The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  What Fanon suffered in his encounter with the little boy on that “white winter day” was, as Louis Althusser puts it in his classic essay on ideology, the experience of being “hailed” or “interpellated.” That this primal scene takes place outdoors is crucial to its power. As Althusser writes: “What . . . seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it.”

  Fanon was not a follower of Althusser, much less a philosophical antihumanist, but in Black Skin, White Masks he attempts to do something that Althusser might have appreciated, namely, demonstrate the way that ideology interpellated French West Indians as racialized subjects. Black Skin, White Masks is not a memoir, but it is obviously the product of Fanon’s time in Lyon, his first experience as a member of a black “minority.” Interestingly, two of the chapters explore how racial ideology disfigures interracial relationships, a subject that would have been of acute personal concern to Fanon.

  The problem of “love” in a racist society lies at the heart of Black Skin, White Masks, nearly as much as it does in the work of James Baldwin, who in 1956 would hear Fanon address a conference of black writers organized by Présence Africaine in Paris. Baldwin, who sailed to Paris a year after Fanon arrived in Lyon, does not mention Fanon in his report on the conference, but he would later invoke Fanon in his 1972 book No Name in the Street. The title of Black Skin, White Masks could have been Notes of a Native Son, for Fanon, like Baldwin, was grappling with the obstacles to black citizenship in a white-dominated society. His principal quarrel in the book is not with colonial domination and exploitation, but with the racial limits of French republicanism: it is a Frenchman’s hopeful protest for inclusion, not a bitter repudiation of the métropole. Fanon seems confident of his ability to achieve “nothing short of the liberation of the man of color” not only from white supremacy, but from the restrictive conceptions of Négritude: “The Negro is not. Anymore than the white man.” Fanon’s language here should be familiar to anyone who has read Sartre’s 1946 essay “Anti-Semite and Jew,” which argues that the idea of “the Jew” as the Other was an invention of the anti-Semite. For Fanon, a person of African descent became black, became a “nègre,” through and only through the white gaze. The so-called black problem was no less a phantasm than the Jewish question.

  Yet Fanon was not content simply to dispatch with race as an analytic concept, and to prove that it is a mere construction, unlike, say, class. This argument has had its liberal defenders, including the political philosopher Mark Lilla, who, in a widely cited New York Times op-ed article (later expanded into a book, The Once and Future Liberal), belittled what he called “diversity discourse” as an “identity drama” that “exhausts political discourse” and divides a polity that could otherwise be unified around supposedly real things like “class, war, the economy, and the common good.”

  In Fanon’s view, however, race is always already a refraction of ideas, fears, and anxieties about “class, war, the economy, and the common good.” It is a fiction, yet one so pervasive and so powerful as to produce profound real-world effects. It may seem to be “a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” as Marx wrote of the commodity, but “it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Like the commodity, race is the ghost in the machine of an apparently disenchanted society, never fully exorcised, a tribute not only to enduring inequities but to the enduring power of the gaze, of unreason and ressentiment. And its worst injuries, for Fanon, are psychological: violations of dignity, especially the “shame and self-contempt” it implants in its victims. Even a relatively privileged, “assimilated” black man like himself was “damned”: “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.” But how was he to liberate himself from this infernal circle and—as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it in Between the World and Me—“live free in this black body”?

  Looking to free himself from the white gaze, Fanon was briefly drawn to the racial romanticism of Senghor, tempted, he says, to “wade in the irrational,” as the Négritude poets had urged him. When he read Sartre’s introduction to Black Orpheus, a 1948 anthology of Négritude poets, he was taken aback by the condescension: Sartre defended black consciousness as an “antiracist racism”—what Gayatri Spivak would later call “strategic essentialism”—but downgraded it to a “weak moment in a dialectical movement” toward a society free of race and class oppression. Yet by the end of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon has come to agree. The “only solution,” he declares, is to “rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me” and “reach out for the universal,” rather than seeking refuge in some “materialized Tower of the Past.” If anyone is making that leap, he adds, it is not the Négritude poets, but the Vietnamese rebels in Indochina, who are taking their destiny into their own hands.

