Frantz Fanon: A Portrait

by Alice Cherki, Nadia Benabid (Translator)

"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon's discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared.... Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own life, and it was for this reason that he was so engaging and disarming―so alive."―from the Introduction Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was born in Martinique, and in 1943 left to fight in Europe with Free French forces. After 1945 he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyons and began to write. His first analysis of the effects of racism and postcolonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, appeared in 1952 and would become a foundational text for the liberation movements of the 1960s and later for postcolonial studies. In 1952 he moved to Algeria and practiced at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in French Algeria until 1957. From that year he worked full time for the Algerian independence movement, including a brief appointment as the movement's ambassador in Ghana. One of Fanon's few surviving contemporaries, Alice Cherki worked closely with Fanon at the psychiatric hospital in Blida and then later for the Algerian cause in Tunisia. This book is a record of "an epoch, a life, and a body of work often viewed as inadmissible." Cherki offers a unique assessment of Fanon's complex personality, illuminating both his psychiatric practice―of which she says, "Fanon possessed a tremendous intuition about the unconscious and a great erudition in psychoanalytic theory"―and the sources of his political activism, of his intellectual career as a pivot of the quickly changing world. Given the continuing relevance of Fanon's insights into the enduring legacy of colonialism on the psyches of the colonized, this compelling and personal account of his life and work will be required reading for anyone interested in the consequences of empire.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 2006

Reviews

[Carolina Marchesin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma biografia não tão biografia, mais testemunho, desse homem incrível. A autora conheceu Fanon na Argélia, no hospital de Blida-Joinville, e foi sua amiga próxima até seus últimos dias. É um relato que só uma pessoa próxima poderia fazer, pra além das informações mais factuais.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

leider hab ich das buch bei weitem nicht ganz verstanden, da ich den fehler gemacht hab, es auf französisch zu lesen. fand es trotzdem sehr gut, da es besonders auch einen einblick auf die entwicklungen in algerien gibt und wie diese fanons denken beeinflusst haben. außerdem wird viel über die reaktionen auf fanons schriften und denken gesprochen, sowohl zu seiner zeit als auch heute

[Stephen Cowden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read a number of books about Fanon, which followed on from reading his two main books “Black Skin, White Masks” and “The Wretched of the Earth”. To me he is a compelling and utterly original thinker for the way he puts together questions about politics and psychology. Many of the books written about him focus on him as a theorist and activist of the anti-colonial movement, treating his psychological practice as something of a side issue. To me this gets Fanon the wrong way round. Fanon is first and foremost a Psychologist, and it is seeing the psychological consequences of colonialism as a black man himself and as Psychologist, that he produces his most important insights. In this sense after reading Fanon’s main works, where I would advise anyone to go to next is this incredible book by Alice Chekri. Chekri is a fascinating figure in her own right and not nearly enough of her own work is published in English. But this book gives you Fanon as a person, and Fanon as thinker whose ideas were always developing and in motion. What Chekri shows is that Fanon was very much a Psychologist but he was never content to allow the scientific status of Psychology to stop him from asking the deeper questions. He saw the inherent limitations of Psychology without needing to throw the baby out with the bath water, as so many (including Foucault) have done. To get Psychology to think through the conditions of its existence as a discipline Fanon turned to Philosophy on one hand, but always tested theory against his life experience. He was a profoundly dialectical thinker. Alice Chekri has written a book which allows us to see all these dimensions of Fanon. She doesn’t idealise Fanon and in showing both his strengths and limitations she allows us to see how deeply relevant he is to the left, feminist and anti-racist project so needed now.