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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Black Lives
- Sprache: Englisch
Revolutionary humanist and radical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was one of the greatest Black thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Martinique and known for his involvement in the Algerian liberation movement, his seminal books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are widely considered to be cornerstones of anti-colonial and anti-racist thought.
In this essential introduction to Fanon’s remarkable life and philosophy, Nigel C. Gibson argues that Fanon’s oeuvre is essential to thinking about race today. Connecting Fanon’s writing, psychiatric practice, and lived experience in the Caribbean, France, and Africa, Gibson reveals (with startling clarity) his philosophical commitments and the vision of revolution that he stood for. Despite his untimely death, the revolutionary pulse of Fanon’s ideas has continued to beat ever more strongly in the consciousness of successive revolutionary generations, from the Black Panthers and the Black Power to Black Lives Matter.
As Fanon’s thought comes alive to new activists thinking about their mission to “humanize the world,” Gibson reminds us that that Fanon’s revolutionary humanism is fundamental to all forms of anti-colonial struggle, including our own.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface: What would Fanon say?
Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A question of biography
A note on psychiatry
A note on Fanon and the language of race, gender, and translations
Notes
1 Martinique, France, and Metaphysical Experiences
Childhood
Césaire and negritude
Antillean metaphysics and Fanon’s war years
Fanon and the Free French
Disillusionment
Back to Martinique
Notes
2 Fanon in France
Fanon in Lyon
Meeting Josie and the birth of Mireille
The plays
Words
Medical school
“The ‘North African Syndrome’”
Trip to Martinique
Institutional therapy and radical psychiatry
Notes
3 Black Skin, White Masks
Introduction
The journey
“The Black and Language”
The possibility of love among the races
“The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized”
The 1947 revolt
The interpretation of dreams
“The Lived Experience of the Black”
“The Black Man and Psychopathology”
The failure of reciprocity and the adventures of the dialectic
The Black and Hegel
“By Way of Conclusion”
Notes
4 Fanon in Algeria
The Algiers school
Sociopsychotherapy at Blida-Joinville
Politics inside the hospital
Therapy and the war inside the hospital
The Congress of Black Writers and Artists
Leaving Algeria
Fanon and Jeanson
Notes
5 The Algerian Revolution and Beyond: Fanon in Tunis
El Moudjahid
Ramdane Abane
The border
Lectures at the Institut des hautes études in Tunis (1959/60)
Notes
6 Writing from Inside the Algerian Revolution: L’An V de la révolution algérienne
The Battle of Algiers
Notes
7 Fanon, a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist Ambassador and His Last Days
Fanon and Africa, 1960
A new African front of the Algerian revolution
Leukemia
Last days
Notes
8 Les Damnés de la terre: The Handbook of Revolution
“On Violence”
“Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Weaknesses”
“The Misadventures (or Pitfalls) of National Consciousness”
“On National Culture”
“Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders”
Fanon’s conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
The immediacy of Fanon
The rationality of revolt
Breath
Time
Rethinking everything
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Introduction
Photograph by Tony Webster. “We revolt simply because for many reasons we can no…
Griffin Fisher, Frantz Fanon. Boston 2019
Chapter 6
Françoise McAree, “Burqa Silhouette” (2014)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface: What would Fanon say?
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Black Lives series
Elvira Basevich, W. E. B. Du BoisNigel C. Gibson, Frantz FanonDenise Lynn, Claudia JonesUtz McKnight, Frances E. W. HarperJoshua Myers, Cedric RobinsonSherrow O. Pinder, David Walker
Frantz Fanon
Combat Breathing
Nigel C. Gibson
polity
Copyright © Nigel C. Gibson 2024
The right of Nigel C. Gibson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Excerpts from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. English translation copyright © 1963 by Présence Africaine. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Excerpt from West Indians and Africans by Frantz Fanon © Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Used by permission of Éditions du Seuil.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4877-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945890
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Preface: What would Fanon say?
The original impetus behind writing Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing was the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded across the world after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. Although the book was already at the publisher when the horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens (as well as on military occupation facilities) took place, followed by Israel’s immediate catastrophic response (a collective punishment resulting in a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza), I felt compelled to add a short preface to this book as another global movement is emerging in support of Palestinian national self-determination.
There is a remarkable staying power and urgency to Fanon’s thought. Just short of one hundred years after his birth, he always seems to have something to say that connects with our contemporary moment. In the critique of orientalism expressed in one of his first articles, “The ‘North African Syndrome,’” he lays out the thesis that when North Africans (i.e. Arabs) come “on the scene,” they enter “into a pre-existing framework.” This pre-existing orientalist framework extending beyond North Africa is seen every day in the commentaries about the Arabs’ constitutional inferiority, violence, fanaticism, and lies. This ideology reemerged unmistakably after October 7, 2023 when Hamas fighters stormed into villages in southern Israel and killed civilians, young and old, many of whom were opposed to Netanyahu and the settlers. The prevailing orientalist discourse emanated not only from the Israeli state, but also became the dominant narrative across the Western media: Hamas came to represent the generic Arab. Of course, the violence and daily brutality required to police Israel’s Manichean world of colonizer and colonized was normalized, and remained so even after October 7, as the world began to watch a genocide unfold.
Israel’s European “brightly lit” cities with their vibrant nightlife, on the one hand, and the high-tech border fences and military guards of the occupied territories, on the other, “a world without spaciousness” (Fanon 1968: 39), harkens back to the Manichean geography of the colonial world described by Fanon. It is a juridical world of compartments, divided by the police and the military. However, after October 7, the survival of Gaza – already an “open-air prison” – itself came into doubt as daily atrocities and massacres were unleashed against Palestinian civilians there who have nowhere to escape to. This obliteration is justified in the indisputable moral name of “never again.”
This reference to the Holocaust takes us back to Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, in which, in connecting anti-Semitism with negrophobia, he is reminded of his philosophy teacher from the Antilles saying, “‘When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.’ And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother.” It was around that time that Fanon left Martinique to join the Free French Army, which was committed to the anti-Nazi fight. “Since then,” he added, “I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe” (2008: 100). Back in Martinique in late 1945, Fanon heard a speech from Aimé Césaire’s political campaign: “When I switch on my radio and hear that Black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead” (2008: 70). Just a few years later, Césaire would argue that Nazism is the product of a “boomerang effect” of European colonialism, where the exclusive savagery, violence, and brutality – the racism – toward non-European people rebounds with the largest holocaust in history, the systematic elimination of 6 million Jews. “At the end of formal humanism,” Césaire adds, “there is Hitler” (2000: 37), making it clear that Hitler was not dead but would continue to appear in new forms.
After October 7, mention of the Holocaust in Israel became weaponized as a justification for the removal (and, indeed, the wished-for annihilation) of Palestinians. It is true that the idea of self-determination for Jews after the Holocaust contained contradictory tendencies, including liberal and socialist. More importantly, there is also a direct line of Zionism in power – from the fascist-terrorist Irgun, through Menachem Begin, to Benjamin Netanyahu – that from its inception cared more about consolidating land and power than adhering to the principle of the self-determination of nations that declares no nation can be free if it oppresses another.
In Les Damnés de la terre, Fanon describes the colonial world as Manichean (going back to the Persian religion of Mani, which viewed the creators of the world, God and the Devil, as still fighting it out). From the colonizer’s standpoint, the colonized do not lack values but are simply evil. Thus, the police and army play the role of containing the colonized and keeping them in place (and, as Fanon critically points out, they play the same role in the post-independence neocolonial national regime).
To return to Fanon’s conception of colonial Manicheanism, its relevance now is borne out by the use of the term “apartheid” to describe conditions of life for Palestinians. Introduced after World War II in South Africa with genuinely fascist connections, apartheid was about “population control” (i.e. labor control) of South Africa’s Africans, including pass laws and the forced removal of people. The creation of Homelands or “Bantustans” for 87 percent of the population on 13 percent of the land was an attempt by late settler colonialism to develop a system of indirect rule based on apartheid state-sanctioned and supported “tribal” rule outside “White South Africa.” In apartheid Israel, the “Bantustans” of Gaza and the West Bank are not primarily about labor control – though the pass laws work in a similar way – but about keeping the Palestinian population fixed in their exiled place, as in Gaza, where this surplus population is essentially locked down. Fanon’s writings, focused as they are on the lived experience of being denied freedom of movement, hemmed into “this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions” (1968: 37), have an immediate resonance. In Les Damnés de la terre, for example, he writes of a million Algerian hostages behind barbed wire and 300,000 refugees on the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers forced there by the French. The unheard-of levels of brutality, terror, and vengeance unleashed on the populace created a continuous “apocalyptic atmosphere” that, Fanon concludes, is “the sole message [of] French democracy” (1965: 26). In extreme poverty and precarious living conditions, Fanon continues, the colonized live in a state of permanent insecurity; in flight from endless aerial bombardments, families are broken up and there is hardly anyone who does not suffer from mental disorders. This “shameless colonialism” is only matched by apartheid South Africa (1965: 26). Palestinians live under similar conditions and are also expected to express an emotional and affective control of the self that is situationally impossible. As Hamas’s bloody murders of Israeli civilians on October 7 dominated the news, it was quickly forgotten that those breaching the fences and breaking into “forbidden quarters” (1968: 40) were experiencing a physical moment of liberation. As a psychiatrist and political theorist, Fanon engaged with these contradictory and dehumanized realities. While recognizing the role that the October 7 attacks have played in putting the Palestinian question back on a global stage, Fanon would also be critical of Hamas’s ideology and authoritarianism. Concerned about the difficult question of how to rebuild a resistance that is democratic, his warning in 1959 could very much be directed at Hamas:
Because we want a democratic and a renovated Algeria, because we believe one cannot rise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed. (1965: 25)
In Fanon’s schematic mapping of anticolonial activity, he argues that resistance is determined by the colonizer. He appreciated the power of this militant and Manichean anticolonial inversion, proclaiming that the colonized respond “to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood” and adding that, in this colonist context, “there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for ‘them’” (1968: 50). While recognizing the logic of this inversion of colonial Manicheanism, Fanon also considered it incredibly problematic, warning that, along with the “brutality of thought and a mistrust of subtlety which are typical of revolutions … there exists another kind of brutality which … is typically antirevolutionary, hazardous and anarchist.” If it is not “immediately combatted … this unmixed and total brutality … invariably leads to the defeat of the movement” (1968 147). Political education, Fanon argues, is necessary to introduce “shades of meaning” and, in doing so, challenges the tendency among leaders to underestimate the people’s reasoning capabilities. This might sound almost idealistic, but it is essential to the cognitive break that Fanon argues can be brought about by a revolutionary moment. This is not the old, but a new politics, he argues, where “leaders and organizers living inside of history … take the lead with their brains and their muscles in the fight for freedom. These politics are national, revolutionary and social” (1968: 147).
Warning of the degeneration of nationalism into chauvinism and ethno-nationalism, Fanon argues in Les Damnés de la terre that national consciousness is not nationalism, quickly adding that national consciousness also has to open up during the struggle for freedom: “If it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads to a dead-end” (1968: 204). We continue to see these dead-ends reappear in brutal and nihilistic ways, reminding us that developing radical humanism mediated through political and social (human) action and thought requires both intention and clarity. Radical humanism calls not only for political organization, but also, crucially, for an image of the future society based on human foundations that must be worked out and discussed with the people (reflecting their social needs) involved in the struggle for liberation.
