by HAMZA HAMOUCHENE
What would Fanon say about the ongoing genocide in Palestine?
For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity … we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon’s dynamic and revolutionary thinking, always centered on creation, movement and becoming, remains utterly prophetic, vivid, inspiring, analytically sharp and morally committed to disalienation and emancipation from all forms of oppression. Fanon strongly and compellingly argued for a path to a future where humanity “advances a step further” and breaks away from the world of colonialism and the mold of European “universalism”. He represented the maturing of the anti-colonial consciousness and was a decolonial thinker par excellence. As a true embodiment of l’intellectuel engagé, he transformed the debates on race, colonialism, imperialism, otherness, and what it means for one human being to oppress another.
Despite his short life (he died from leukemia at the age of 36), Fanon’s thought is very rich and his work prolific, ranging from books and scientific papers to journalism and speeches. He wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, two years before the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam (1954), and his last book, the famous The Wretched of the Earth, a canonical work about the anti-colonialist and Third Worldist struggle, one year before Algerian independence (1962), during the period of African decolonization. In his trajectory and across his work we can see interactions between Black America and Africa, between the intellectual and the militant, between thought/theory and action/practice, between idealism and pragmatism, between individual analysis and collective movements, between the psychological life (he trained as a psychiatrist) and the physical struggle, between nationalism and Pan-Africanism, and finally between questions of colonialism and questions of neocolonialism.
It is neither a surprise nor a coincidence that we are witnessing a renewed interest in Fanon and his ideas since the October 7 Hamas attacks on the Zionist entity and occupying settler colony of Israel and the ensuing genocide against the Palestinians. Without any doubt, his analysis and thinking remain highly relevant and enlightening, due to the endurance of coloniality (which he analyzed) in its myriad forms, from settler colonialism in Palestine to neocolonialism in various parts of the global South. However, some of this renewed interest—particularly in relation to the situation in Palestine—succumbs to simplistic critiques and erroneous and insidious readings of his work that tend to distort it and to disconnect it from his anti-colonial and revolutionary praxis, as well as from his unwavering commitment to the liberation of the “wretched of the earth.” These supposedly “critical” endeavors cannot be dissociated from the broader attacks on Palestinians’ right to resist colonialism using any means necessary and the disdainful attitude toward people who show uncompromising solidarity with their resistance and liberation struggle. In some cases, the whole enterprise amounts to racism masquerading as intellectual discourse.
This is not new: there exist many reductive interpretations of Fanon, interpretations that eliminate either the historical/political dimension or the philosophical/psychological dimension of his work, depending on the social imperatives of the moment. Fanon was a political thinker, a revolutionary militant, and a psychiatrist, and all of these aspects of his life formed a coherent unity: dialectical, complementary, and enriching each other. After all, his was a project of combating alienation in all its forms: social, cultural, political and psychological. Fanon lived the life of a revolutionary, an ambassador, and a journalist, but it is impossible to separate these many lives from his scientific and clinical practice. Similarly, his expressions and articulations were not only those of a psychiatric doctor, but also those of a philosopher, a psychologist and a sociologist. Fanon was a pioneer precisely because he combined a commitment to social transformation with a commitment to the psychological liberation of individuals. His essential aim was to think about, and construct freedom as disalienation, taking place within a necessarily historical and political process.
Fanon, the revolutionary psychiatrist
Science depoliticized, science in the service of man, is often non-existent in the colonies.
— Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
Arriving at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria in 1953, Fanon realized quickly that colonization, in its essence, was a major producer of madness, hence the need for psychiatric hospitals in colonized countries. He enthusiastically undertook to revolutionize mainstream psychiatric practice, in accordance with the “desalienist” teaching of the Saint-Alban asylum and Professor Tosquelles. He saw how colonial psychiatry naturalized mental disorders that were determined by social and cultural factors. Scientific reductionism flourished in the colonies, in particular under the authority of Antoine Porot and his influential “Algiers school.” Fanon presented an incisive critique of colonial ethno-psychiatry by exposing its crude racism and justification of colonial oppression. He argued that colonialist psychiatry as a whole had to be desalienated.
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