Volume 6, Number 5 · March 31, 1966
The Black Rousseau
By Francois Bondy
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Grove, 255 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Frantz Fanon, a Negro doctor born in Martinique, died of leukemia in a Washington hospital in 1961, before the end of the Algerian war. He had already become a hero to the leaders of the Algerian Revolution. The 'provisional government' had his body brought to Tunis and 'in the middle of the war the Algerians paused to honor one of their own in a national funeral.' So Simone de Beauvoir tells us in the last volume of her Memoirs. In contrast to many of Mme. de Beauvoir's recollections, the portrait of Frantz Fanon is both sympathetic and objective. Frantz Fanon, whom the provisional government had not only considered to be a citizen of the new Algerian nation, but sent as an Ambassador to Accra, had formerly been a psychiatrist at the French military hospital of Blida in Algeria; he had observed there the effect of torture on the personalities of the tortured and torturers alike. Having become, not without difficulty, a French M.D., and having married a white Frenchwoman, Fanon was 'integrated' in Paris. He chose to join the revolutionary forces, to uproot himself from France. But did he do so? Fanon seems, in retrospect, much more a typical voice of the left-wing Parisian intelligentsia than an expression of the 'emergent' colonial nations which Sartre and his followers thought were replacing the European proletariat as the true 'wretched of the earth' (a quote from 'L'Internationale').
Review, 1614 words
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