  Fanon’s dissatisfaction with the political moderation of the Négritude movement, and with his mentor Césaire, who had become a senator in the overseas department of Martinique and an opponent of independence, may help to explain one of the great mysteries of his life: his decision not to return home to Fort-de-France after completing his residency at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in the Massif Central. François Tosquelles, Fanon’s mentor at Saint-Alban, was both a doctor and a resistance fighter, having headed the Spanish Republican Army’s psychiatric services before crossing the Pyrenees in 1939. He had pioneered institutional or social therapy, which tried to turn the hospital into a recognizable microcosm of the world outside. The idea underlying social therapy was that patients were socially as well as clinically alienated, and that their care depended on the creation of a structure that relieved their isolation by involving them in group activities.

  In 1953, after more than a year at Saint-Alban, Fanon took up his post at Blida-Joinville, a psychiatric hospital about forty kilometers south of Algiers. He was responsible for 187 patients: 165 European women and 22 Muslim men. He found some of them tied to their beds, others to trees in the park. They lived in segregated quarters, with the women in one pavilion and the men in another. The hospital’s former director, Antoine Porot, the founder of the so-called Algiers School of colonial ethnopsychiatry, had justified this segregation on the grounds of “divergent moral or social conceptions.” Several of Fanon’s colleagues shared Porot’s view that Algerians were essentially different from Europeans, suffering from primitive brain development that made them childlike and lazy, but also impulsive, violent, and untrustworthy. As a West Indian atheist who was neither a Muslim “native” nor a white European, Fanon stood at a remove from both the staff and the residents at Blida. Since he spoke no Arabic or Berber, he relied on interpreters with his Muslim patients. His closest friends in Algeria would be left-wing European militants, many of them Jews.

  To instill a sense of community among the staff—and perhaps to break out of his solitude—Fanon created a weekly newsletter. In a striking article published in April 1954, he questions the spatial isolation of the modern asylum, anticipating Foucault’s 1961 Folie et déraíson: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique:

  Future generations will wonder with interest what motive could have led us to build psychiatric hospitals far from the center. Several patients have already asked me: Doctor, will we hear the Easter bells? . . . Whatever our religion, daily life is set to the rhythm of a number of sounds and the church bells represent an important element in this symphony. . . . Easter arrives, and the bells will die without being reborn, for they have never existed at the psychiatric hospital of Blida. The psychiatric hospital of Blida will continue to live in silence. A silence without bells.

  Restoring the symphonic order of everyday life was the goal of social therapy, and Fanon pursued it with his usual vigilance, introducing basket
weaving, a theater, ball games, and other activities. It was a great success with the European women, but a total failure with the Muslim men. The older European doctors told him, “When you’ve been in the hospital for fifteen years like us, then you’ll understand.” But Fanon refused to understand. He suspected that the failure lay in his use of “imported methods,” and that he might achieve different results if he could provide his Muslim patients with forms of sociality that resembled their lives outside. Working with a team of Algerian nurses, he established a café maure, a traditional teahouse where men drink coffee and play cards, and later an “Oriental salon,” as he put it, for the hospital’s small group of Muslim women. Arab musicians and storytellers came to perform, and Muslim festivals were celebrated for the first time in the hospital’s history. Once their cultural practices were recognized, Blida’s Muslim community emerged from its slumber.

  Fanon’s curiosity about Algeria led him far outside the hospital gates. Deep in the bled of Kabylia, the Berber heartland, he attended late-night ceremonies where hysterics were healed in “cathartic crises,” and learned of women using white magic to render unfaithful husbands impotent. He discovered a more merciful attitude toward mental illness: Algerians blamed madness on genies, not on the sufferer. In his writings on these practices, Fanon never uttered the word “superstition.” Yet even as he insisted on the specificity of North African culture, he was careful to avoid the essentialism of the Algiers School. He wanted to pierce the frozen, apparently natural surface of reality, and to uncover the ferment beneath it.

  On November 1, 1954, that ferment erupted, when the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) carried out its first attacks, launching a war of independence that would last for nearly eight years. The FLN was a small organization that had grown out of a split in the banned Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, a group led by the founding father of modern Algerian nationalism, Messali Hadj. Winning over the Muslim majority to its cause, and, not least, persuading them that they had a chance against one of the world’s most powerful militaries, required no small effort and no little coercion. Their case would partly be made for them by massive French repression: the razing of entire villages, the forced relocation of more than two million to “regroupment” camps, widespread torture, and thousands of summary executions and disappearances; as many as three hundred thousand Algerians died during the war. Fanon, however, needed little convincing. When the rebels contacted him in early 1955, he had already chosen his side; according to his biographer David Macey, his first thought was to join them in the maquis.

  Fanon took great risks to help the rebels, opening the hospital to FLN meetings, treating fighters at the day clinic, and forbidding the police from entering with their guns loaded. At the same time, he was treating French servicemen who were involved in torturing suspected rebels. He did not hand over their names to the FLN for they, too, were victims of a colonial system whose dirty work they were required to perform. Eventually, however, Fanon concluded that he was helpless to effect change at Blida: Algeria’s Muslims had been subjected to what he called “absolute de-personalization,” and to remain in his position was to perpetuate a spurious normalcy. He resigned from his post in a protest letter to Resident Minister Robert Lacoste in December 1956; a month later he was expelled from Algeria. But before he left, he had a brief meeting with Abane Ramdane, an FLN leader from Kabylia who powerfully shaped his vision of the Algerian struggle. Ramdane, sometimes described as the Robespierre of the Algerian Revolution, was a kindred spirit: a hardliner opposed to any negotiations prior to France’s recognition of independence, and a genuine modernizer with progressive, republican values.

  After a stop in Paris—his last visit to France—Fanon settled in Tunis, where the FLN’s external leadership was based. He divided his time between the Manouba Clinic, where he resumed his psychiatric practice under the name “Dr. Fares,” and the offices of El Moudjahid, the FLN’s French-language newspaper, which he helped edit. As the FLN’s media spokesman in Tunis, he cut a glamorously enigmatic figure. Living in an independent Arab country sympathetic to Algeria’s struggle, Fanon no longer had to conceal his loyalties. Yet, paradoxically, he learned to tread even more carefully than in Blida. For all its claims to unity, the FLN was rife with factional tensions, and Fanon was a vulnerable outsider with no official position in the leadership. His most powerful ally in the movement was Ramdane, the leader of the “interior,” but Fanon was now on the other side of the border, working for the FLN’s “external” forces, who saw Ramdane as a threat to their interests.

  Fanon’s contributions to El Moudjahid were not always appreciated by his colleagues in the FLN, particularly his fiery denunciation of the “beautiful souls” of the French left who denounced torture but refused to support the FLN because of its attacks on civilians. The FLN’s leaders in Tunis were pragmatic nationalists, and their goal was to intensify the divisions in France over Algeria, not condemn France as a nation. Unlike Fanon they didn’t have to prove that they were Algerians. There is no doubting the sincerity of Fanon’s writing for El Moudjahid: he tended to gravitate to the most militant positions, and he had an old account to settle with the French intelligentsia. But his fervor also expressed a longing to be accepted as a fellow Algerian. According to the historian Mohammed Harbi, a left-wing FLN official who crossed paths (and swords) with Fanon in Tunis, Fanon “had a very strong need to belong.”

  Fanon upheld the FLN line even when he had very strong reasons for doubting it, as in the case of the Melouza massacre. In a small hamlet outside Melouza, the FLN had killed hundreds of sympathizers of a rival nationalist group, and then tried to blame the massacre on the French. In his first public statement in Tunis, made at a press conference in May 1957, Fanon denounced the “foul machinations over Melouza,” insisting that the French army was responsible.

  He exercised a similar discretion, when, a year later, El Moudjahid announced that his friend Abane Ramdane had died “on the field of honor.” In fact, Ramdane had been dead for five months, and he was not killed on the battlefield. His erstwhile comrades had lured him to a villa in Morocco, where he was strangled to death. The external leadership had long wanted to seize control of the revolution, and Ramdane, the figurehead of the internal struggle, stood in the way. Real power now lay with the external elements of the FLN and the so-called army of the frontiers. Fanon, who was close enough to the intelligence services to know the truth of his friend’s murder, said nothing. Shaken by Ramdane’s death, he made his peace with the army of the frontiers, both for the sake of the revolution—the military leadership, in Tunisia and Morocco, was increasingly the dominant force—and to protect himself: according to Harbi, his name was on a list of those to be executed in the event of an internal challenge to the FLN leadership.

  He was scarcely more secure in his medical work at the Manouba Clinic, where he began to introduce the social therapy he had practiced in Blida. The clinic’s director, Dr. Ben Soltan, called him “the Negro” and accused him of being a Zionist spy and of mistreating Arab patients on Israeli orders. The proof was his denunciation of anti-Semitism in Black Skin, White Masks, and his close friendships with two Tunisian Jewish doctors. Dr. Fares managed to hold on to his position, but shifted his energies to the Hôpital Charles-Nicolle, where he created Africa’s first psychiatric day clinic.

  He was most at ease, as ever, when he was writing—or rather, dictating. His first book on the Algerian struggle, L’An V de la révolution algérienne (translated as A Dying Colonialism), was composed over three weeks in the spring of 1959. It is a passionate account of a national awakening, as well as a document of the utopian hopes it aroused in the author, who had come to think of himself as an Algerian after three years in Blida. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that Fanon had fallen in love with the Algerian people. As John Edgar Wideman writes in his novel Fanon, “Fanon is not about stepping back, standing apart, analyzing and instructing others but about identifying wi
th others, plunging into the vexing, mysterious otherness of them, taking risks of heart and mind, falling head over heels in love whether or not there’s a chance in the world love will be requited or redeemed.”

  L’An V is Fanon’s love letter to the Algerian Revolution, and it often feels like an expression of Ramdane’s views—or fantasies—about postindependence Algeria. In L’An V, the Algerian Revolution is not simply an anticolonial uprising, but a social revolution against class oppression, religious traditionalism, and patriarchy. For all the appeals to Islam, Fanon argued, Algerian nationalism was a nationalism of the will, rather than of ethnicity or religion, open to anyone willing to join the struggle, including European democrats who renounced their colonial status and the country’s Jewish minority.

  In fact, Ramdane’s vision was rapidly losing out, partly because the French army had crushed the FLN’s interior leadership during the Battle of Algiers. After independence, women in the maquis would experience a painful regression, and the pieds-noirs would flee en masse to France, along with Algeria’s Jews. Those who envisaged a multiethnic Algeria were always a minority, and their numbers diminished with every pied-noir or army atrocity. The single consensual demand inside the FLN—aside from independence itself—was the reestablishment of Algeria’s Islamic and Arab identity. Fanon was correct that France’s attempt to “emancipate” Muslim women by pressuring them to remove their veils had only made the veil more popular; what he failed (or refused) to see was that influential sectors of the nationalist movement were keen to reinforce religious conservatism. We know from a letter that Fanon wrote to a young Iranian admirer in Paris—the revolutionary Islamist Ali Shariati—that Fanon viewed the turn to Islam as a green mirage, a “withdrawal into oneself” disguised as liberation from “alienation and de-personalization.” But he shied from expressing these views in public, and leftists within the FLN were furious that Algeria’s pious bourgeoisie had, in Mohammed Harbi’s words, “found in Fanon a mouthpiece who presented its behavior as progressive.” Fanon “the Algerian” saw what he wanted to see—or what Ramdane wanted him to see.