For Fanon, to perceive the reason in revolt – which will be discussed throughout this book – requires the development of new ways of thinking and new ways of understanding that seem implausible. The attitudes to the bombing of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in mid-October 2023 expressed the Manichean situation and thinking that Fanon describes. While Israel and the US immediately insisted that it could not have been an Israeli bomb, across the region, mass demonstrations and expressions of outrage (including against their own Arab leaders) rejected that assessment. As Fanon puts it, “the ‘truth’ of the oppressor” becomes “an absolute lie,” and is countered by “another, an acted truth” (1967: 76). Despite whatever proof was produced, the masses had already made up their minds, connecting the violent destructive act directly to their experiences: the Palestinian experience of Israeli’s military might, as well as the fear of a genocide. They knew that this would happen, and that thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children would be killed by Israeli airstrikes.
To reiterate, the colonizer/colonized relationship is a Manichean one. The arming of the ultra-rightwing Religious Zionists to steal Palestinian land and the silencing of opposition to the war inside Israel are logical expressions of Manichean thinking. While there is some opposition among Israelis to the settlers, there is, at the same time, a widespread sense of existential dread of Arabs. Among these groups, it would not be surprising to hear them repeat what Fanon heard the Algerian colonists say, “Let’s each one of us take ten of them and bump them off and you’ll see the problem solved in no time” (1965: 56).
But colonialism is not only a simple occupation of a territory. It is also, argues Fanon, the occupation of body and mind where, “in its initial phase, the action … of the occupier … determines the resistance around which a people’s will to survive becomes organized” (1965: 47). After all the years since Fanon wrote these words, we keep returning to this initial phase, mediated by violence. As Gideon Levy put it in the liberal Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz immediately after the Hamas attacks: “They are already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza ‘as it has never been punished before.’” Implicitly critical of the idea of Israel being seen as a liberal democracy, he adds: “Israel hasn’t stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment … Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.”1
Fanon’s understanding of the pathology of colonialism is described in both L’An V de la revolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) and in Les Damnés de la terre. At the same time, he recognizes the emergence of the new “reality of the nation” (2018: 679) out of the process of decolonization. In L’An V, he argues that a radical change in consciousness is taking place as a new reality of the nation is being born, and critically warns of the pathological excesses of violence. But Fanon’s relevance has to be understood in a context where no such new reality of the nation seems to be emergent. Manicheanism reigns, reflecting and underlining Fanon’s discussion of violence as a ceaseless pathological dystopian reality of permanent social dysfunction manifested so vividly in Hamas’s politics of pathological violence. It is a politics that is held up to the world ostensibly as distinct from the religion-driven violence of ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the state-sponsored persecution of occupied Palestine, and the Arab abandonment of the principle of Palestinian national self-determination. The massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, a pathological act of anti-Jewish violence, exposed the multiple layers and facets of Palestinian oppression. And it is this dialectic that has elicited global responses of support for Palestinian national self-determination, as well as, not surprisingly, global anti-Semitic and Islamophobic rhetorical and actual violence. The images of Gaza as a graveyard of children have been seen around the world, motivating a global response, especially among youth, offering a challenge to both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as new possibilities.2 As Fanon puts it in the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks: “To move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born … to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other” (2008: 206).
As you read this book, you will see how Fanon’s analysis and vision remain vital and speak powerfully to our situation. You will also read of Fanon’s consistent concern about human liberation and the crucial need for disalienation. In his 1960 speech “Why We Use Violence,” he responds to the colonist in Algeria who says that Algeria belongs to them, laying out his radical humanist challenges:
We do not say … “You are a stranger, go away.” We do not say … “We will take over the leadership of the country and make you pay for your crimes and those of your ancestors.” We do not tell him that “to the past hatred of the Black we will oppose the present and future hatred of the White” … We say … “We are Algerians, banish all racism from our land, all forms of oppression and let us work for the flourishing and enrichment of humanity.” We agree, Algeria belongs to all of us, let us build it on democratic bases and together build an Algeria that is commensurate with our ambition and our love. (2018: 657)
This is the “important theoretical problem” Fanon discusses at the end of Les Damnés de la terre, which includes an existential self-critique, explaining that it is “necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to de-mystify, and to hunt down the insult to humankind that exists in oneself” (1968: 304; 2004: 229; translation altered). The theoretical problem concerns how to create a new society that supports and nurtures a liberating consciousness. It is a problem that Fanon addresses throughout his psychiatric and political work. Understanding that “people are imperceptibly transformed by revolutionary processes in perpetual renewal,” he adds that “there must be no waiting until the nation has produced new people.” Consciousness, Fanon insists, “must be helped” by giving people back their dignity and what he calls “opening the mind to human things” (1968: 304, 205). Indeed, we should not forget that the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa – the Soweto uprising of 1976 – was opened up by a philosophy of liberation called Black Consciousness, for which Fanon was an essential theorist (see Gibson 2011). Revolutionary theory (and this is what makes Les Damnés de la terre a “handbook of revolution”) must contribute to total and complete human liberation.
November 20, 2023
Notes
1.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-cant-imprison-2-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price/0000018b-1476-d465-abbb-14f6262a0000
.
2.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html?searchResultPosition=1
Acknowledgments
This book was meant to be completed earlier. George Owers contacted me just before the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020 about Polity’s new Black Lives series. We talked about a book on Fanon and I submitted a proposal later in the year. At the time, I was working on Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth, an edited collection that would be published in November 2021 on the sixtieth anniversary of Les Damnés de la terre (Daraja Press). During that time, I was struggling with a medical condition that was not improving. To keep me sane I worked, when I could, on Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing. Medical leave followed by a teaching sabbatical gave me the time to concentrate and live with the book. A big thanks to Amy Ansell, my dean at Emerson College, for helping to make this possible.
Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing could not have been completed without the aid of many people. First, I want to thank Lou Turner, who commented on every chapter. It was, while I was living in London in 1980 that John Alan and Lou Turner’s Frantz Fanon, Soweto, and American Black Thought first introduced me to Fanon and to Steve Biko’s Fanonian praxis. After the formal end of apartheid in 1994, Fanon became newly alive, though his books were not being taught at South African universities. In 1999 I had my first opportunity to visit South Africa and speak there about Fanon; in the early 2000s, I presented the annual Frantz Fanon lecture in Durban. Students there told me that, as they read Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, they would write down South African names as they applied “the Pitfalls of National Consciousness” to their own situation. But it was the emergence of the shack-dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, in 2005 that expressed the reason and revolt of the wretched of the earth in post-apartheid South Africa. For me, the relevance today of Fanon is visible in these conversations in South Africa, in the Arab Spring revolutions, and in the #Black Lives Matter movements. This Fanonian praxis was expressed by the activists and scholars who contributed to Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth including Flávio Almada, Elizabeth Berger, Alejandro De Oto, Deivison Faustino, Rosemere Ferreira, Levi Gahman, Razan Ghazzawi, Hamza Hamouchene, Samah Jabr, Kurtis Kelly, Wangui Kimari, Toussaint Losier, Ayyaz Mallick, Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, David Pavón Cuéllar, Johannah Reyes, Annette Rimmer, Ato Sekyi-Otu, Léa Tosold, Lou Turner, and S’bu Zikode, as well as, most crucially, the publisher, Firoze Manji. In addition, Jim Fabris, Michelle Gubbay, Yasser Munif, Michael Neocosmos, Richard Pithouse, and Jennifer Rycenga were also important interlocutors during this important moment. The sudden death of Miraj Desai, a contributor to Fanon Today, is truly mourned. A true Fanonian, his work with Fanon was connected with his commitment to anti-racist community psychiatry and healing.
Students from my Fall 2020 Fanon seminar who, with me, at that very Covid-19 and George Floyd moment, read, discussed, and were fully engaged in Fanon backwards, from Les Damnés de la terre to Black Skin, White Masks, include Eric Dolente, Maya Faerstein-Weiss, Griffin Fisher, Claire Foley, Leah Kindler, Sam Kiss, Hunter Logan, Tess Rauscher, Michael Rocco, Salah Shams, Madison Shaw, Liam Thomas, Weiting Tian, Lin Vega, and Vedaaya Wadhani. Leah Kindler’s poetry from the class is included in Fanon Today; and the artwork of Griffin Fisher, who heartbreakingly died before Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing was completed, is present in the book.
Just before the Covid-19 lockdown, I had a chance to meet with members of the South African shack-dweller organization, and to engage in a four-hour discussion on Fanon’s work and its meaning, sitting around a table with National Council Members S’bu Zikode, Mqapheli Bonono, Nomusa Sizani, Zanele Mtshali, Bathabile Makhoba, Joyce Majola, Thuso Mohapi, Mfanufikile Sindane; KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Secretary, Nhlanhla Mtshali; Youth Comrades, Busisiwe Diko, Lindokuhle Mnguni, Nhlakaniphi Mdiyastha; and Financial Officer, Asiphe Mpumela. Since then Abahlali baseMjondolo has established a Frantz Fanon school in the eKhenana Commune in Durban.
When the first draft of Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing was complete in the spring of 2022, John Trimbur offered invaluable support, reading, commenting, and provided critical editorial advise. At Polity, the book was shepherded by Julia Davies, who went through the whole manuscript, suggesting edits and calmly explaining each element of the publishing process, aided by Sarah Dancy, Helena Heaton, and Maddie Tyler. The work also benefited from a research appointment at Brown University’s Department of Africana studies from 2022 to 2024, thanks to chair and Professor Noliwe Rooks. In the Spring of 2023, Matthieu Renault invited me to the Fanon en Pratiques Colloque in Paris, my first Fanon trip in three years. There I saw the marvelous Frantz Fanon graphic book, and had the opportunity to meet its author, Frédéric Ciriez. In Paris, I had the chance to reconnect with my friends from the “Fanon: Decolonizing Madness” project: Alice Cherki, Roberto Beneduce, and Lisa Damon.
I am grateful to have been involved in Caribbean Philosophy Association events, and value my long acquaintance and work with Jane Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon. And last, my debt to Raymond Geuss, Edward Said, and the late George C. Bond for their intellectual generosity remains boundless. While Aidan Gibson generously offered humor, relief, and advice, Kate Josephson was a constant interlocutor, companion, critic, and comrade.
Introduction
We inhabit extraordinary times: times of crisis and possibility in which we are acutely aware of the intensity of what revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon called “the glare of history’s floodlights.” Around the world, the invisible has become visible as rebellions from Black Lives Matter following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 spread with astonishing speed, creating new solidarities around the globe (see Gibson 2021).1 And in 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, the movement, under the banner of “Woman. Life. Freedom,” escalated quickly across Iran into North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey. It is impossible to predict – but then, in retrospect, it seems utterly predictable. As the police murders of George Floyd and Mahsa Amini become nodal points, calling for action as well as rethinking and self-clarification, many are reminded of an observation attributed to Lenin – that “there are weeks where decades happen.” What will happen next? How can we play a role in determining the future, making sure that these rebellions are not taken over and watered down, and realizing the truly human-centered transformations that people crave?
