Who was Frantz Fanon, the freedom fighter Palestine supporters love to quote?
Everyone sees what they want to see in Frantz Fanon.
The anti-colonial icon is endlessly quoted by leftists tweeting about Black Lives Matter or Palestine. He is the father of ongoing efforts to “decolonize psychiatry”. He has even been invoked by the far-right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, the father of the “great replacement theory”, to support his calls for depopulating Europe of non-white immigrant “occupiers”.
But since 7 October, the Martinican-born psychiatrist, who became a fighter in Algeria’s revolution, seems more popular than ever. After Hamas militants broke out of Gaza and killed 1,200 Israelis, Fanon has been regularly quoted, dissected and wrangled over in social media posts in an effort to explain the massacre and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of the besieged territory, which has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.
A cascade of statements and thinkpieces have sought to grapple with how Fanon’s controversial theories of violence and decolonization apply to the Hamas attacks. In a 9 October statement titled Oppression Breeds Resistance, student groups at Columbia University quoted Fanon: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” A November op-ed closes with another quote: “For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution’.”
For Adam Shatz, as deeply as Fanon has been celebrated, he has also been misunderstood. Shatz is the author of a masterly new biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In it, Shatz seeks to dispel some of the mythologies that have shrouded the man Shatz calls the “tribune of the oppressed”.
“Fanon continues to be an iconic figure,” Shatz says, “and that means there are all sorts of different ideas that surround him which require cutting through in order to understand him with any sense of clarity.”
For Shatz, a journalist, essayist and US editor at the London Review of Books, it is the contradictions in both Fanon’s political writings and life story that make him such a compelling figure, more than 60 years after his death.
Perhaps no contradiction in Fanon’s life is more salient than the one between Fanon’s “practice as a healer”, Shatz says, “and his practice as a fighter or as someone who advocates violence as a kind of therapy for the oppressed”. Amid fresh debates about the virtues of armed resistance, the book couldn’t have come at a better time.
T
he basics of Fanon’s trajectory – from a middle-class West Indian family in colonial Martinique to a militant in Algeria’s independence movement – will be known to most people with cursory knowledge of the anti-colonial struggles of the mid-20th century.
Born in 1925, Fanon grew up a fervent French patriot who fought against the Nazis for Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces in North Africa and Europe before settling in France to study psychiatry.
‘In spite of the bleakness of some of his writing, Fanon remains a defiant optimist,’ Shatz says. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons
In his landmark book Black Skin, White Masks from 1952, he describes the pivotal moment he began to realize what it meant to be a Black man in a country where colonial attitudes ruled the day. On a train ride in Lyon, a white French boy is startled by him, alerting his mother to the presence of a “nègre” in the carriage.
“Fanon writes, in describing this primal experience, that he had never really thought of himself as Black. He thought he was a Frenchman of color,” says Shatz. “He thought he had more in common with the French than with this ancestral African past. And here he learns from this small child, that no, he is a ‘nègre’, and he’s associated with things like cannibalism and danger and violence.”
The story resonated with Shatz when he first read the seminal text in college. Born and raised in a left-liberal home in Massachusetts, Shatz is a francophile – though he is “hesitant to admit it” – who once nurtured a dream of becoming a French pastry chef. When he was 10, a group of his friends called him a “dirty Jew” and tossed coins at his feet. Shatz stood there frozen until the boys left. Later, Shatz would attack one of the boys who taunted him.
It wasn’t just Fanon’s experience on the train that Shatz recognized, but what he did with it. “His response after that was to assert himself through violence, which is exactly what I did.”
Fanon began writing about the psychological effects of racism, particularly on Black people living under French colonialism, which he theorized led to feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. Eventually, Fanon would travel to continue his psychiatry work in French Algeria on the eve of the revolution, which broke out in 1954, ultimately joining the National Liberation Front’s struggle against the very country he had fought for just a decade earlier. He turned the hospital he ran into a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including National Liberation Front (FLN) militants, civilians, French soldiers, and settlers. France would exile him to Tunis in 1957, where he became a spokesperson for the group.
Witnessing the sheer brutality of colonialism in Algeria, the crown jewel of the French empire, convinced Fanon that emancipation would necessarily come with a heavy price: violence against the colonial power, he came to believe, was not only inevitable but necessary for oppressed peoples to assert their humanity and demand their liberation.
It is through this violence, he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, that the native “discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner.”
Adam Shatz. Photograph: Sarah Shatz
While Fanon viewed violence as a requirement for breaking the psychological chains of colonialism, he was no Black nationalist – but rather believed that an uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all.
“In spite of the bleakness of some of his writing, Fanon remains a defiant optimist,” Shatz says. “He believes in the idea not only of overcoming colonialism, but the very possibility of creating what he calls ‘a new man’. He felt that the world that we live in had been made by human beings and thus it could also be unmade by them.”
The Wretched of the Earth was published as Fanon lay dying of leukemia in a Maryland hospital. The book would transform Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries. He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation.
S
hatz’s interest in Fanon should come as no surprise to those who have followed his work. He has spent the better part of his career telling the often ambivalent stories of rebellious thinkers and artists like Edward Said, Nina Simone, Michel Houellebecq and Sonic Youth.
“I didn’t think that it would be interesting to write about Fanon as someone who suffered no contradictions, who was just a kind of rather bland revolutionary icon,” Shatz says. “Fanon was someone who was sometimes at odds with himself.”
Shatz argues that The Wretched of the Earth is Fanon’s most misunderstood book. Often read as a screed delighting in violence against colonial armies and settlers, it also describes the psychological scars borne by anti-colonial fighters who remained haunted by the violence they carried out. “The overwhelming impression left by Fanon’s case studies … is that the disintoxicating effects of violence are ephemeral at best,” Shatz writes in The Rebel’s Clinic. “The colonized, he believed, had no choice but to fight back; their very existence … was at stake. But the sobering litany of case studies injects a striking ambivalence into a work of militant self-certainty.”
Less than a month after the Hamas attack, Shatz published an essay in the LRB that harshly criticized Israel’s assault on Gaza – which the international court of justice (ICJ) ruled may constitute “plausible genocide” – while taking aim at the “perverse ethno-tribal fantasies” of a left that has used Fanon to justify the mass killings and destruction of Israeli communities. He quotes the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan, who critiques leftists who are unable to hold the simultaneous truths that “massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival are an outrageous horror, and Israel is a ferocious colonial power”, and adds that at a time when “the most extreme voices have been amplified by social media, a cult of force appears to have overtaken parts of the left, and short-circuited any empathy for Israeli civilians”.
Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times echoed the criticism in a piece where she criticized the left’s “slinging hashtags, hyped up on theories of liberation based on memes of Frantz Fanon quotes taken out of context”.
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But Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia professor who has previously faced backlash for his criticisms of Israel, says it is Shatz and Polgreen who get Fanon wrong. “Fanon cannot be neutralised,” he wrote in Middle East Eye this month. “He was a revolutionary thinker, committed to helping liberate colonised peoples from the savagery of colonial domination of the sort we see in full throttle in Gaza today … Instead of sophomoric speculation about Fanon’s theories on violence,” Dabashi wrote, “analysts need to start from the facts on the ground.”
Shatz says that while he stands by his LRB essay, he makes no excuses for Israel’s violence. He, too, looks to Fanon’s writings on Algerian resistance to make sense of the current onslaught in Gaza – in fact, he came to writing about Algeria through his interest in Palestine.
“The violence of the French army in Algeria, Fanon wrote, had acquired the air of a genocide, even if the purpose of the violence was to maintain French rule, not to exterminate Algeria’s Muslims,” Shatz says. “This, too, is something he might have written about Israel’s conduct in Gaza: eliminating the Palestinian population is not its objective, so much as making Gaza uninhabitable. But in pursuing its campaign, the Israeli army is willing to kill countless numbers of civilians.”
Fanon’s dream, that an anti-colonial war would lead to a new, multicultural Algeria, was dashed by a movement that was growing increasingly Islamist. But Shatz says Fanon’s analysis of a “world cut in two” was prescient.
“Look at the starkly different responses of global south and global north countries to the South African case” against Israel at the ICJ, says Shatz. “Fanon was someone who understood the way in which the postcolonial order would reproduce, on a global stage, some of the conflicts of colonialism itself.”
The caption on the second photo in this piece was changed on 27 March 2024 to remove disputed sourcing.