As a child in the 1960s, my mother would routinely pass a secondary school on her way home in downtown Algiers named Lycée Frantz Fanon. To her, the name was quite peculiar, since all the other schools had newly Arabic names, alluding to different figures within the independence movement and Algerian history. She was perplexed as to why this school kept this seemingly white French name, only to learn much later in life—from her son, a particularly angsty postcolonial teen—that it was named for a black man from the Caribbean who had made contributions to Algeria’s independence movement.
For someone whose presence and body of work today seem to be central to Algerian liberation and decoloniality more broadly, it is rather strange that he was merely a French name to a woman who grew up in the aftermath of Algerian independence. This begs the question then, what was Frantz Fanon’s role in the Algerian liberation movement? Did he have a place in Algerian society, or could he even, as a black man from Martinique? In a recently published biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (2024), Adam Shatz attempts to give light to these inquiries, entering a somewhat crowded field of work detailing the short 36 years of academia’s favorite revolutionary.
From David Macey’s authoritative biography in 2000, which sought to restore Fanon’s Martinican context, to Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young’s more recent Alienation and Freedom (2018) - an intimate collection of Fanon’s unpublished writings including two plays he wrote in his twenties - a fascination has remained with Fanon’s continued influence and what exactly his legacy was. Over the decades, he has been pulled in many directions, acting as a rationalization for revolutionary violence, a damning reminder of the fixity of global black subjectivity, and a committed Marxist that understood race as a material formulation. With all these different Fanons floating about, biographers and commentators over the decades have generally focused on particular aspects of Fanon’s life and work, often to challenge the current renderings of the man. Macey’s biography, for example, sought to counter the “Anglo-Americanized Fanon” that emerged from the academy since the 1980s. More recently, scholars like Muriam Haleh Davis have emphasized the “formative influence of the Algerian Revolution” upon Fanon and the extent to which that context has been left out of his American engagement. It is the latter current that seems to energize Shatz’s narrative, portraying a man that never wavered in his commitment to the Algerian cause, a man whose very body seemed to age too quickly on account of the multitude of revolutionary lives it endured.
While ample time is dedicated to Fanon’s early life, the narrative does not start hitting a rhythm until he embarks on his medical career, ultimately leading him to Algeria. His account reminds us that Fanon came to Algeria essentially as a French civil servant, making his subsequent defection to the Algerian cause all the more incredible. Fanon arrived in Blida in 1953, initially stationed in the psychiatric ward of a small hospital. He was soon contacted by the Front de libération nationale (FLN) a few months after their November 1954 declaration of war against the French state. Fanon’s works were relatively unknown in Algeria at the time, so the FLN was solely after his psychiatric talents as a means to tend to their fighters. However, as Fanon became more entrenched with the FLN, he began to take the role of ideologue and ambassador—becoming an editor and routine contributor to El Moudjahid, the FLN’s newspaper, as well as publishing his own works, most famously The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism.
Fanon’s role as a spokesman for the FLN put him in quite a unique position, not seen in most anti-colonial movements. He was not an Algerian national, but that did not stop him from inhabiting a rather liminal space in the movement and Algeria as a whole. His outsider status gave him access to unique avenues to advocate for the Algerian cause, whether it was to fellow African nations or to intellectuals among the European left and elite. He was quite literally one of the FLN’s chief propagandists, with an analytic and ethnographic style that endowed a veneer of authority over his commentary on the cause. However, his ideas were not always in sync with the goals of the FLN, and he was not immune to the organization’s internal politics. Some of his FLN colleagues saw Wretched as advocating for a winner take all race war, while others felt patronized by his seemingly uninformed takes on Algerian society. Despite these tensions, Fanon remained a useful asset for the FLN precisely because of his outsider status. Shatz dedicates a lot of time describing this dynamic, highlighting how in Fanon’s thought, a rather conservative movement found itself a mouthpiece that helped brand it as progressive on the global stage. He goes as far as to call Fanon the FLN’s “Africa Policy,” detailing how he would outright lie to his African contemporaries regarding the population of black Algerians and Algerian racial attitudes, more broadly. To Fanon the truth was whatever advanced the victory of the colonized. Thus the “portraits of liberated female fighters, sons overthrowing their fathers, and young men and women marrying in the maquis out of love and shared national devotion”, all come together to form an Algeria curated for outside observers.
Shatz is quite careful in exploring Fanon's complex relationship with Algeria. He balances Fanon’s methodical yet passionate approach to the Algerian question with his scattered musings of a burgeoning nation he hoped to have a place in. Indeed, Fanon was quite romantic about Algeria, writing, “The Algerian Nation is longer in a future heaven. It is no longer the product of hazy and fantasy-ridden imaginations. It is at the very center of the new Algerian man.” In Algeria, he did not find an emerging nation on its way to decolonization, but rather a society he saw as more interested in the seizure of liberty. To Fanon, violent armed struggle almost engendered a kind of metaphysical transformation onto the Algerian (man). He was deeply fascinated by the prospect of true postcolonial subjects, unmoored by traumas of the past. In a certain sense, this was the very “out” he sought after in his musings on Négritude that we find in Black Skin, White Masks. However, the tabula rasa put forth to readers of Wretched is indicative of a tension that culminates into quite the tragedy in Shatz’s narrative.
Throughout the book the reader gets pulled by Fanon, following a man who is clearly on the hunt for something. Characters like Mohammed Harbi might describe that something as a sense of belonging, while Shatz conveys a general yearning for sanctuary in a world built by his words. Despite his illustrious cast of characters, Fanon would maintain a persistent mistrust among the circles that are quite literally his people, namely, the upper-class intelligentsia and political elites. Fanon instead gradually became more and more enthralled by a sort of agrarian radicalism. As he would go on to describe in Wretched, the rural peasantry had the potential to be a true revolutionary force, not plagued by a sense of being caught in between—and alienated from both—Western culture and their own traditions. While he had this inclination as far back as his Blida days, it only intensified during his missions in Sub-Saharan Africa where he concluded that the rural masses were not interested in Africanizing the colonial administration, like the African elites, but rather sought to throw away and replace the system altogether. Truly his time in Africa cemented this position as he slowly saw his once respected contemporaries, Cesaire and Senghor, in his view, sell out and make compromises with the West. His ideas underwrote Boumedienne’s faction’s conservative social project–backed by the rural masses either willingly or by force–which came to define Algeria’s political future post-independence. This nostalgic “return to the self” was what Fanon dreaded the most but ironically was ushered in by the people he identified as most immune to the forces stifling true liberation.
Despite always insisting on the need for his patients to “faire face au monde [confront the world], especially if—it challenged their sense of reality” Fanon seemed to have trouble following his own advice. Shatz notes that his political analysis would often take detours from discouraging realities and find solace in a sort of utopian poetry. Did Fanon see the writing on the wall? Did he not want to contend with the world how it was? It is this very idea of the look that comes in and out of this story leaving the reader asking what did Fanon truly see? Did his gaze upon the world fix it into a realm of his own making, or did his idealism give him the drive to believe that circumstances would change? Shatz leaves these questions up to the reader and to good effect, imparting a sense that there may have been answers if Fanon’s life wasn’t cut so short.
Shatz is careful to never cast down a concrete judgement on Fanon. He maintains a distanced ambivalence, choosing to instead provide speculations and context. On one hand, this approach allows the reader to marvel at Fanon’s unwavering political commitments. Throughout the independence struggle Fanon saw his close friend and ally Abane Ramadane get murdered by the FLN, played a part in covering up crackdowns on whole villages that supported competing political factions, and a myriad of personal attacks and slights from his new countrymen. These hardly cleansing acts however, never tested his commitment to the Algerian cause. Shatz conveys a clear admiration for Fanon’s many contradictions, but he unfortunately does not take Fanon to task like other scholars have over the years. The elephant in Fanon’s revolutionary room is his gap with Islam, and while Shatz gestures to these shortcomings–highlighting his ignorance to major aspects of Algerian culture and society, he misses the opportunity to weave a cohesive link between his lives pre- and post-Algeria.
This gap is not more apparent than with his most public engagement with Islam, the infamous Algeria Unveiled. Shatz maintains a rather ambivalent stance towards the work, leaving the criticism for Fanon’s Algerian colleagues like Mohammed Harbi, who called the piece a defensive rationalization of Algerian conservatism. Despite his wealth of knowledge of Algeria, Shatz never takes the step to identify the piece as ahistorical propaganda that contrasted a robust Algerian discourse surrounding issues of aesthetics and modernity concerning both men and women, which predated the war for independence. Furthermore, Shatz does not take the opportunity to use this piece to convey Fanon’s rather strange relationship with and stance on women. There is a reason that professors seldom assign chapters 2 & 3 of Black Skin, White Masks in college courses, and it is those chapters’ very assumptions that find a home in Algeria Unveiled. Do colonized women undergo processes of alienation like their male counterparts? Or are they just another means to facilitate men’s alienation and subjugation? These remain very open questions in Shatz’s narrative which also chooses to shy away from the more controversial allegations surrounding Fanon’s domestic life. Whether or not Felix Germain’s 2016 allegations of Fanon’s long history of violence towards women are true, it cannot be denied that Fanon had a loose definition of friendship with women while being a married man. While Shatz does well in describing the dubious dynamics Fanon had with several women in the book, he does not truly contend with their implications and what they say about Fanon’s character. Fanon’s own wife is a ghost in a majority of the narrative and this absence brings about themes of how history gets told and who gets to tell it.
Despite the many lives of Fanon that Shatz wants to convey, the revolutionary himself remains quite elusive throughout the narrative. The reader is doing the work of catching up to the blazing path set forth by Fanon due to Shatz spending a lot of time giving context to the surrounding political environment, characters, and speculations on Fanon’s thoughts and actions. It is clear Shatz is no stranger to Algeria, having written about the North African giant since the early 2000s, allowing him to go into what may be considered too granular of details about everything surrounding colonial Algeria and the war of independence. Large sections of the narrative are purely dedicated to describing Algerian history, politics, and the myriad of players and forces involved, with Fanon disappearing for whole passages and chapters, overshadowed by a very long list of contemporaries and successors. For anyone interested in the Algerian inter-war period and liberation struggle, the book is a treasure trove of fascinating insights and revelations that, however, do not always work towards giving the reader a better impression of Fanon’s context. In fact, they often serve to obfuscate Fanon’s principles and foundational frameworks in favor of his psychological commitments to politics, myths, and utopian thinking.
Despite Fanon being quite clear in his works, Shatz echoes a common misunderstanding of Fanon as someone who wrote about and was solely concerned with the psychological effects of racism. At his core, Fanon was a materialist who wrote about how the material processes of exploitation in the colony produce “race,” and consequently, how it structures our possibility of thought. Thus, racism is not external to race, with the former giving life to the latter. Indeed, Shatz feels most comfortable when describing Fanon’s thought in idealist terms, making dubious teleologies with Fanon’s Manichean writings in “On Violence” and his earlier conversations on Hegel, describing the settler and native as Fanon’s recreation of the Lord and the Bondsman. Throughout Shatz seems more interested in capturing the development of the grand psychic drama that is Fanon’s thought rather than fleshing out his more materialist commitments. In his essay on “The Negro and Recognition,” Fanon critiques Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, simply arguing that the master ultimately desires the slave’s labor, not their mere recognition. In going against Hegel’s ‘absolute reciprocity,’ Fanon puts forth a rendering of the negro slave as the alienated epitome of exploitation. While Hegel’s slave gains recognition through labor, Fanon’s slave desires to be like the master, thus remaining alienated. This is to say that the master and the slave in Fanon’s account are not produced by a relation of racism or anti-blackness but by material exploitation. In this formulation then, Fanon gives ontological priority to the exploitative relation of production between master and slave.
Shatz ultimately puts forth a Fanon who is a theorist of a rather narrow and neutralized conception of race, rather than the theorist of capitalism that he is. He is all too ready to delve into the many contradictions of Fanon’s thought, but not really keen on staking clear positions on the ways in which Fanon is interpreted and understood. Rather, he provides a broad landscape of the many discourses surrounding Fanon, stressing the importance of these afterlives as vital to Fanon’s story. Shatz, however, seems a bit reluctant to truly weigh in on more contemporary discourses despite gesturing to their resonance with Fanon. Frameworks like Afro-pessimism are able to neatly orbit the Fanon ecosystem despite having core tensions with Fanon’s thought. Shatz is not interested in examining these tensions, dedicating more time to mapping out the next revolutionary vanguard that Fanon had his eyes on. Similar to Fanon’s own place in the narrative, Shatz’s voice ultimately recedes, yielding discourse to his impressive network and an illustrious cast of characters.
In The Rebel’s Clinic, Adam Shatz triumphantly captures a life whose flame burned out all too quickly. He portrays Fanon as someone who lived, danced, fought, and, most importantly, healed others in his pursuit of a truly liberated society. The narrative showcases Fanon’s youth and energy while not making them the foundation of his political commitments. Rather, they gave context to his idealism while also conveying his thought as dynamic and continually evolving amidst contradictions and political realities. It is in Fanon’s life and works that generations have felt the energy and bombast of revolution. The mundane politics that might find a home on C-SPAN take a back seat in favor of the psychic drama that was Wretched. It was an account of not only theory, but an intimate whirlwind of considerations from an experienced comrade in arms. Fanon had a knack for giving life to the mundane–a look on the train, a radio in the house, and, of course, the everyday violence of the colonial system. It was this life and the story his own life embodied that connected with so many, often contradictory agendas and worldviews. Shatz makes a strong effort in putting together these “little pieces” that Fanon has been chopped into while also emphasizing his fragmented influential afterlives as vital to his overall story. It was a story cut too short, just shy of witnessing Algerian independence, a moment that began closing the door of possibilities for a nation burdened with such potential. Shatz leaves speculation quite open on Fanon’s feelings, however highlighting his contemporaries’ mass exodus from the country. If Fanon was given more time, perhaps his philosophy would change, his commitments dull, and the realities of the world would slowly eat away at his ideals. However, what would not change would be the fact that Fanon was an Algerian. Shatz makes clear that his home and heart would remain in Algeria where he would continue to fight and move forward with his people.