not contain new archival discoveries about
Fanon, its depth is enhanced by the relationships Shatz fostered over
the years with individuals close to Fanon. These include Algerian
historian Mohamed Harbi, Algerian psychoanalyst Alice Cherki and, most
notably, the late Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, Fanon's secretary and
confidante – aka Fanon's "tape recorder" – who typed "The Wretched
of the Earth" from his dictations.

Shatz, 51, has a rich history in journalism and a deep connection to
the regions Fanon wrote about. Coming from a left-leaning, secular
Jewish family in Massachusetts, his fieldwork took him to Algeria, the
Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt. His published works
include "Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about
Zionism and Israel" and "Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the
Radical Imagination." In recognition of his contributions to French
culture, in 2021 he was named a knight of the Order of Arts and
Letters. In this book, Shatz weaves together those years of travel,
encounters and intellectual explorations into Fanon's world, in all
its contradictions and complexities.

No Fanon work has generated more debate
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"The Wretched of the Earth," which was published in 1961, the year of
his death. It is a trenchant analysis of the psychological and
cultural impacts of colonialism, advocating for decolonization and the
liberation of oppressed peoples. It presents a powerful critique of
colonial rule and a call to arms for revolutionary change, rooted in
Fanon's own experiences in Algeria.

The family of Liraz Assulin, who was killed by Hamas terrorists while
attending the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, creating a memorial for
her near Kibbutz Kfar Azza last month. Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Fanon had a talent for revolutionary phraseology, for what you might
call revolutionary jingles. Thus, one can read them very selectively
and find support for one's argument – in this case, the 'Al-Aqsa
Flood' – as a classic example of Fanonian struggle.

Adam Shatz

Its first chapter, "On Violence," is also its most discussed. In it,
Fanon discusses the role of violence in the decolonization process,
arguing that it has a regenerative force for the oppressed to reclaim
their humanity and overthrow the colonial system. He views violence as
a cathartic response to the violence enacted by the colonizer and a
crucial component in the struggle for liberation.

While many readers saw "The Wretched of the Earth" as nothing but a
call to wanton violence, settling the score with the "master" – as
many of his appalled contemporaries did – Shatz offers a more
complex analysis.

For instance, he draws attention to a passage from "The Wretched of
the Earth" where Fanon addresses this directly: "Racism, hatred,
resentment and the 'legitimate desire for revenge' alone cannot
nurture a war of liberation."

In Shatz' understanding of Fanon's thinking, there is a tension
between Fanon the doctor, whose first commandment is "do no harm," to
the revolutionary for whom violence is a way of achieving liberation.

"The longest chapter in the book is 'On Violence.' But the second
longest chapter is 'Colonial Warfare and Mental Disorders,' which is
an absolutely wrenching chapter where he writes not only about the
impact of colonial violence on the colonized after independence. He
also writes about the impact of anti-colonial violence on
anti-colonial fighters who are haunted by the acts that they've
committed," the author says.

Shatz doesn't argue that Fanon shies away from violence, but that his
exploration of violence is phenomenological, focusing on the lived
experience and the psychological transformation it brings about –
such as a sense of empowerment or regeneration. This viewpoint is not
unique to Fanon and is common in nationalist movements.

Furthermore, Shatz highlights Fanon's poetic inclination, influenced
by Negritude poets and his Caribbean background, which infuses his
work with rich metaphors and a deep connection to historical struggles
against oppression like the 18th-century Haitian Revolution.

Shatz contends that the misinterpretation of Fanon is partly due to
the incorrect translation of the term "violence" as "cleansing" rather
than "disintoxicating," which Fanon intended to describe as an
unfortunate but necessary step in the journey toward decolonization
and reclaiming identity.

That misreading is attributed partly to Sartre's militant preface to
the book, in which he infamously stated: "To shoot down a European is
to kill two birds with one stone – to destroy an oppressor and the
man he oppresses at the same time."

Simone de Beauvoir, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre at a Parisian
restaurant in 1970. Credit: AFP

Fanon's afterlife

Since Fanon's death from leukemia and double pneumonia in December
1961, just seven months before Algeria's independence, there have been
numerous misuses and misreadings of his work. Shatz addresses this in
an epilogue dedicated to Fanon's posthumous influence, exploring how
his ideas have been referenced and absorbed in various fields.

This epilogue includes subchapters on Fanon's impact on Black
liberation movements, psychiatry, post-colonial literature, the
European migration discourse, pan-African and East Asian revolutionary
thought, and Palestinian liberation – even though Fanon never
directly wrote about either Palestine or Israel.

Fanon's specter is invoked so frequently that Shatz has continued to
expand on this epilogue even after his book was officially completed.
A few weeks after the Hamas attack, Shatz wrote a piece in London
Review of Books called "Vengeful Pathologies,"
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which his nuanced application of Fanon's theories in the context of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly regarding Hamas'
actions on Oct. 7, transcend a simplistic interpretation of Fanon as
merely advocating violence.

Instead, Shatz uses Fanon to delve into the psychological
ramifications of colonization and the complex motivations behind the
use of violence in liberation struggles.

As for why Fanon is suddenly so prevalent, Shatz observes that he "had
a talent for revolutionary phraseology, for what you might call
revolutionary jingles. Thus, one can read them very selectively and
find support for one's argument – in this case, the 'Al-Aqsa Flood'
– as a classic example of Fanonian struggle. The textual evidence is
there. Just as Marx has been reduced to class struggle, and Freud to
the unconscious and the Oedipus complex, so Fanon has been reduced to
violence. And like Marx, he has lent himself to both vulgar and
sophisticated readings.

"It's impossible to know what Fanon would have said about the Oct. 7
attack," Shatz continues. "But I don't think Fanon would have been
surprised by the fact that it happened. That the violence of
oppression inevitably provokes the counterviolence of the oppressed
is, after all, a Fanonian theme. As he writes in 'The Wretched of the
Earth': 'The colonized person is a persecuted person who dreams
constantly of becoming the persecutor.' Whether he would have endorsed
this kind of attack, however, one can only speculate. A militant
reader of Fanon might say that he would have, and there are grounds
for making this claim. But 'The Wretched of the Earth' is also full of
warnings about the danger of turning hatred and revenge into a
political program, and Fanon insists that an anti-colonial struggle
must overcome the 'primitive Manichaeism' of the colonial system."

A banner quoting Frantz Fanon outside the Minneapolis Police
Department following a police shooting in 2015: "We revolt simply
because for many reasons we can no longer breathe." Credit: Tony
Webster

The renaissance of Fanon comes at a time when, according to Shatz,
certain styles of thought – such as Afro-pessimism and the
decolonial movement – have tended to substitute ontology for
history. "Instead of seeing these identities as products of history
and as entities that can be unmade, they view them as fixed and
essential. Thus, the person who is the child, the grandchild or the
great-grandchild of a colonized nation is somehow eternally colonized.
Right? The notion is that anti-Black oppression is something that can
never be transformed; it's simply an irreducible, ontological part of
societies under Western domination.

"I think Fanon was very skeptical of this style of thought – which,
by the way, has a lot in common with Zionism. I think Afro-pessimism
and decolonial thought share the same kind of historical fatalism that
defines much of Zionism. For classical Zionism, a Jew in exile is
living in a kind of hell, where it's always possibly 1939. The only
authentic life is among Jews in Israel. And I think there are many
parallels. To me, that all speaks of the great doubt that has fallen
over so many societies – most societies, arguably – that there is
any horizon beyond what we know today."

_"The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon"
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Adam Shatz, is out now._

_ETAN NECHIN is an Israeli-born journalist and author.
Twitter: @Etanetan23 [[link removed]]_

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* Frantz Fanon
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* biography
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* colonialism
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* revolution
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* Violence
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* trauma
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