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IRENE L. GENDZI ER
the men who had made the greatest impression on his life. He chronicled
the events of his youth in Martinique, the impact of French troops land–
ing in wartime, the subtle prejudice of the West Indian against the
African and the shock of feeling himself treated as inferior by the French.
He acknowledged the debt he owed to Hegel, Freud and Sartre; and
he demonstrated the relevance of Sartre's essay on the Jewish question
to the Negro and colonial issues. Fanon's ability to question himself,
and his talent to understand the broader dimensions of his personal
quest led him to expand the basis of his explanation from the biographical
to the social level. From the psychology of his own soul he turned to a
psychological study of the society around him; a society that he experi–
enced as based on inequality, myth and injustice.
In 1953, having completed his medical training in France, he ac–
cepted a position as psychiatrist in Blida, Algeria. The move was critical.
Within three years of his appointment, the pressures of Franco-Algerian
coexistence proved too much. The choice had to be made, and Fanon
abandoned France and the French medical service as he felt it had
abandoned him, the Algerians and the entire world of the under–
developed colonies. The Algerian war made Fanon a revolutionary; it
transformed him into a theoretician of violence.
Studies in a Dying
Colonialism
was Fanon's analysis of France in Algeria. It was a ruthless
exploration of the substructure of Franco-Arab relations and the ap–
parent inability of the two to communicate in peace or war. In 1956
Fanon joined forces with the National Liberation Front (FLN) of the
Algerian Revolution, acting as occasional ambassador at large to other
African countries and as political essayist for
el-Moudjahid.
The essays written for the FLN publication,
el-Moudjahid,
consti–
tute the bulk of
Towards an African R evolution.
They focus on the
events of the Algerian war, the anatomy of racism, the myth of coloniza–
tion and the alleged hypocrisy of the French Left in its complicated
dealings with the Algerian revolutionaries. Fanon's ties with the journal–
ists and intellectuals of Paris who supported the Algerians were strong
but tinged with ironic criticism. The logic of the Revolution,
if
not of
revolution, forced the drawing of clear boundaries between the colonizer
and the colonized. It prohibited the ambiguities that peace or equality
might have allowed. It required terrorism when anything less proved
futile and it required retaliation when torture was applied from the
Capital. The issue of terrorism, of violence in the service of justice,
divided Fanon from his French counterparts who demanded less blood
more cautiously spilled.
Algeria also provided Fanon with the raw material of a powerful
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