Frantz Fanon and France's Wretched of the Earth

I'm remembering the brother of a friend of mine from the Maghreb - northern Africa. Yes - Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and several other countries beyond are in and are part of Africa. My friend's older brother was killed some years ago - murdered it seems - in a small town in France; a town I visited. To my knowledge up to now no one has ever been arrested, let alone tried for this young man's tragic and unnatural death. I don't even have any idea whether French local authorities investigated the circumstances of his death. Last year in 2004, in spite of our collective efforts and dialogue at the 2003 European Social Forum (ESF/FSE) right there in France, in St. Denis and in Paris, there was precious little global recognition of France's history and responsibilities in Haiti during the 2004 bicentennaire - bicentennial - of the entire world's first modern Black republic. In spite of all this I maintain my love of France, though certainly not uncritically. I have lived and worked, struggled, learned and shared in France. Now national authorities have activated a state of emergency - un etat d'urgence - for the first time since Algeria's war of independence against France as European colonial occupier. There's a huge gap of both time and politics from 1955 to now. Yet not nearly enough has changed it seems. Coincidentally, the Bandung Conference in Indonesia also took place in 1955. Two of my blog categories are "Bandung+50" and "Wretched of the Earth?" I was very much influenced in choosing these themes by a person, a Black Frenchman and an historical cousin - another person of African descent from the Americas - named Frantz Fanon. Fanon authored two seminal works of "anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies." Fanon died of cancer in Washington, DC on 6 Dec. 1961. In 1964, after his death, his third book appeared in English as Toward the African Revolution. Black Skin, White Masks originally was titled, "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." The above quote is from Prof. Deepika Bahri's informative Fanon website. Bahri, from India, is associate prof of English and director of Asian Studies at Emory University in the US. Her site also notes British director Isaac Julien's 1996 film on Fanon - Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, available from California Newsreel. Read more of this post below...

FRANTZ FANON, MD (1925-1961):

Native of MARTINIQUE, Caribbean Americas

... I've been in France recently and been engaged with others in related debates and conversations, yet I'm not sure how much discussion of Dr. Fanon and his work goes on in France - or in Europe - these days. Sadly, I doubt enough or perhaps not even much. After these weeks of hell I can only hope this will change. Many people (not all, of course) who are French citizens of colour and/or immigrants to France also consider that they've been experiencing not just weeks but years and decades of hell. For some at best there's a kind of 'non-existence', a nothingness, when it comes to not being able to see oneself in one's society and have little ability to positively shape one's future. Too many people including outside France have no idea or appreciation of who Frantz Fanon was nor of what he lived and observed and researched and wrote about. Others have forgotten Dr. Fanon or tried hard to forget the facts and issues he documented. Too often they've succeeded in a collective forgetting. Yet as events in France today demonstrate, even a fairly good job of 'papering over' history and reality never actually changes facts. This is not only true in math but also in life, and even to some extent in politics. 3+4 will never equal 48 or 6 or 8, no matter how close the latter two numbers come. During the late 1960s and through part of the 1970s, many people of colour - at least in the United States - still maintained energy and hope for positive social change; even in the face of the hard conservative turn of macro political events. Increasingly over recent years I've been in too many private and public fora where the mere mention of ethnicity and diversity was more and more unwelcome. Gender seems to have taken its place, though this was only "ok" when framed in the experiences of some white women. Not everyone was hostile to discussing what we needed for a new society, but those who were were virulent, and sadly, our "allies" often stayed silent. That hostility, which some of us have experienced as racism, has particularly shocked me when I've witnessed it in the human rights, humanitarian aid and civil society development communities. It also seems many people of colour who wanted to "get ahead" and "fit in" in human rights, humanitarian and civil society work also have remained silent. And here we all are today with little discussion and less action on how to create hope; on how to reverse the daily loss of hope; on how to share opportunity and deal with the lack of opportunity. Then there are the racial pecking orders and the racial pecking; racism and negative discrimination; issues of race+gender, class+race, ethnicity, skin colour & physical features - and such. There's little open discussion of 'whiteness' and domination nor of that other forbidden term and reality - 'white supremacy'. Until recently (when it seems I started it) even Technorati had no antiracism tag. Many of us realise that what has occurred in France is not only about France, nor just about Europe or only North America - or the USA. Re-enter Frantz Fanon, physician. He was a psychiatrist, a Black person - a so-called Black Frenchman - descended from our common African ancestors (evicted from collective human consciousness), enslaved, then deported to the Americas to live and work like animals while creating unmatched wealth for France and for Europe. Fanon was born in these Americas, in Martinique, still called one of France's "overseas departments." I have never fully understood how "departement d'Outre Mer" status works to the long-term benefit of the people of the Caribbean and the Americas. Frantz Fanon's life and work, along with the work and lives of dozens and hundreds of other thoughtful, intelligent and even prescient people of colour across the globe, are worthy of being read and being publicly discussed once again.