The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary of Lives of Frantz Fanon
The Last Poets’s eponymous 1970 debut album, nearly 55 years ago, awakened me to revolution as a political ideology in Black America. I remember first hearing their opening track with the tumbadoras, the Cuban congas going boom, boom bap, bap boom bap bap and the percussive tapping of the cow bell coming over the top interweaving with the background chanters in refrain, “niggers, all niggers” and the lead poet beginning with “Niggers are scared of Revolution!” Before Hip Hop exploded as a genre in the recording studios in 1979, this was the first time I heard “nigger” used in a recording, this was four years before the comedian Richard Pryor titled his 1974 live album That Nigger’s Crazy that won a Grammy for best comedy album. When I heard The Last Poets for the first time it was disconcerting to my adolescent ears. In my household I was taught the N-word was best used behind the veil of Black respectability and never to be used in public, especially in earshot of White people. Truthfully, I had no idea of what this talk of revolution that The Last Poets and political rhetoric of the late 60s was all about. The only revolution I vaguely knew something about was the American Revolution from those facts children use to learn through rote. Perhaps I vaguely knew that the civil rights movement was called in books written by journalists the Negro Revolution. However, in 1970, Black Chicago, where we migrated from down South to up South, was in full revolutionary mode after the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and the chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, a native son of Chicago’s westside. In that era, like The Last Poets, congas literally rage at what Chicago locals called The Point, the Promontory Point on Lake Michigan on Chicago’s Southside in Hyde Park, calling for some kind of resistance that I could not fully comprehend.
I had no idea of where this talk of violent revolution was being derived. Who was informing the Black Panther Party, Kwame Toure (the formerly Stokely Carmichael) and other young radicals. Was it Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s “The Little Red Book,” Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung, that Black Panther Party sold on the street in competition with The Nation of Islam whose members sold bean pies. Eventually, I discovered in my uncle’s small library, sitting on a bookshelf, The Wretched of the Earth by an author named Frantz Fanon. It was sold in Black-owned bookstores like Ellis’s at 64th and Cottage Grove and in radically friendly bookstores on Chicago’s northside in the days of the Chicago Seven trial. I read a portion of the back of the cover then to glean cool points in the same way I cursorily read Malcolm X Speaks. It would be years later that I would do a close read of Fanon and gain some understanding of what this mythical figure who demanded violence to overthrow colonial shackles that imposed themselves politically, psychologically, and spiritually on two-thirds of the world’s people.
Books have their time. The Wretched of the Earth was published by Grove Press in 1961 and translated into English by Constance Farrington, an Irish Protestant from Cork, Ireland, living among left-wing activists in Paris. In 1965, her English translation could not have been timelier. A film discussion of this translation could have been a part of the great documentary series Eyes on the Prize episode “The Time Has Come,” covering the years 1964-1966. Fanon’s Wretched helped scaffold a new intellectual framework for revolution in what the Bandung Conference, the Asian-Africa Conference of 1955, called the “Third World.” Farrington’s translation hit just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Immigration Act of 1965 were enacted in Congress.
It would be years later that I would do a close read of Fanon and gain some understanding of what this mythical figure who demanded violence to overthrow colonial shackles that imposed themselves politically, psychologically, and spiritually on two-thirds of the world’s people.
Now the question became, were African Americans a nation within a nation? What should be done to end a century of substandard wages, ethnic chauvinism, and the emerging feminist movement? How was police brutality to be handled given the 1964 rebellions in Harlem and Philadelphia and the 1965 rebellion in Watts of Los Angeles? When Wretched of the Earth reached African American activists who were disillusioned by the assassination of Malcolm X and by the violence heaped upon non-violent protesters throughout the South, and the Christian-based non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr., the book seemed to be a stiff drink, a straight-up shot, that appeared to bring clarity to the next phase of the movement. Now was the time to meet violent state aggression with counter violence to liberate Black people. Activists tore through bookstores looking for this English translation of this late prophet of Third World revolution, who died in 1961 of leukemia in a Maryland hospital. So, we have Adam Shatz to thank for this latest interrogation into Fanon with this superb publication of The Rebel’s Clinic.
Fanon was born on the French colonial island of Martinique in the Caribbean. Though a Caribbean island, Martinique is territorially a part of France, as are the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, territories of the United States. Martinicans today have two representatives in the Parlement français in the senate, but in the main, it is an island ruled by France, surviving on French tourist francs.
Martinique, interestingly is one of the sites of Négritude, a cultural movement by Francophone African and Caribbean activists and students living around Paris in the 1930s who had been inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. Aimé Césaire, writer and then later politician, was one of these “New Negroes,” so to speak, of metropole of Paris, along with Senegal’s Léopold Senghor whom Fanon would take to task for their romanticism. Négritude was a cultural movement without the politics of the Harlem Renaissance. There was no National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), or the socialism as represented by Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph publisher of The Messenger. For Fanon, Négritude was a string of words without a politics or an organized mobilization to enact its beautiful words into reality, making the poetry groundless. Here, Fanon notes that virulent apartheid politicized Black America’s cultural intelligentsia more so than France’s assimilationist ideology that stated all its extractive colonies were French, no matter where they were. In other words, with the exception of, perhaps, 1920s writer René Maran who showed the brutality of French colonialism in his award-winning novel Batouala (1921), Négritude writers seemed scared of revolution.
According to Shatz, it was World War II that radicalized Fanon. Anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 African and six thousand or more Caribbean troops fought under the French flag. Like their Black American counterparts, the war mobilized the masses giving a generation a global Black consciousness to fight colonial racism. During the war Fanon demonstrated bravery, was wounded severely, was captured by Germans, escaped, and confronted the enemy again after his recovery. Battlefields can either make a combatant or psychologically break them. Placing his life on the line in battle taught Fanon a level of courage and freedom that he could psychologically face down his opponents without fear of death. This freedom of psyche permitted him to look at the situation faced by the “darker races,” as DuBois might have put it, with a combatant’s bravery, fearlessly.
For Fanon, Négritude was a string of words without a politics or an organized mobilization to enact its beautiful words into reality, making the poetry groundless. Here, Fanon notes that virulent apartheid politicized Black America’s cultural intelligentsia more so than France’s assimilationist ideology that stated all its extractive colonies were French, no matter where they were.
This psychological release challenged him to look at psychiatry not as a sterile clinical practice of drugging or electric shock therapy, but creating new or expanded social context for the patient’s collective psyche. A better social context helped patients to face their social fears and anxieties. Psychiatry as a medical practice was more than the cold clinical isolation of treating an individual, but a communal creation and context just as combat expanded the horizons for soldiers in their fight together. Fanon realized in his medical practice, as he drew on his experiences in war, that a collective psyche had to be galvanized to throw off oppression. Fanon’s psychiatric practices, from my limited knowledge, seems revolutionary in medicine which often focuses on the isolated individual to rectify psychiatric disorder.
In Fanon’s first book, Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952 he described the psychic selves of Martinicans in a way that resembles the Black American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s famous 1895 poem, “We Wear the Mask”:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
The psychology developed from centuries of subjugation had to be treated through the practice of disalienation. One that recognizes that Black people are not prisoners of history, especially to histories of oppression.
Being disalienated meant that Fanon could involve himself in the rebellion taking place in Algeria, rather than a Black African country such as Guinea, which was also a French colony. As Shatz makes abundantly clear, Arabic and Berber-speaking North Africans held a historic disdain for Black Africans and their descendants in the region. Though he does not fully explain North African racism, I would argue that Atlantic racism is rooted in the Trans Saharan Slave trade and was embedded in the Abrahamic ideology of Ham. Those slave routes through the desert found in the Torah and the Koran, the cursed son of Noah, turned Black for his sin of seeing his father naked, created a narrative to justify hierarchy of status. Shatz points out that one of my former university professors, Harold Cruse, noted in his journals his experiences in North Africa during World War II as being disturbingly prejudicial and hostile towards Black American soldiers.
Yet, Algerians living in and around Paris and elsewhere in the country were France’s version of niggers. Perhaps this hostility might date back to the Crusades. In Paris, Algerians prove to be less assimilable than, say, their West African and Vietnamese colonial counterparts. Maybe because the French might have felt that Islam was as imperious as Catholicism or its god-like secularism in the wake of its own eighteenth-century revolution.
The war for Algerian independence was also conflictual for the French liberal intelligentsia because French-speaking colonial settlers had made a life for themselves in the country beginning in 1830 when France first invaded Algeria. Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and philosopher, found himself in a tug or war, pulled back and forth on the question of human rights abuses and the interminable fighting that war brings. The great writer could not separate his own emotional ties to his fellow White French denizens, which Black American writer James Baldwin called him out on. In the meanwhile, like those known and unknown incidents of police brutality which occurred in Harlem and Watts, the Parisian police exercised levels of police brutality on a breathless scale with the massacre of two hundred Algerians in Paris, which the Black American novelists William Gardner Smith so vividly captured in his 1963 novel The Stone Face. The levels of Algerian repression, as the late historian Tyler Stovall explained, disillusioned the Black American expatriate community from the false impression that the French were less racist than their fellow American compatriots.
Fanon, the Martinican, never held any illusions about French racism, though he lived a life of a French medical student in Lyon after World War II, having a child with one French woman out of wedlock, and marrying another, an 18-year-old French woman named Marie-Josèphe “Josie” Dublé.
As a psychiatrist and an anticolonial freedom fighter, he planted both feet inside of Algerian nationalism, the FLN camp. He secretively used his French hospital settings to support their decolonial efforts without reservation. The FLN was not an inclusive organization like the Communist Party was in theory; it was an Arabic nationalist one. It did not see Black Africa as being representative of its movement, though it allowed Fanon to reach out to Black African countries in the era of Kwame Nkrumah and serve as a quasi-ambassador in the wider decolonizing struggles.
Here The Rebel’s Clinic should be read alongside English historian and writer Susan Williams’s 2021 book White Malice: The C.I.A. and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, a book that deserves a closer reading and discussion. She, too, covers Fanon and documents the difficulties he faced towards the end of his life. The global Cold War security apparatus that revolutionaries from the likes of the Black Panther Party to Fanon were up against was formidable.
The FLN was not an inclusive organization like the Communist Party was in theory; it was an Arabic nationalist one. It did not see Black Africa as being representative of its movement, though it allowed Fanon to reach out to Black African countries in the era of Kwame Nkrumah and serve as a quasi-ambassador in the wider decolonizing struggles.
Shatz’s book is thought-provoking, well-written, and historically informative. It raises so many questions for activists and theorists in a reconsideration of Fanon. The first is that Fanon was more than a bookish theorist, as a combat veteran, a freedom fighter, his theorization came from taking action to change the world he lived in. He engaged a world he saw that desperately needed changes. Second, Fanon is an important psychiatric clinician and offers us new ways to treat people with depressive conditions in Black and Brown communities throughout urban cores today. Third, as I have written in my own book on Martin Luther King Jr., Fanon is so present and rightfully angry that he missed the opportunity to think through what revolutionary violence means as a transformational tool for change and its aftermath. In most cases, the end of revolution violence is tyranny and one-party rule instead of an inclusive society. The end of revolution is often a Napoleonic figure or party. Algeria, even today, has not recovered from this period.
And this is where The Last Poets got it wrong at the time; perhaps it is right to be scared of revolutions, especially violent ones. They can descend into warlord bloodletting. Finally, Fanon was not a pessimist, his existentialist idealism reinforced his orientation to act in the face of despair. Here, as Shatz points out, Fanon’s theorization could not be more different than what is called Afro-Pessimism in corners of the academy. Disalienation as a spiritual commitment to free oneself. It could be suggested by the Apostle Paul’s idea of creating the condition for making all things new.