Fanon’s statement in the conclusion to his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, that the Vietnamese revolt not because they have discovered a culture but “quite simply … because it became impossible for them to breathe” (2008: 201) quickly became reproduced and reanimated on placards, public art, and social media posts after the murder of Eric Garner in 2014 and again following the murder of George Floyd. The lament of their dying words “I can’t breathe” – the same phrase uttered by 40 people in the US killed by police in 20202 – became transformed into the reason for revolt.
Asking the question, what to do after the revolution has failed, the incarcerated revolutionary philosopher James Yaki Sayles created a remarkable guide to discussing Fanon (2010: 353). By describing the Manichean world, Sayles argued, Fanon is talking about mental liberation “reflecting on the state of consciousness of colonized people as they struggle to become NEW PEOPLE” (2010: 180). And from within the hellholes of the Pelican Bay State Prison, the hunger strikes (2011–13) began as a humanist refusal to the “killing of our minds.”3
Fanon is acutely aware of consciousness and the lived experience of the body in space, structured and ordered by racism and colonialism. Throughout his work, he uses the terms “suffocated,” “smothered,” and “imprisoned” to describe racialized and colonial reality. In Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), he describes the spatial reality of the colonial world where the colonized are forced to live in a “narrow world strewn with prohibitions” (1968: 37; 2004: 3). And in L’An V de la révolution algérienne,4 he describes colonization as the crushing of life and the denial of space, food, water, and air. In a colonial situation, life is not perceived “as flowering,” he writes, “but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death” because “there is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested.” Under these conditions, breathing itself is a threat, “it is an observed, occupied breathing … a combat breathing.” Combat breathing is not only the struggle to survive under the continued threat of political, economic, and psychological violence. Fanon does not forget to inform us of the clandestine forms of existence that become the oxygen “shap[ing] a new humanity” (1965: 12, 65, 181).
Photograph by Tony Webster. “We revolt simply because for many reasons we can no longer breathe” – Frantz Fanon. Outside Minneapolis Police Department 4th precinct following the police officer-involved shooting of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015.
Fanon’s philosophy of liberation is intimately connected to the fight for another life. In such a struggle, he observes, every breath is a challenge, and “a clandestine form of existence.” Because life cannot be conceived “otherwise than as a kind of combat,” titling this work combat breathing also echoes Fanon’s vision for another history and another society, “porous to all the breaths of the world” (Aimé Césaire, quoted in Fanon 2008: 104, 107).
This book is an introduction to the life and ideas of Frantz Fanon, the radical psychiatrist and revolutionary humanist. There is really nothing to separate his politics and his therapeutic approaches to mental health. By focusing on this dialectic, Combat Breathing brings into focus a living Fanon who continues to emerge at historical junctures of revolutions, social movements, and rebellions.
Fanon died young, at the age of 36 in 1961. In the short period between 1952 and 1961, he wrote and published three books, Black Skin, White Masks, L’An V de la révolution algérienne, and The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre),5 all of which have become classics discussed in radical social movements.
As well as a political activist and thinker, Fanon was a psychiatrist who spent much of his short professional life working in hospitals in France, colonial Algeria, and postcolonial Tunisia. In all these contexts, treating the suffering of mental disorders was connected to the necessity of disalienating and decolonizing the institutions themselves, encouraging active engagements with the patients, and democratizing the hospitals (Fanon used the term “boarder” rather than “patient” to highlight his view that the institution works to “transform the mad into a patient”). His active participation in the Algerian revolution changed the primary focus of his work: he resigned in late 1956 to work as a full-time revolutionary. In his letter of resignation he wrote that after three years of working to disalienate the hospital, “there comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty” (1967: 52, 54).
My focus on Fanon’s life and thought will offer up some important insights into his theory of liberation. Thinking about this moment with Fanon, we need to be aware of continuities and discontinuities – or, as he puts it, opacities – between our age and his. Fanon is often speaking to us, but generally in ways we cannot hear. We have to work to hear him and to understand the new situations and their meanings.
Since his death, each generation has read Fanon and applied his ideas to their time. In Africa, Fanon’s warning of the pitfalls of national consciousness was played out across the continent to such an extent that Ngugi wa Th’iongo (1993: 84), argued that the literature of Africa at the time was a “series of imaginative footnotes” to Fanon’s “Pitfalls” chapter in Les Damnés de la terre. In Africa and Latin America, with the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, coltan, copper, lithium, and uranium, and other minerals, neocolonialism remains incredibly adaptive and violent to any resistance.6
In South Africa, students read Fanon after the end of formal apartheid, adding local examples to his analysis. Fanon’s idea of “development” from the ground up, based in the community need and discussion articulated in Les Damnés de la terre, resonate today with rural people in the Eastern Cape of South Africa fighting government-supported expropriation of land. And Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dweller and activist movement in Durban (eThekwini), South Africa, have recently created a political education school named after Fanon as they developed the eKhenana commune on occupied land.7 They continue to be under constant and often deadly attack from the police and the state as well as from local ruling African National Congress (ANC) organizations. Even as Fanon’s words take on fresh meanings among new generations of activists, we should heed his caution that he does not come with timeless truths. This takes us directly to his warning that each generation must find, fulfill, or betray its mission, as he puts it.
