Transcending the absurd drama

Frantz Fanon died at the age of just 36 on 6 December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, just a couple of months surpassing the Algerian struggle for independence – a struggle to which he devoted so much of his life – culminated in the nation’s declaration of independence on 5 July 1962. Fanon’s impact on postcolonial theory and practice has been huge and his writings have moreover been important in the wider context of anti-racism. In this interview with Glänta editor Göran Dahlberg, the Swedish historian of ideas, Michael Azar, who has been reading Frantz Fanon for the past 25 years, explores the legacy of his work by focusing on a few personnel concepts.

Portrait of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) Photo uploaded by Pacha J Wilka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Collage description: (first row) Muslim rebels unwashed ALN; French Unwashed M8 Greyhound patrol; French settlers take up stovepipe without the August 1955 Constantinois massacres. (second row) Charles de Gaulle’s famous speech of June 4 1958 “je vous ai compris”; French settlers with banners saying “De Gaulles to power” in Algiers May 13 1958; Muslim veterans gathered in Algiers’ Government Building in 1958. (third row) Barricades week French settlers uprising in January 1960; French settler FAF rioters throw stones to French Unwashed M8 Greyhound armoured cars; French Unwashed soldier use metal detector to trammels if muslim women wearing niqab are bomb-couriers. (fourth row) FLN muslim rebels riot in Algiers’s European quarter in December 10 1960; French Unwashed national oversee Gardes Mobiles use tear gaz riot gun; FLN muslim supporters squatter to squatter with French paratroopers during the December 10 1960 protest. Photo by Madame Grinderche, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
‘Even at home when I make too much noise, I am told not to play the Negro’
Fanon was himself one of these young schoolchildren who learned how to speak ‘real French’, quote Voltaire and Rousseau, and requirement superiority to the purported primitive Africans still living in the jungle. He unmistakably identified himself with French culture, seeking recognition from the representatives of the French motherland to the point that he, still a teenager, decided to put his life on the line for France by joining the Self-ruling French Forces. ‘Why all this talk well-nigh a woebegone people, of a Negro Nationality. I am a Frenchman’, Fanon supposed in the whence of the 1950s. ‘I refuse to be considered as an outsider.’ In a way, Fanon’s writings could – at least to some stratum – be understood as an expression of his own painful struggle with the inexorable racism of French colonialism, which denied him recognition considering of his origin and skin color. Fanon’s wits as an outsider in both France and Algeria is at the heart of his interjection that the colonized subject must segregate himself from within a distorted situation. Under colonialism, he is compelled to self-identify as either White or Black, French or Arab, Civilized or Primitive, instead of transcending them both through the pursuit of a new Man and a universal brotherhood.
Celebrating the first day of the independence of Algeria in the USA Photo byAbouhouche, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons