Frantz Fanon: Portrait (review)

History has not taken the course Frantz Fanon tried to impel it upon, but the trajectory he cut across mid-twentieth century thought and politics continues to fascinate a wide and heterogeneous readership. There are literally thousands of references to Fanon on the internet, tellingly maybe ten times more in English than French. Little mystery behind this language shift; not only has English become more prevalent globally than, say, in the 1950s, but no small part of Fanon's attraction to recent generations is his penetrating analysis of racism, a topic of inexhaustible consequence in the enormous American "market." To this day, there are few explorations of the deleterious effects of racism on its victims as well as perpetrators equal to his Peau noire, masques blancs (1952); even in this age of imperious global capitalization there is still no polemic in defense of the "wretched of the earth" as stirring, at least to this reader, as Les damnés de la terre (1961). Fanon, Alice Cherki demonstrates, was many men wrapped into one, not the least of which a poet whose mastery of language and gift for image might well have produced a literary oeuvre of dimensions equal to, even surpassing, other Caribbean writers of his time, had he lived beyond his mere 36 years.

Frantz Fanon: Portrait is a compelling read because of Cherki's own literary skills and her personal familiarity with Fanon the psychiatrist. Her "distanced portrait" is thus vastly more complex than the quasi-mythic icon of decolonization and the Algerian revolution to which he has sometimes been reduced. Édouard Glissant remarked that Fanon was alone among Antillean intellectuals to have crossed from thought into action. To some extent, Cherki's témoignage is an extended investigation of this and other facets of his exceptionality. Fanon himself believed that although human experience is situated in and must be defined in terms of given social milieux (Cherki's background chapter on French Algeria circa 1953 deserves in this regard special note), this experience is irreducibly subjective and concretely particular.

Many critics have placed Fanon within the philosophical traditions he studied concurrently with his medical training in Lyon starting in 1946, in particular the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the related existentialism of Sartre. Cherki reports that his intellectual tastes in that period were omnivorous, including Lévi-Strauss, Mauss, Heidegger, Hegel, Lenin, and Marx, though Fanon apparently never bothered to read Capital and kept his distance from the French Communist Party. Having worked alongside him at Blida in French Algeria and afterwards in Tunisian psychiatric hospitals after both had been driven from Algeria, Cherki brings an invaluable dimension to the story of Fanon, since she knew him initially as a colleague whose struggles with official currents of French psychotherapy in the 1950s ran parallel to her own, though her roots were in the Jewish community of Algeria. Accordingly, she shows us Fanon the clinician, a young doctor who was professionally committed to psychiatric healing before committing himself to revolutionary politics, a "partisan of institutional psychotherapy in the lineage of Tosquelles, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, among others." The manuscript of Peau noire, masques blancs was initially submitted as a dissertation in psychiatry, though it had to be replaced by a second text Fanon unwillingly yet competently cut to fit the reigning paradigm, a study of Friedrich's ataxia, a genetic condition affecting the cerebellum and upper spinal cord. In one among the many intriguing footnotes Cherki has gathered from those who knew him in those years, Fanon is depicted as rarely having stooped to taking the voluminous clinical notes expected of an apprentice psychiatrist, and thus accused of arrogance. Cherki's explanation is telling: "[S]imply enough, Fanon did not accept that clinical personnel and staff should act as if they were guards (gardiens). He was unforgiving of staff who refused to remind themselves that mental patients were also living...