Fanon’s first “home” after his death in 1961 was not in fact Algeria or France, but the United States where, by the late 1960s, he had become infamous (Turner and Kelley 2021). Les Damnés de la terre was first published in the US in 1963, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, coinciding with the murder of Medgar Evers, who was involved in desegregation at the University of Mississippi and voting rights struggles, and the televised police violence against civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. It occurred at the moment when the nonviolent strategy, including the overall philosophy of the civil rights movement, was being challenged. Fanon was acutely aware of the struggles in the US; when he noted in Les Damnés de la terre that “Black radicals in the US have formed armed militia groups” (2004: 39), he was perhaps referring to Rob Williams and the 1959 announcement that he and other Black North Carolinians had taken up armed self-defense. The reprint of Les Damnés de la terre in the US in 1965 coincided with Martin Luther King Jr.’s opposition to the Vietnam war and the turn to “Black Power” within the civil rights movement. In the wake of the 1965 Watts rebellion, Fanon’s description of violence as the daily experience of colonialism and his idea that counterviolence was the only language colonialism understood immediately resonated with his readers. By 1968, Fanon had become central to the movement’s debates: as Les Damnés de la terre was republished in a cheap mass paperback edition, his name became well known in the Black movements and among White leftists (in 1968, the book was second on the list, behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as suggested reading for new members of the Black Panthers).8
Reacting to this, influencers from the popular press and in intellectual circles equated Fanon’s thought with violence.9 As the philosopher Hannah Arendt said at the time, very few people read past the first chapter, “On Violence,” with many focusing on Sartre’s preface, which “was more violent than the book it introduced” (Bernasconi: 2010: 40). The idea of Fanon as an “apologist of violence” has unfortunately remained dominant. Even today, the idea that every one of Fanon’s comments “on violence is framed or qualified by an argument about healing” is reduced to an argument for healing through violence rather than, for example, a starting point for “understanding how his thought unfolds over time” (Gilroy et al. 2019: 180, 181). Assuming “a moral equivalence” between colonial and anticolonial violence (see Turner 2011) was not Fanon’s argument, and elides both the geo-historical specificity of colonial violence and the goals of organized anticolonial counterviolence. As Fanon’s biographer and colleague Alice Cherki puts it, Fanon was “a thinker about violence, not its apologist” (2006: 2).
Griffin Fisher, Frantz Fanon. Boston 2019
Today, the return to Fanon is framed by a more nuanced view, helped by the English translation of his psychiatric and medical writings (see Fanon 2018; Gibson and Beneduce 2017), but we should not forget that this always formed part of his activist engagements (see Turner and Neville 2020). It has become a characteristic of Black Lives Matter as a psychosocial political movement for expressions of the subjective element of Black trauma that had not occurred previously. Perhaps it was because the George Floyd uprising happened in the midst of COVID-19 – when the high numbers of deaths of Black and Brown “essential” workers shone a light on Black life not mattering – that space was made for these subjective expressions. The movement continued to highlight police abuse and murder, including those whose names were being added to a growing list, such as Breonna Taylor who was shot by police deploying a no-knock warrant. The no-knock warrant became law 50 years earlier in response to another moment of the Black uprising in 1970. Deeply connected to “search and destroy” in Vietnam, it grew exponentially, echoing its militarism, equipment, tactics, and mindset, just as the police in Ferguson employed military-grade equipment in response to the rebellion after the murder of Michael Brown in 2014. In a Fanonian sense, Black trauma became politicized and expressed in the heartfelt testimonies from the immediate families who spoke in much clearer terms than the leaders as they testified in the trial of Floyd’s murderers. Writing about suffering in the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital’s Notre Journal, Fanon understood George Floyd’s call out, explaining: “In hours of great suffering, the adult again has need of a consoling mother … A mother is someone who has protected us from suffering, from troubles” (2018: 345).
It is Fanon’s revolutionary humanism and humanity, his sensibility to the lived experience of racial objectification, oppression, and suffering that cannot be hidden, that make him so present for a new generation of thinkers and activists. He knew nothing about intersectionality or nonbinary gender identities; one can find in his writings terms and norms that very much reflect the period in which he wrote. But “to accuse Fanon of not thinking beyond his historical and cultural context,” as argued by Bhopal and Preston (2011: 215), “is to accuse Fanon of being stuck in a singular consciousness, focused on ‘race.’” It is his quest for human liberation – not as an abstract principle, but grounded in the daily lives of those who have been objectified, alienated, and dehumanized – and his willingness to “rethink everything” that mark him out as a thinker for our age. As his last words sum up, “we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new human” (1968: 239).
Fanon is primarily a theorist of liberation, and his engagement with philosophy, politics, and mental health is always grounded by his concerns about dehumanization and alienation. He was a psychiatrist, philosopher, and political theorist but not at all interested in academic disciplines. Fanon’s psychoanalytical approach in Black Skin, White Masks engages above all with the world around him (politically, culturally, medically), and he continually reminds us that such critical engagements require radical action. In thinking about taking such action, he is reminded of the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who argues that each person is “co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in their presence or with their knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty” (quoted in Fanon 2008: 69n.9). Many in the Black community in Minneapolis expressed this in response to the murder of George Floyd, feeling guilty that they had not been able to do more to stop the police from killing him. Darnella Frazier, the young woman who stood a few feet away recording his death on her cellphone, said she felt powerless. For her, it was a life-changing and traumatic experience. Suffering from anxiety and panic attacks for months afterwards, she couldn’t sleep. All she would see was a man “Brown like me, lifeless on the ground.” Her mom would have to rock her to sleep: “George Floyd … I want you to know you will always be in my heart. I’ll always remember this day because of you” (McDonnell Nieto del Rio 2021).
Revealing a lifelong commitment to human freedom and the struggle against tyranny, Fanon would use a Jasperian argument in response to his brother Joby, who asked him why he was joining the Free French in 1944. In the year that followed, he would find out that France’s humanism was an “obsolete ideal.” This represented a transformational moment, but he still remained committed to fighting for freedom: indeed, he widened this commitment to focus on the struggle against racism and colonialism. And he would develop a “new humanism” in the 1950s connected to constructing a new ideal in the struggles for freedom in the Third World, which was most explicitly expressed in the conclusion to Les Damnés de la terre.
To remember Fanon, the man, the person, and the thinker, is to remember Claude Lanzmann’s reflection after visiting him as he lay dying. Fanon, he said, “was a gentle man whose delicacy and warmth were contagious” (Lanzmann 2012: 347).
A question of biography
Wary of what Lewis Gordon calls the “problem of biography in Africana thought,” where “White intellectuals provide theory; Black intellectuals provide experience” (2000: 29), one is faced with a number of problems writing about Fanon in a book series called “Black Lives.” Fanon felt the lived reality of the racial gaze reproduced on a daily basis, which for him meant that wherever he went he had to struggle to change that reality.
Another problem with writing about Fanon is that we don’t know much about his private and domestic life. We know of his life in Martinique through his brother Joby and his friends. But as his neighbor Maiotte Daiphite remarked, Frantz Fanon was an average (not brilliant) student, and was “quite normal”: “I was far from imagining he would become the thinker. I mean the thinker. I wonder what was brewing in his mind then” (Djemai 2001).
As a full-time member of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) after 1957, and one of its leading spokespeople, Fanon was cautious by necessity. He was a public figure involved in a war against the French. He did not share personal stories even with those who knew him. There are very few photographs of him, and none (as far as I know) of him and his wife Josie; apart from one with his son Olivier in Tunis, there are no family photos. And as Daniel Nethery put it in the foreword to Joby Fanon’s Frantz Fanon, My Brother (2014), “Josie remains an elusive character in all of the Fanon biographies.”
The Fanons attended a Christmas Eve party at Marie-Jeanne Manuellan’s house in 1959. Manuellan had been working with Fanon for more than a year, transcribing sessions with his patients and then typing L’An V de la révolution algérienne, but their relationship was strictly professional. Fanon had essentially invited himself, and Manuellan could hardly say no. But she could not imagine “dancing in front of Fanon” (Manuellan 2017: 41). Josie went too, along with Fanon’s bodyguard Youssef Farès (who was also a nurse at the Charles Nicolle psychiatric day hospital in Tunis). A few years younger than Fanon, Youssef was a dark-skinned Algerian who took care of Fanon’s car, carefully opened his packages, and also sometimes took care of Olivier. Farès was also Fanon’s official name at the hospital; in addition, Fanon used the name Nadia Farès, writing in the third person to his publisher François Maspero. Having the same name and the same fake passports under the Farès name, Youssef could easily pick up Fanon’s packages at the post-office. Aware of Tunisian racism, Fanon would ironically remark: “Between two Blacks, the Tunisians will not know the difference” (see Cherki 2006: 131). Many at the hospital, at the clinics, and at the borders, writes Manuellan, thought Youssef was Fanon’s brother (Manuellan 2017: 81).
Fanon turned out to be the life and soul of the Manuellans’ party. This was a “different Fanon” from the one at work. He cracked jokes, was happy and relaxed. He sang biguines,10 and he might have even have played a bit of guitar. Pictures were taken of the party, but Fanon destroyed the film. This reflected his intelligence, not paranoia. For his own safety and that of all the guests, the photos could not exist. It simply was too dangerous. These were the practices that Frantz and Josie Fanon carried out, almost automatically, on a daily basis. It was a war situation with informants and spies everywhere. Alice Cherki suggests that although Fanon may have said to Manuellan, “I am a very important person in the FLN and cannot fraternize with French people,” he was only truly at ease with those who “belonged to Tunis’s cosmopolitan circles – Tunisian Jews, French volunteer workers, French people who had decided to remain in independent Tunisia, Europeans who worked with the FLN. These were the people with whom he went to the beach and to the movies, with whom he listened to music and conversed” (Cherki 2006: 125).
The party at the Manuellans was so enjoyable that the Fanons were invited to gather again on New Year’s Eve to sing and dance and, of course, talk about the Algerian war, independence, and the future of the Third World (see Manuellan 2017: 143). Over the next few months, Fanon would spend quite a bit of time with the Manuellans and also with the Taïebs. All were ex-communists who supported the Algerian revolution. Roger Taïeb was a Tunisian lawyer who had defended imprisoned communists during the Tunisian struggle for independence. Fanon would write a powerful letter to him from his deathbed, which is discussed later. Yoyo Taïeb was a musician and Gilbert Manuellan a jazz aficionado, and Fanon would sometimes talk with them about jazz. Some Sundays, notes Cherki, “Fanon would relax by playing cards,” which he would also do with his Algerian comrades Omar Oussedik and Si Saddek (see Cherki 2006: 126).
Fanon’s critical interest in popular culture (comics, novels, films), indicated in Black Skin, White Masks, continued. At Blida-Joinville, he created a film discussion club and included film screenings as part of socio-psychotherapy programs. We know from Manuellan that he watched Hiroshima Mon Amour in Tunis. Because he was short-sighted (a fact rarely spoken about in the biographies, even though there is a famous photo of him with his nose in a text) and refused to wear glasses, he insisted on others joining him in the front row (see Manuellan 2017: 153–4). He liked the film and wanted to hear the others’ opinions.
After Fanon’s death, Josie avoided talking about their personal life. Into this void, stories and innuendos surfaced. For a few months before Fanon left for Accra in February 1960, he and Josie spent time with the Manuellans; Marie-Jeanne’s Sous la Dictée de Fanon provides some useful insights. Like Fanon, Gilbert Manuellan, Marie-Jeanne’s husband, had signed up for the fight against Nazism as a young man, and both had been wounded in the winter of 1944. Both had been denied their humanity by the French: Fanon because he was Black, Manuellan because he was a Métèque (a pejorative word for a “shifty-looking” immigrant of Mediterranean origin). They were both concerned with creating a post-independence society and had many discussions concerning questions of land and agriculture.
This is not to say that Marie-Jeanne and Josie were not also involved in political discussions, but they were the ones taking care of the children. Manuellan reminds us that relations between men and women in 1960 were quite different from how they are today: “Of course, Josie and I put our grain of salt in the political discussions of men. But it was just a ‘grain of salt’. Yet our men in no way relegated us to the kitchen.” But when Fanon said that “a child must smell the smell of jams made by his mother,” it was the women who started making the strawberry jam and asked the children to watch. But Manuellan insists there were no divisions about what was spoken: “All four of us also talked about psychiatry, children’s education, ways of being of others, and of ourselves … We commented on the news on the radio that we listened diligently and on the articles in the ‘progressive’ [French] newspapers of the time” (2017: 147–8).
Fanon would talk about the possibility of new social relations, which he called “revolutionary love” (1965: 114–15), whereby each was the owner of their own freedom while respecting the freedom of others – but he would add you’d have to make the revolution first (see Manuellan 2017: 155). The revolution was in motion, as he argued in the first chapter of L’An V de la révolution algérienne, and the Algerian revolution had women at the “heart of the combat” (1965: 66). It is clear that when he said that revolution comes first, he was not disconnected from the new questions and new social relations that the revolution itself was creating. The truth is that Fanon, in theory and practice (whether that be as a psychiatrist, a political analyst, or a philosopher), was a revolutionary who called for disalienation in all its forms. What he had said in Black Skin, White Masks about transforming the world and changing the social structure (2008: 1, 80) had become a live possibility with the Algerian revolution.
An ardent supporter of the Algerian revolution, Josie was fearful about what would happen to her and Olivier after Frantz died, but she was always committed to “returning to Algeria” (Manuellan, 2017: 170). After Algerian independence, she became a naturalized Algerian, writing for Afrique action and other publications. She interviewed Che Guevara for Révolution africaine in 1964. She remained committed to keeping Fanon’s work in print and was skeptical of the new generation of American biographers in the early 1970s (such as Peter Geismar and Irene Gendzier) who wanted to know personal details about the Fanons. But, just as Fanon never said much about himself, so his wife rarely spoke about their life after his death. This was in the period when Fanon was being stereotyped as an angry man of violence in the US popular media. While Joby Fanon made himself available to biographers, he was taken aback by Gendzier’s claim that Frantz’s relationship with his mother was difficult because Frantz “was the darkest of the family.” In response, Joby decided to write his own biography of his brother. While Joby’s biography certainly gives us a good sense of their childhood, and includes family letters, the physical distance between them (especially after Frantz left Algeria) meant that they would only see each other occasionally.
Alice Cherki was a colleague of Fanon’s first at Blida-Joinville and then at Charles Nicolle Hospital in Tunis. Her Fanon: A Portrait (2006) provides some important details, especially concerning his years in Algeria and Tunis. In response to a question about Fanon’s family life, Cherki said he was a “dedicated husband and father. At the same time, he was a very busy man. But he was very dedicated to his family.” “Fanon loved life,” she added later, “He had a great sense of humor … He liked to go out to dinner, go dancing, things like that” (2016). Marcel Manville later recounted that while they were in the French army in North Africa, a Gaullist official turned up at the army camp where they were stationed. The camp commanders organized a parade of 300 troops to be inspected by the official, who asked them if they had any concerns or questions. Three raised their hands and met the official privately: they were the Antillean friends, Fanon, Manville, and Pierre Mosole. Worried, the commanding officers intercepted them, wanting to find out what they would say. Since they had raised their hand for fun, they found it quite enjoyable, recalled Manville later, as he had advised them not to say a thing. “The [W]hite officers got more and more excited while the [B]lack servicemen refused to talk … Manville was using all his strength not to giggle; he always enjoyed laughing. Especially when he looked at Fanon, the most ferocious-looking soldier imaginable” (Geismar 1971: 33).
To talk about Fanon’s life is to talk about Fanon’s intellectual work. This is especially the case of his first book Black Skin, White Masks, in which he used the first person singular and plural. It was published when he was 26 and is the most intentionally “biographical” of his works, but it would be a mistake to associate the author with the pathologies he describes. Rather, the alienation of the person with a Black skin, forced to put on the White mask in an almost unconscious striving toward the ideal of Whiteness, is social; disalienation requires not only making the unconscious conscious, “but also [acting] along the lines of a change in social structure.” In other words, bringing into conscious reflection through psychoanalytic work the patient’s unconscious feelings, desires, fantasies, anger, and so on, is not enough because the “hallucinatory lactification” is not an individual neurosis but a social one, a product of a racist society. Very much connected to contemporary discussions in psychoanalysis, Fanon would tell his patients: “It’s the environment; it’s society that is responsible for your mystification” (2008: 80). But that knowledge alone would not bring about liberation.
Just as Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks stating that it is a product of a very specific moment and insists that he does not posit timeless truths, the same can be said of his second book, L’An V de la révolution algérienne, literally the fifth year of the revolution. In his last book, Les Damnés de la terre, he argues: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, out of relative opacity” (2004: 145). He thus demands that the reader discover their mission and act in good faith in the struggle for human freedom. For Fanon, this is very much tied to his historic moment and its meaning: the birth of a new “Third World.” As he put it in the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid
