1

Final Year of a Life Well Lived: A Requiem for Frantz Fanon* Lewis R. Gordon [D]eath is always with us and . . . what matters is not to know whether we can escape it but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own. Frantz Fanon I dont like men who hoard their resources. Frantz Fanon Fanon was of the opinion that a society is most healthy when its people forego nationalism for the sake of national consciousness. When such a development arises in different ages, each generation, he contended, discovers its mission. It is difficult not to think about Fanon as one witnesses the youth who took to the streets in North Africa and the Middle East in 2010 to 2011 and achieved fragile change in some cases and the continued wrath of violent dictatorship and monarchical rule in others. The contours of debates, where super powers attempt to negotiate outcomes of protected interests, bring to the fore possibilities of radical democracy constrained by promissory notes of global capital and the potential of electronic media. Although some critics have attempted to imprison Fanon in the dawn of the 1960s, his ideas have returned in cycles in the neocolonial and postcolonial developments in the remaining twentieth-century and the tumultuous ones into the second decade of the twentyfirst. A striking feature of Fanon the man was the tenderness of his age. Similar to those North African youth of today, he was caught up in revolutionary struggles in his twenties. And, unfortunately, like too many, he remains frozen in that youth, in a way, as someone who never completed his fourth decade. Yet, as this reflection and many others attest, he his legacy defies his death. In 1960, Fanon, the thirty-five year-old psychiatrist and veteran of WWII, twice decorated for valor, was appointed ambassador in Ghana for the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). He had devoted the past six years of his life to the struggle for independence and had, among many efforts at articulating the FLNs international image, composed LAn V de la rvolution algrienne (1959). The world had changed much by then; it was clear that Algeria was on the eve of national liberation, and in Fanons native Caribbean, the revolutionary spirit had begun to take hold. The Cuban Revolution raised considerable challenge to the Monroe Doctrine, an imperial declaration that established the United States hegemonic relationship with the Caribbean and Latin America. Civil
*

I thank Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France for permission to use the photographs below.

2 unrest soon followed in Martinique and Guadeloupe, events that Fanon celebrated in his January 1960 article Le sang coule aux Antilles sous domination franaise.1 According to David Caute, these events signaled for Fanon the possibility of his participating in a growing revolutionary movement in the Caribbean. He began to seek an appointment as the FLNs ambassador to Cuba. Cuba was a logical choice, given the transformation of Martinique into an overseas department of France. Fanon, a wanted enemy of the French government, could not immigrate to any island in the Caribbean save Cuba, since all the other islands were either overseas departments or allies of France. One could imagine what might have happened if Fanons bidding was successful. Alas, it wasnt to be. Fanons arduous schedule of organizing supply routes for the FLN, providing medical and military training to FLN members, writing responses to French propaganda (which included some FLN counter-propaganda), and participating in endless strategic meetings and internal squabbles began to take their inevitable toll. Fanon, the great revolutionary, looked tired. Today, a popular photograph of Fanon appears on the cover of several volumes devoted to his life and thought, including the 1991 Gallimard paperback of Les damns de la terre. The photograph is an enlarged version that enables his face to fill the frame (figure 1):

Figure 1 The original photograph was at a distance, revealing Fanon as rarely seen, without a buttoned up shirt and a tie (see figure 2, where it is somehow reversed).

1 This article is available in Frantz Fanon (1969).

Figure 2 Shocking, however, is a still more distanced photograph of Fanon, apparently from the same meeting, seated on a couch, leaning to his right, his clothing disheveled, revealing an emaciated, anemic torso (see figure 3).

Figure 3 It is a photograph of Fanon as he appears in no prior instance. In previous photographs (figure 4), Fanon is neat, often in a business suit or in another suitable uniform (for instance, a soccer uniform during his days at the lyce):2

2 So concerned was he about his appearance that he often changed into several suits while on duty as the chief psychiatric officer so as not to appear overcome by the North African heat. See Alice Cherki (2000). For a wonderful array of photographs of Fanon from his adolescent years through to those in his last, see the special edition of Sans Frontire (Fvrier 1982), which was a memorial issue at the twentieth anniversary of his death.

Figures 4 But, as we saw in Figures 1, 2, and 3, Fanon was unkempt, his hair disheveled, and in the distance, from the long-framed version of figure 3, his posture sloped. The persistence of this (figure 1s) photographs reprint, appearing on the cover of a variety of texts by and on him, is perhaps a function of contingent mattersfor example, permission for its reprint is easily obtained from any Algerian embassyyet it also presents an image that is at once powerful, iconoclastic, and mortal. The humanity of the man appears as an effort to struggle on in the face of his limitations. His eyes, looking to the side, appear suspicious, and his slightly tightened jaws and narrowed eyes betray a moment of irritation, disdain, perhaps contempt. Fanon, in that often reprinted photograph, is listening to something, something that has left him agitated in the midst of his ceaseless struggle, as he often put it, to set man free. On the cover of Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996), my co-editors and I included a quotation from one of his letters, placed at the lower left end of the photograph from Sans Frontire: En tant quhomme, je mengage affronter le risque de lanantissment pour que deux ou trois vrits jettent sur le monde leur essentielle clarts (figure 5):

Figure 5 Fanon spoke of annihilation and death. Yes, Fanon didnt look well. His comrades began to tell him so. It is no doubt that the doctor, in the end, is he who is most reluctant to consult the aid of a physician. Eventually, while traveling in Mali to secure supply routes for the FLN, he fell ill and reluctantly inquired about his health. The results? Granulocytic leukemia. In less technical language, blood cancer. There is irony in Fanona man who devoted much theoretical and political energy to de-fanging the impact of race and racism in modern society, concepts marked from their inception by proscriptions premised upon bloodfacing death from a blood disease. Race has etymological roots in the word raza, a term used by Christians in Muslim-ruled Iberia to refer to breeds of dogs, horses, and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews (see Covarrubias Orozsco 1611). As Muslims from North Africa, the Moors, along with the Jews (many of whom were determined by fourth century Roman edicts limiting Jewish proselytizing and intermixing), represented a deviation from Christian normativity. Given that history, there is much insight in Fanons observation that

6 he who hates Jews invariably hates blacks as well. The defeat of the Moors in Grenada in 1492 was followed by the Inquisition to assess the Christian authenticity of the remaining conversos, converted populations, a process which led to demands for demonstrations of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre).3 The standard was individuals whose origins were purely Christian. The notion of purity here emerged from theological naturalism, where the natural was determined by its alignment with theological dogma. Since all that was natural emanated from the theological center, Moors and Jews stood as prototypical formulations of the anthropology of damnation that took a path to the modern term race, as used by Francois Bernier in his 1684 account, A New Division of the Earth. In todays terms, the dormant genes of self-destruction in Fanons body were awakened. His body, saturated with a flowing cancer, was eating itself. The genes linked Fanon to some of his ancestors, to his blood relatives, in a way that repeated his famous reflections in Peau noire, masques blancs, on the body, blood, and the salty fluids of desperation. In its fifth chapter, he recounted the previous ones through autobiographical reflections on the forms of self-consciousness stimulated and struggled for from the crisis occasioned by a little boy pointing at him and shouting, Tiens, un ngre! Fanons presupposition of non-raciality, which he realized was the presumption of a white normative standpoint on reality, was shattered as the imago of le ngre latched onto him as its referent. Qui, moi? he seemed to ask, while the world encircled him and closed in to offer no exit. That body, his body, wanted refuge, a world in which it could move with the flowing certainty of its own worth and conviction, but he found himself caught, enmeshed in a web of designations, none of which wanted, but all of which imposed, enwrapping him in what seemed to be a sealed fate by which he fell to the ground, ready for the role set for him to play: le ngre offers a black body as one manqu, as a body gone bad. In such a body flows bad blood, that which, as fluid, offers a constant risk of spilling beyond its bounds, of pollution. Thus, whether as le ngre psychiatrist (which he was called by his critics in Algeria), le ngre writer, le ngre singer, le ngre a-host-of-other-things, the neurotic role was unveiled in the folly of illegitimating membership: His presence constituted the absence. He was, by definition, that which is illegitimate in relation to everything but his own illegitimacy, although, as the success of white minstrels suggests, more radical forms of illegitimacy were demanded: le ngre was apparently even bad at being himself.4 The paradox of his existence was its nonexistence. Even his efforts to claim it, as Fanons foray into Negritude revealed, occasioned failure. Understandably, the situation occasioned despair and led him to weep. But getting to that point was circuitous. The body is of central importance in Peau noire, masques blancs. This is because the body is a necessary condition of appearance, since to be seen is to be seen somewhere. Much of the text explores illicit dimensions of black appearance, including its neurotic, self-defeating structure: as illegitimate-in-itself, black existence attempts to be seen in a world in which its appearance is a violation of its norms. Compared with our earlier observations on Christendom and damnation, the black thus faces a twice-fell reality, which Fanon describes as une zone de non-tre, une rgion extraordinairement strile et aride, une rampe essentiellement dpouille, do un authentique surgissement 3 See, e.g. Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozsco, Tesoro de lengua (1611). 4 For discussion of this double bind on black existence, see Gordon and Gordon (2009: 84).

7 peut prendre naissance. Dans la majorit es cas, le Noir na pas le bnfice de raliser cette descente aux vritables Enfers (Fanon 1952: 6). This is more of a collapse than a fall, then, that places the black body into a schema of deviations and imitation. As deviation, it falls from a presumed original white body. Why doesnt it rise from the white body? As the standard, the white body would make illegitimate the movement in any direction of deviation; whether up or down, the consequence is failure. The path, then, seems to be to overcome the deviation by reclaiming an original unity. The white, however, denies the original unity, because that would entail a potential blackness at the heart of whiteness, which makes the claimed reclamation imitation. As imitation, what is lacked is the original advantage of the self as standard. The imitation, in other words, is not its own standard. It is a failure, as we have seen, even of its achievement. To achieve imitation is to fail at what an imitation imitates, namely, an original. Failure, for Fanon, requires a sociodiagnosis, since, as Fanon argues in his introduction, racism and colonialism are sociogenetic. Working at the level of failure summons psychoanalytical resources of interpretation: Si le dbat ne peut pas souvrir sur le plan philosophique, cest--dire de lexigence fondamentale de la ralit humaine, je consens le mener sur celui de la psychanalyse, cest--dire des rats , au sens o lon dit quun moteur a des rats (Fanon 1952: 18).5 Working with failure carries the danger, however, of resignation, for implicit in such a conception is the preference for its overcoming: to fail at failure offers its own paradoxes. So Fanon ventures through the minefield of failures. The socialdiagnostics of failure in an antiblack and colonial world relies on the human capacity to construct a symbolic world that transcends, at least at the construction of meaning, reductive biological and other natural forces. The black body, here also marked as lme noire , demands demystification at its source: ce quon appelle lme noire est une construction du Blanc (ibid: 11). This construction, a failure of human understanding, asserts itself through a variety of idolatrous offerings: language, bad-faith love, and law-like constitutional theories of psychic life. Deviation and imitation reveal themselves in the failure of each movement: to speak, the black appears as an echo of white speech: Rien de plus sensationnel quun Noir sexprimant correctement, car, vraiment, il assume le monde blanc. Il nous arrive de nous entretenir avec des tudiants dorigine trangre. Ils parlent mal le franais : le petit Cruso, alias Prospro, se trouve alors son aise. Il explique, renseigne, commente, leur prend leurs cours. (ibid: 28). To love is to seek a reflection that is not ones own: the quest for recognition leads such blacks, whether female or male, to the arms and reflecting eyes of white men. To dream is to rehearse the trauma of collapsed and closed symbols; in the dream life of colonial subjects, a gun is a gun. These series of failures recur in the fifth chapter of the work, Lexprience vcue du Noir, Fanons autobiographical reflection that is also not autobiography. This seemingly awkward formulation is connected to an additional underlying thesis: That a black means the black, which means a collapse of 5 For discussion of this conception of failure, see Lewis R. Gordon (2005).

8 differentiation from the encroaching ngre. Autobiography is an individuated narrative hindered by the racial and colonial situation of the narrative; as an effort to unveil an inner world whose legitimacy is denied by the social circumstances, Fanon, as the black and le ngre, performs the supposedly impossible. He achieves magic. Magic is the effort to control and dominate reality by producing something seemingly from nothing (Cavendish 1990: 2). Fanons magical reflection announces itself immediately from the body, but one marked for non-appearance because of its illegitimacy. To see that body is to acknowledge what should be disavowed. Thus, it is those susceptible to the pre-reflective, those not yet socialized into self-deceiving norms of social propriety, who belch out the image, including the self image, the society prefers to repress: Sale ngre! ou simplement: Tiens, un ngre! (Fanon 1952: 88). The encounter is reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersens fairytale, The Emperors New Clothes. Duped by the system, Fanon walked with a white imago, and its being white meant that its identification would be redundant because supposedly encompassed by the term normal. Thus, being normal, Fanon presumed others would see the white skin that should have come along with his white mask. Like the Emperors new suit, Fanons wasnt there. The effect was collapse: Jarrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire leer un sens aux choses, mon me pleine du dsir dtre lorigine du monde, et voici que je me dcouvrais objet au milieu dautres objets. Enferm dans cette objectivit crasante, jimplorai autrui. Son regard librateur, glissant sur mon corps devenu soudain nul dasprits, me rend une lgret que je croyais perdue et, mabsentant du monde, me rend au monde. Mais l-bas, juste contre-pente, je bute, et lautre, par gestes, attitudes, regards, me fixe, dans le sens o lon fixe une prpration par un colorant. Je memportai, exigeai un explication Rien ny fit. Jexplosai. Voici les menus morceaux par un autre moi runis (ibid.). The assembling of the self, or effort to re-assemble, to re-collect, to re-member the self, is Fanons body offered back to him. He now sees that body, although looked at before in mirrors, differently. The mirror of the self as white and whole was shattered, and the realization of how he is seen by whites challenged anti-ngre through the offering of the ngre self. That self, that body, not associated before with his body, fell from the fallen into his transformed consciousness. The result, in Fanons reflection, brought him to two stages of what W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) called double consciousness.6 The first involves seeing oneself through the eyes of the alienating Other. The second is the realization of the first as a constructed reality. That involves demonstration of the contradictions of the imposed self (the fall after the collapse) on the lived-reality of the 6 For discussion, see, e.g., Paget Henry (2005: 79112) and Jane Anna Gordon (2007: 143161).

9 everyday self. For Fanon, this demonstration had already begun with the appeal to social diagnostics, with his observation of the black as a white construction, and continued through the analysis of failures and the body. At the point of bodily identification, of the image of himself in the little white boys eyes as the ngre, Fanon confessed: Une lourdeur inaccoutume nous oppressa. Le vritable monde nous disputait notre part. Dans le monde blanc, lhomme de couleur rencontre des difficlts dans llaboration de son schma corporeal. La connaissance du corps est ne activit uniquement ngatrice. Cest une connaissance en troisime personne. Tout autour du corps rgne une atmosphre dincertitude certaine (Fanon 1952 : 89). By contrast, there is the original condition, the body at home with itself. That body is fluid in its movements: Je sais que si je veux fumer, il me faudra tendre le bras droit et de la table. Les allumettes, elles, sont dans le tiroir de gauche, il faudra que je me recule lgrement. Et tous connaissance implicite. Lente construction de mon moi en tant que corps au sein dun monde spatial et temporel, tel semble tre le schma. Il ne simpose pas moi, cest plutt une structuration dfinitive du moi et du monde dfinitive, car il sinstalle entre mon corps et le monde une dialectique effective (1952 : 89). White normativity bogs the body down with une schma historico-racial, constructing the body of the ngre, a body turned inward in conflict with itself, devouring itself. For such a body, the ordinary would be an extraordinary achievement: Javais cre au-dessous du schma corporel un schma historico-racial. Les lments que javais utilises ne mavaient pas t fournis par [quotiing Jean Lhermitte] des rsidus de sensations et perceptions dordre surtout tactile, vestibulaire, cinesthsique et visual , mais par lautre, le Blanc, qui mavait tiss de mille dtails, anecdotes, rcits. Je croyais avoir construire un moi physiologique, quilibrer lespace, localiser des sensations, et boici que lon me rclamait un supplment (ibid., p. 90). The result is a body marred by endless self-negations, a body de trop: Jtais tout la fois responsable de mon corps, responsable de ma race, de mes anctres. Je promenai sur moi un regard objectif, dcouvris ma noirceur, mes caractres ethniques, et me dfoncrent le tympan lanthropophagie, larrieration mentale, le ftichisme, les tares raciales, les ngriers, et surtout, et surtout : Y a bon banania. . Bon banania, as French audiences know, is the name of the popular cocoa-banana cereal whose iconic figure in the companys advertisements was a Senegalese soldier, who, in turn, became known as bon banania. Y a bon is an African patois or creolized formulation of, cest bon. Over the years, bon banania became more simian. Today, he is a smiling black monkey wearing a fez. The orality of the ngre, whether as smile or as continued rationalizations of oral culture, is thrown into the tide of overdetermined forces, the

10 effect of which was that, as Fanon reflected: Mon corps me revenait etale, disjoint, retame, tout endeuille dans ce jour blanc dhiver (ibid., 91). Overdetermined, de trop historical forces had a role for him to play: Les ngres sont des sauvages, des abrutis, des analphabtes. Mais moi, je savais que dans mon cas ces propositions taient fausses. Il y avait un mythe du ngre quil fallait dmolir cote que cote. On ntait plus au temps o lon smerveillait devant un ngre cur. Nous avions des mdecins, des professeurs, des hommes dEtat Oui, mais dans ces cas persistait quelque chose dinsolite. Nous avons un professeur dhistoire sngalais. Il est trs intelligent Notre mdecin est un Noir. Il est trs doux. Ctait le professeur ngres, le mdecin ngres ; mois qui commenais me fragiliser, je frmissais la moindre alarme. Je savais, par exemple, que si le mdecin commettait une erreur, cen tait fini de lui e de tous ceux qui le suivraient. Quattendre, en effet, dun mdecin ngre ? Tant que tout allait bien, on le portait aux nues, mais gare, pas de btises, aucun prix ! Le mdecin noir ne saura jamais quel point sa position avoisine le discrdit. Je vous le dis, jtais emmure : ni mes attitudes polices, ni mes connaissances littraires, ni ma comprhension de la thorie des quanta ne trouvaient grce (ibid., p. 94). We see here the logic of rule and exception, where the system could be maintained in spite of individual progress: Regarding an achieved black person as an exception to a rule of black inferiority maintains the rule. The logic is preserved through an inversion with whites: A white persons failure is treated as an exception to the rule of white superiority. This logic enables the emergence of a black body as an exception to black bodies, yet as an exception, it is at war with its inner functioning principles. The consequence is a resigned effort at repressed pathology: The exception is the absoluteness of the rule waiting to come out. That lurking reassertion of mythic cohesion leads to the heaviness of action under the schma historico-racial. Fanon makes his diagnosis, anticipating the reassertion of racism in contemporary genetics: On dcrivait sur mes chromosomes quelques genes plus ou moins pais reprsentant le cannibalisme. A ct des sex linked, on decoubrait des racial linked. Une honte, cette science ! (ibid., 97).7 The black body, in which lurked le ngre, is cannibalistic and mechanistically overdetermined: It is an appetitive consciousness and, thus, consciousness without freedom. In existential phenomenology, which greatly influenced Fanons thought, the idea of at least self-consciousness without freedom leads to contradictions. In living, which amounts to living our body, living ourselves, we are freedom. The effect of antiblack racism is a demand for blacks not to live and for them to embrace this prescription. The ngre, then, faces an additional imposition on the self in a social world of expected consciousness without freedom, namely, the responsibility for such a lived un-lived reality. That responsibility for what is imposed upon one offers a unique form of sufferingnamely, oppression. An effect of oppression is the set of additions to negotiate in ones effort to live ordinary existence. Although the ordinary, from the perspective of phenomenological 7 Cf. Gilroy (2000) for a recent discussion of genetics bringing race beneath the skin.

11 treatments of the social world, should be understood as an extraordinary achievement, it is so through precisely that: Its ordinariness. Most people, with nearly no effort, obey the set of rules or practices that enable coexistence. We, human beings, live together in ways that facilitate a generally unimpeded dialectic between body and world. Oppression, however, weighs down each moment of bodily reach, as Fanon observed, which makes the extraordinary achievement of the ordinary even more extraordinary. There is, in other words, a re-evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary life, which means, then, the lived-reality of the oppressed body as a body de trop, a body overflowing with superfluity. It is, in other words, a body of extremes. It is a body that is too much of whatever quality considered because of having diverted from the normal harmony of embodiment: to be black, it has fallen away from normativity; to be black is, in other words, to be too black since to be just right is to not have been black at all. As, then, a reaching consciousness brought down under the weight of a historical-racial schema, the black body, Fanons body, moves thus: Jarrive lentement dans le monde, habitu ne plus prtendre au surgissement (ibid., 93). Fanon dedicated his life to breaking free of the weighted expectations of consciousness without freedom. In each instance, the potential of cultural transformation as a bodily phenomenon comes to the fore. In Lan V de la rvolution algerienne, the Algerian womans various transformations of bodily representation present new considerations for the postcolonial state, for the Algerian woman who carries bombs, who experiences herself in western clothing, who learns acts of comportment in military campaigns, exemplifies an upsurge whose containment is a dialectic of body and world beyond a consciousness without freedom to one fighting for it.8 In Les damns de la terre, the plea takes the form of asking, in the concluding sentence, for the development of peau neuve , through which a new humanity could be born. Yet in the early Peau noire, Fanon had concluded with a consideration on bodily freedom thus: Mon ultime prire : O mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge ! As oppressed embodied consciousness is overly determined inward, the direction of one marked by questioning that oppression points outward; it is that second form of double consciousness born of dialectical critique. Fanons first book offered this prayer, and his life, as it came to a close, never stopped him from asking, questioning, and exemplifying his humanistic commitment, ultimately, to life. There continues to be no cure for leukemia. In Fanons time, as today, the best that could be done was to sustain the patient through blood transfusions and do ones best to keep him alive as long as possible. Near the end, the best thing is to alleviate the patients suffering with pain-relieving drugs. What was Fanon to do? He was a notorious revolutionary and committed critic of European colonialism, but he needed medical attention beyond the resources of the FLN facilities in Tunisia. The first option was to seek medical attention in the Soviet Union, a nation that supported the FLN. He visited there in December 1960, where he received treatment, but the prognosisthat he had a few months to livewas confirmed. He was advised to rest. 8 Cf. Cornell 2001.

12 Fanonrest? Instead, Fanon took the opportunity to tour the Soviet Unions psychiatric facilities. He was greatly disappointed by what he found. Writes Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan (1985: 34), The straightjackets, barred windows, and barren rooms in these institutions reminded him of [Algerias] Blida-Joinville Hospital when he had first arrived. His observations convinced him that genuine rehabilitation of troubled psyches awaited new discoveries. Fanons remaining time turned out to be more than a few monthsin fact, nearly a year. The Soviet physicians had advised him to seek treatment in Bethesda, Maryland, where the most advanced treatment was available for leukemia. Fanons response has become legend. He refused to seek aid in a nation of lynchers. His remark could be interpreted in many ways. One obvious interpretation is his condemnation of American racism, which was well known for its brutality as witnessed by lynchings and the violent response to the Civil Rights Movement. That he did not subscribe to the practice of comparative racismwhether, for example, U.S. antiblack racism was worse than French antiblack racism and whether South African antiblack racism was worse than bothsuggests that he meant something else by his remark. Here is another interpretation. Fanon was a black man married to Marie-Josphe Dubl, a white woman (albeit of Corsican and Gypsy descent). A rationale for lynching in the United States was not only claims of supposed black male predation of white women, but also violation of anti-miscegenation laws, many of which were enacted after the overturning of segregation by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954.9 Sexual relations between blacks and whites were in 1961, and continue to be in the United States and much of the Americas, sources of controversy. Worse, Bethesda was in Maryland, and Maryland, we should remember, is part of the American South. Segregation was the rule even in the District of Columbia, the nations capital. Upon his return to Tunis, he immediately set to work on several projects, including what turned out to be his final and most influential work, Les damns de la terre. He also hoped, as recounted by David Hansen, to produce a work on death and dying. He is reputed to have completed Les damns in ten weeks. A work of intense prose rich with phenomenological description, broad historical scope, and theoretical precision with at times ice-cold dialectical logic, it is a classic in political thought and a masterpiece of political writing. To have achieved such a work in any age would be remarkable enough, but within ten weeks by a dying thirty-six-year-old revolutionary, aided by his wife Jose (the nickname for Josphe), who typed and edited the narrated work, with limited access to libraries and other research materials is a Promethean achievement, in the least. After completing Les damns, Fanon invited Sartre to write its preface. Fanons fame (and infamy) by this time was such that he did not need Sartres endorsement for promotion of the book. Lan V, for instance, had sold out within two weeks upon publication in 1959 before being banned in France. Speculation varies on why he invited Sartre to write the work. One consideration was that he was impressed by Sartres devotion of more than seventy pages of his Critique de la raison dialectique to the racism of French colonialism in Algeria and the terror exemplified by French efforts to maintain colonial rule there. But that by itself did not warrant the invitation. A statement of 9 See Carol Fluehr-Lobban (2006).

13 affinity and agreement would have sufficed. Here is another reading. In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon had accused Sartre of guiding in a Trojan Horse to black semiotic resistance by pointing out, in his Orphe noir (1948), that Negritude was an antiracist racism that was revolutionizing black consciousness as a negative moment of a dialectic in which the universal proletariat of Marxism will emerge through a cross-racial coalition of black, brown, and white workers.10 The Reality Principle of this revolutionary position turned out, again, to be White Reason. Fanon had admired Sartre. He had even written a play, Les Mains parallles, during his medical school years, with affinities to Sartres Mains sales. Sartres open position on the Algerian war, a position that endangered his life in France as the bombings of his apartments attest, redeemed Sartre in Fanons eyes. But more, Fanon was not a black separatist. He had long moved on from the seduction of Senghorian Negritude and sought a multiracial postcolonial project. The FLN faction to which he belonged was the secularists, who shared his multiracial hopes for Algeria. What better demonstration of his antiracism not being a form of racism than to present the work on violence, counter violence, and the need to forge a new humanity in partnership with the most eminent white intellectual supporter of anticolonial struggles at the time? Fanon by himself represented critique and creativity, but with Sartre, there was demonstrated possibility of such a postcolonial future. The first chapter, De la violence , was published in Les Temps Modernes, the editorial collective that at the time included Sartre, de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, and several other influential mid-century French intellectuals. Fanon had met with Sartre and de Beauvoir in Rome in spring 1961, where the latter were on vacation. In his influential biography of Sartre, Ronald Hayman describes their meeting as follows: . . . Fanon came to Rome, although, two years earlier, when he was in a hospital there, he had escaped only just in time when an assassin found the way to his room. After he and Sartre had lunch together, the conversation went on until two in the morning, and when De Beauvoir pleaded that Sartre needed sleep, Fanons response was: I dont like men who hoard their resources. He told [Claude] Lanzmann: Id give twenty thousand francs a day if I could talk to Sartre from morning till night for two weeks. As it was, they talked almost nonstop for three days. In the Algerian war, Fanon, who had been supplying the guerrillas with drugs, had trained terrorists in how to resist torture and how to keep calm when planting bombs or throwing grenades. According to De Beauvoir, Fanons face would express less anguish when he described the counterviolence of the blacks and the vengeance of the Algerians than when he spoke of Congolese mutilated by Belgians or Angolans by Portuguesefaces battered to flatness, lips pierced and padlocked. He accused Sartre of not doing enough to expiate the crime of being French: how could he go on trying to live normally? The two men talked again when Fanon came back to Rome, ten days later, on his way to Tunis, but this was to be their last meeting. . . . As soon as he left Rome, Sartre started on the preface, writing less feverishly than during the early summer in Paris. I am recomposing myself, he said (Hayman 1987: 384385). 10 For a critical discussion of Sartrean Negritude and Fanons response, see Reiland Rabaka (2010: 7282).

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While Sartre was recomposing himself, Fanon returned to Tunis to continue his efforts on behalf of the Algerian struggle for national liberation, a struggle that he analyzed in the context of the broader struggle for the international liberation of humankind. As his body deteriorated from his illness, his comrades began to urge him to take the advice of the Soviet doctors and seek treatment in the U.S.A. He finally agreed. Then, he faced another problem. How was he to get there when it was clear, given the U.S. governments increased involvement in Vietnam, that it was a staunch ally of France? It had to be done with secrecy and with the aid of the reconnaissance division of the government he often criticized. Peter Geismar related the situation: The black doctor was a nice catch for the intelligence services. . . . Washington would be able to fatten its dossiers on the leftist segment of the FLN; Fanon knew a lot about other African liberation movements. His kind of thinking and activities were a threat to Western interests in the Third World (Geismar 1971:182). The CIA got Fanon into the United States under promised stealth. What followed, however, is unclear among Fanon scholars. Reports have ranged from Fanon visiting and subsequently dying in New York City to his remaining in Washington, D.C. What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia. Who knows what information the CIA may have received from Fanon under the delirium of his illness? It is possible that they didnt receive much, if any, information, for Fanon was a specialist in techniques for resisting torture. It was his doing so for the FLN while being the head physician at Blida-Joinville that led to his eventual resignation and public enlistment in their cause. He trained guerrillas how not to divulge secrets under the worst of conditions. His time in CIA custody was such an instance. By the time Fanon was taken to Bethesda, he was on the verge of death. He was put through several blood transfusions. After one instance, he declared, They put me through the cleaners last night. His wife Jose and his son were brought to him, and he spoke, occasionally, of his future projects. He managed to write a letter to his brother Jobi, which appears on p. 185 of Peter Geismars study of his life and thought: What I wanted to tell you is that death is always with us and that what matters is not to know whether we can escape it but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own. What shocked me here in my bed when I felt my strength ebbing away along with my blood was not the fact of dying as such, but to die of leukemia, in Washington, when three months ago I could have died facing the enemy. . . . We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty. The tragedy of Fanons situation was that his intense relationship with his body had come full circle through the drama of dying. From earlier reflections on the dreaded epidermal schema, his vital spirit was now under the scrutiny of those microtomes he feared but

15 eight years earlier. No longer facing an explosion, he found himself suffering the experience of dissolution, of dissolving, of withering away. On December 6th, 1961, a few days after composing his letter to Jobi, it was over. Fanon had survived many lifethreatening episodes: while a youth, a gun firing off while a friend and he played with it; two instances of injury on the battlefield for which he was honored for valor in World War II; being thrown by the explosion from a jeep that ran over a mine; assassins from the French Right seeking him out over North Africa and in southern Europe, including machine-gunning the bed in a hospital room in Rome reputed to be his. He survived all that, but in the end, it was in his body, in the cells of his blood, and the micro-assassins of bacteria and viruses that prevailed. Fanon probably would have preferred his dead body to be hurled at the enemy. It was brought, instead, to Tunis and then on to Algeria, where, after a long procession with military rituals befitting an honored soldier and martyr, he was laid to rest. There is no longer a Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria but instead, amid many Fanonian legacies, a hospital that now bears the name of that young man whose encomia continue to make us question and serve as an example of a life well lived.

WORKS CITED Hans Christian Andersen. 1983. Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard. New York: Anchor Books. Bernier, Franois Bernier. 1684. A New Division of the Earth, trans. T. Bendyphe in Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London, Vol 1 (London: Anthropological Society of London, 18631864), pp 360364. Hussein Abdulahi Bulhan. 1985. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Plenum. Caute, David. 1970. David Cautes Frantz Fanon. New York: Vintage. Richard Cavendish. 1990. A History of Magic. London: Arkana. Cherki, Alice. 2000. Frantz Fanon: Portrait. Paris: dition du Seuil. Drucilla Cornell. 2001. The secret Behind the Veil: A Reinterpretation of Algeria Unveiled, Philosophia Africana 4, no. 2 (August): 2735. Covarrubias Orozsco, Sebastian de. Tesoro de la lengua. 1611. Quoted, translated and discussed in David Nirenberg, Race and the Middle ages: The Case of Spain and the Jews, in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: ditions du Seuil. . 1961/1991. Les damns de la terre. Prface de Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: Franois Maspero diteur S.A.R.L./Paris: ditions Gallimard. . 1975 [1959]. Sociologie dune rvolution: lan V de la rvolution algrienne, 2me ed. Paris: Franois Maspero. . 1979. Pour la revolution africaine: crits politiques. Paris: Franois Maspero. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2006. Race and Racism: An Introduction. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Peter Geismar. 1971. Fanon. New York: Dial. Gendzier, Irene. 1973. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Vintage. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Colorline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Gordon, Jane Anna. 2007. The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized, in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. by Nalini Persram. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 143161. and Lewis R. Gordon. 2009. Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gordon, Lewis R., T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Rene T. White, eds. 1996. Fanon: A Critical Reader, with an introduction and translations by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Rene T. White, and a foreword by Leonard Harris and Carolyn Johnson, and an afterword by Joy Ann James. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hayman, Ronald. 1987. Sartre: A Biography. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Henry, Paget. 2005. Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications, The C.L.R. James Journal 11, no. 1 (Summer): 79112. Judy, Ronald A.T. Judy. 1996. Fanons Body of Black Experience, in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. by Lewis R. Gordon et al, Fanon: A Critical Reader, pp. 53 73. Rabaka, Reiland. 2010. Fanonian Moments. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sans Frontire. 1982. Spcial Fanon (Fvrier).

17 Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Orphe Noir, in Anthologie de la nouvelle posie ngre et malgache, ed. Lopold Senghor. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. ix xliv. Bio: Lewis R. Gordon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Temple University and author of several influential books, including Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (Routledge) and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP).