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Biografías /
Biographies |
Glosarios -
Biografías |
Contenidos disponibles en
español y en inglés - Availables resources in spanish and english.
Compilador / Compiler:
Jorge Tobías Colombo
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French psychiatrist and revolutionary writer, whose writings had profound influence on the radical movements in the 1960s in the United States and Europe. As a political thinker born in Martinique, Fanon's views gained audience in the Caribbean islands along with Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams. Fanon rejected the concept of Négritude - a term first used by Césaire - and stated that persons' status depends on their economical and social position. Fanon believed that violent revolution is the only means of ending colonial repression and cultural trauma in the Third World. "Violence," he argued, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect."
Frantz Fanon grew up in Martinique amid descendants of African slaves, who had been brought to the Caribbean to work on the island's sugar plantations. Fanon's father Casimir worked in the customs service; he died in 1947. At the lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where Fanon studied, one of his teachers was Aimé Césaire. In his teenage Fanon became politically active and participated in the guerrilla struggle against the supporters of the pro-Nazi French Vichy government. He served in the Free French forces and volunteered to go to Europe to fight. After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris and Lyons. Among Fanon's friends was Edouard Glissant, his younger compatriot, who studied philosophy and history at the Sorbonne. Fanon was, according to Glissant "extremely sensitive". Glissant debuted as a poet with Un champ d'îles (1953), Fanon's first major work, BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, appeared in 1952. The book, analyzed the impact of colonialism and its deforming effects, had a major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world. Fanon argued that white colonialism imposed an existentially false and degrading existence upon its black victims to the extent that it demanded their conformity to its distorted values. The colonized is not seen by the colonizer a human being; this is also the picture the colonized is forced to accept. Fanon demonstrates how the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images, starting from the symbol of the dark side of the soul. "Is not whiteness in symbols always ascribed in French to Justice, Truth, Virginity?" Fanon examines race prejudices as a philosopher and psychologist although he acknowledges social and economic realities. The tone of the text varies from outrage to cool analysis and its poetic grace has not lost anything from its appeal. In 1952 Fanon began to practice in a psychiatric ward in Algeria. He married in 1953 a young white Frenchwoman. At Blida-Joinville's hospital, where Fanon worked as the director of the psychiatric department, he applied the ideas of François Tosquelles, an innovative practitioner of group therapy. In 1954 the National Liberation Front (FLN) started its open warfare against French rule. After three years Fanon resigned and allied himself with the Algerian liberation movement that sought to throw off French rule. Fanon travelled guerrilla camps from Mali to Sahara, hid terrorists at his home and trained nurses to dress wounds. In 1959 he was severely wounded on the border of Algeria and Morocco. Fanon then worked briefly as an ambassador of the provisional Algerian government to Ghana and edited in Tunisia the magazine Moudjahid. During this period he also founded Africa's first psychiatric clinic. Much of his writing concentrated on the Algerian revolution, including the essays published in L'AN CINQ, DE LA RÉVOLUTION ALGÉRIENNE (1959), in which he calls for armed struggle against the French imperialism. Fanon himself did not live long enough to witness Algeria's independence.
Fanon's last work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), was called by its publisher "the handbook for the black revolution". The book was based on Fanon's experiences in Algeria during the war of independence. Using Marxist framework, Fanon explores the class conflict and questions of cultural hegemony in the creation and maintenance of a new country's national consciousness. "In guerrilla war the struggle no longer concerns the place where you are, but the places where you are going. Each fighter carries his warring country between his toes." The Wretched of the Earth became one of the central documents of the black liberation movement. Fanon's writings also influenced such anticolonial writers as Kenya's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Senegal's Ousmane Sembène. In contrast to Mao and orthodox Leninism, Fanon did not accept the view that the Communist party leads the revolution, but he believed that the revolutionary party grows from the struggle. As a Marxist Fanon argued that postcolonial African nations end in disaster if they simply replace their white colonial bourgeois leaders with black African bourgeoisie trained by Europeans - oppression remains under capitalistic class structure. "The national bourgeoisie will be greatly helped on its way toward decadence by the Western bourgeoisies, who come to it as tourists avid for the exotic, for big game hunting, and for casinos. The national bourgeoisie organizes centers of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the mane of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry."
Selected works:
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AVIZORA |
Fanon
survived several political murder attempts, and also the slaughter in
1957, in which the F.L.N. killed 300 suspected supporters of a rival
rebel group. After a 1,200-mile intelligence expedition in 1960, from
Mali to the Algerian, he was seriously ill. Finally Fanon was taken of
leukemia and died in Washington, DC, on December 12, 1961. After
negotiations, his body was flown back to Algeria to be buried on
Algerian soil. Josie Fanon, his wife, committed suicide in Algiers in
1989.