Knife at the Throat

Frantz Fanon​ is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a vanished world. ‘Annihilated’ might be more accurate. Yet the voice breaks through to the present. Its distance from us – the way its cadence and logic seem to shrug aside the possibility of a future anything like ours – is transfixing. Its arguments are mostly disproved, its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.

Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase fits in the history of class struggle:

Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

Arise! Damned of the earth
Arise! Prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
It is the eruption of the end.
Let’s make a tabula rasa of the past
Slave crowd, arise! arise!
The world is going to change its basis
We are nothing, let us be everything!

How the British and Americans have struggled with Eugène Pottier’s great hymn. All those imperative exclamation marks! Two of them in one line, eventually, shouted out to a ‘slave crowd’ (‘slave’, not ‘enslaved’ or even ‘slavish’ or ‘servile’). The opening cry is almost as much a problem. How can ‘Debout!’ go into English (‘Arise!’ is dreadful)? It wasn’t until Socialist Songs in Chicago in 1900 that ‘ye wretched of the earth’ was hit on as an equivalent to ‘les damnés de la terre’ – the ‘ye’ too familiar, maybe, but ‘wretched’ a great leap. (I take it the translator was borrowing from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet on the Statue of Liberty.) Reason is thundering in its Etna crater. Those who are nothing – ‘the wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ – will soon be everything. The Commune is not dead. This is Fanon’s world.

I opened my copy of The Wretched of the Earth at random and found myself reading Fanon on the Mau Mau rebellion. It was built, he argues, out of ‘the great flood of young Kenyans coming in from the forests and countryside, and finding no place on the market’. The youths turn first to thieving, ‘debauchery’, alcohol, thuggery – transgression as a way of life. Then to revolt.

The constitution of a lumpenproletariat is a phenomenon that proceeds with its own logic, and neither the best efforts of the missionaries nor the diktats of the state can stop it. The lumpenproletariat, like a pack of rats at the base of a tree, however hard you kick them and pelt them with stones, go on gnawing at the root.

The shantytown represents the biological decision of the colonial subject to invade the enemy citadel whatever the cost, however deep underground the sappers have to go. Once a lumpenproletariat is established, once it threatens the ‘security’ of the city, it signifies an irreversible necrosis of colonial power, a gangrene at its core. And then, when they are called on, the pimps, the jobless, the hoodlums, the petty criminals launch themselves into the liberation struggle like so many staunch working men [‘comme de robustes travailleurs’]. These désoeuvrés, these déclassés … they find their way back to the nation.

It is a vanished idiom. (I’ve translated the passage again, trying to approximate its interweave of jargon and poetry. But English chokes on the mixture.) All Fanon’s nouns embarrass us: ‘nation’ and ‘logic’ perhaps even more than ‘lumpenproletariat’. His metaphors are dazzling and incorrigible, his psychology of insubordination naive. Sociologists disdain his hopes for the underclass. Marxists concur – his revision of class hierarchies is a scandal. And for all these reasons his writing escapes its archaic frame. In our unlikely present, wandering the ruins of neoliberalism – baking slum-cities, collapsing borders, ‘migrant crisis’, racism redivivus, drowned littoral, drone genocide, sexual violence unabated, war on terror shifting from continent to continent, leaders (as always) competing for murderer or charlatan-in-chief – only a language as outdated as Fanon’s will do.

Impeccable Frenchman though he may have been, the French were never prepared to take Fanon seriously. An Antillais, a psychiatre not a psychanalyste, a non-philosopher in thrall to a simplified existentialism, an alien unable to sympathise with the double bind of Algérie française. (‘The texts of Fanon … are frightening in their irresponsibility,’ Pierre Bourdieu told an interviewer. ‘You would have to be a megalomaniac to think you could say just any such nonsense.’) It is no accident, then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more troubled, undecided and dialogical book, aware on every page of the press of claimants on Fanon’s legacy as the years go by – absorbing and resisting the various readers, trying to reconcile them, admitting the strangeness and multifariousness of the figure they leave behind. It seems right that both biographers are explicit about the circumstances in which ‘Fanon’ – the image, the books, the voice inveighing against wretchedness – first lodged in their lives. Macey doesn’t recall exactly when he first read Fanon, but he knows what prepared him to be his reader: seeing a crowd of Algerians on the Île de la Cité in 1970, in search of work permits at the préfecture de police, systematically turned away and humiliated. (So many bicots, for whom even tutoiement was too good.) Shatz’s memories are less immediate, more American. He sees a picture of Fanon on the back jacket of his father’s Black Skin, White Masks. Black face, tweed jacket, striped tie. On the family bookshelves Fanon keeps company with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Some years later he reviews Macey’s biography for the New York Times. In 2002 he goes to Algeria, trying to understand the chaos and vengefulness – Islamists at war with the state from 1992 onwards, the army determined to reverse the victory of al-Jabhah al-Islāmiyah lil-Inqādh at the ballot box, more than 100,000 dead in the civil war – that had so quickly become the truth of post-colonialism. In 2015, back in Algeria, Shatz turns his mind to Fanon – looking for traces of the writer, talking to friends, hearing from new disciples. He tries twice to go to Blida, the town where Fanon ran his clinic. Both times he’s refused a visa. Protesters are on the streets again.

The differences between Macey’s biography and Shatz’s aren’t easy to sum up. Perhaps we could say that for Macey at the turn of the millennium, the idea of revolution – of a Third World freeing itself, through armed conflict, from the stranglehold of the First – was still close enough, alive enough, for it to provide the main thread of his story. He knew, of course, that the revolution had failed at the same time as it had succeeded. Yet the promise it had held out, of a world scoured of the cruellest forms of abjection and exploitation, had been real for so many, and one senses Macey all the time fighting off the feeling of its having been no more than illusion. Fanon’s death, therefore, can be narrated as tragedy. It is a downfall that tells us things – unwelcome things as well as wonders – about the nature of the original aspiration. Hubris and duplicity are twisted in with clarity and self-sacrifice. We’re reminded that Stalin and Mao were the Algerian insurgents’ contemporaries. Lenin was a sacred text. Among his comrades, Fanon had admired above all Abane Ramdane, the architect of the insurgency’s first provisional government and tactician of its armed struggle. How much Fanon was privy to, or part of, the power struggles within the crystallising FLN – the familiar structural enmity between a guerrilla army, its class constituents in free flow, its politics still in the making, and a ‘movement’ ensconced in Tunis, growing steadily into a Party – is something we shall never know for sure. (Shatz is scrupulous, maybe a touch generous, in handling the evidence.) But it’s clear that Fanon was aware, in 1957, of how Abane had died – lured to a meeting with the king of Morocco, stopped on the road by his FLN rivals, strangled to death. When Fanon’s newspaper, months later, pictured Abane as ‘dead on the field of honour’ – when it declared that he had been wounded in a firefight with the French, and had fought for his life at the start of 1958 – it was a necessary lie.

‘Necessary’ is a Fanon word; Shatz is alert to this too. Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. His agrégation French moves crisply among the categories. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various identities and contradictions its subject struggled with the hardest. Macey seems to believe that Revolution and Revolutionary, both with a capital R – their unfolding reality, their scope, their enemies, their idiom, their imagery, what sorts of conduct might be entailed in their service – are the fragile, but discernible, threads through Fanon’s labyrinth. But is he right? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to see Fanon’s story as turning, whether he wanted it to or not, on the colour of his skin? Isn’t Black Skin, White Masks his best book by far? Many now think so. To the extent that Fanon ever surpassed it (as a writer, as a psychologist, as someone able to give voice to an aspect of the human condition) doesn’t his subject become ‘alienation and freedom’?1  And aren’t these categories essentially further ways, better ways (he hoped), of thinking the problem of black and white? The dreadful opposites are now envisaged, most vividly in Fanon’s psychiatric case histories, as moments in a dialectic – individual and social salvation depending now (he hopes) on reversal, transfiguration, nothing becoming everything. ‘Je suis solidaire de l’Être dans la mesure où je le dépasse.’ Black, for instance – as a category, as a positive or negative – is always on its way in later Fanon towards social and perceptual non-being. (Joining the dead, the ancestors, the gods, the crisscross of kinship, the totems, the tricksters, the evil eye – all those crowding materialities that humans lived with for most of their time on earth.)

But was black on its way to extinction? This too is a Fanon question, groaning between the lines. Isn’t civilisation – the very notion of humanity – unthinkable without a savagery or animality always threatening it? And isn’t the bearer of non-humanness always non-white? Isn’t black versus white indelible – as constitutive a fact of the species as infant helplessness, the incestuous family, the drama of attachment and loss … aggression, misogyny, fetishism, fear of the Other, belief in the self? Aren’t all of these vulnerabilities and disavowals bound to be stuffed, in the end, within racism’s shining armour? Doesn’t the evidence suggest as much?

I believe that Fanon would have answered ‘No’ to all the questions above, except the last one. He was a psychiatrist, therefore a pessimist, never able to forget the catastrophe of (not) growing up; his patients never let him forget the monotony of human bad faith; but he was a dialectical thinker, and therefore always at least half convinced that the worse things are, the worse things had been, the more a revaluation of all values might be in the making. A revolution, he believed – we’ve seen him already stating the case – is more likely to be made by rats and pimps and pétroleuses than spokesmen in phony fatigues. And it is the peculiar nature of this optimism-pessimism – the way so many of Fanon’s sentences give voice to a ‘Debout!’ that truly issues from the depths – that makes his pastness contemporary. I read the most powerful texts written under his aegis in recent years – the merciless Afropessimism (2020) of Frank Wilderson III, for instance, or Daniel José Gaztambide’s new Decolonising Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch – and see them learning from him to look horror in the face.2

This leads me to a difficult central point in Fanon’s writing: the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. It remains a provocation that this chapter, speaking for violence’s purgative power, prefaces the book – seeming to suggest that all its later, less ‘irresponsible’ analyses, on the limits of spontaneous action, on the paradoxes of nationalism and so on, are as nothing without it. It’s not only boors like Bourdieu who pretend to be outraged as they turn the pages. The chapter is outrageous – real readers (Hannah Arendt first among them) are saddened and taken aback by it. The question is whether the case it presents is a realistic one.

Let’s start with Fanon’s conclusion: that violence is not simply a sad necessity in a struggle for liberation, but is in itself a constructive and cathartic form of life – the word Fanon uses is ‘praxis’. The conclusion depends on several premises. First, and fundamentally, there is Fanon’s view of the reality concealed by the inert word ‘decolonisation’. To us, outsiders looking back, the word seems to indicate a change of ownership of the state. But that isn’t, or wasn’t, what happened, Fanon believed: it may or may not be a shorthand for the end result, but certainly not for the process itself. And the process was what mattered, what moved the event out of the endless round of ‘politics by other means’. It mattered because no one in his right mind (the mind of the Marxist and sociologist) thought it could or should have happened at all. Revolutions, after all, are made by ‘rising classes’, in circumstances of change, contradiction, re-constellation of the social order. They are not made by the hopelessly oppressed. They do not come out of an immobile nowhere. They cannot be built from the silence, the bitterness, the subjection and passivity of the peasantry – from the fatalism of those without history, from all their superstitions and fears, their fixation on ownership, their religion of the earth. But in Algeria it was. Mass violence brought down an empire.

Right minds will no doubt remind us that none of the peasant characteristics just listed was conjured away in Algeria by the decade of armed struggle. They will point to the bloodbath of the 1990s – to Islamism and conservatism and jacquerie. But how are we to decide if the complex realities summed up, or condescended to, in those three terms are not necessary weapons in any peasantry’s battle with the state, surviving – intensifying, becoming more violent – because the enemy, the ‘modernisers’, are now intent on a fight to the finish? This question haunts Fanon’s pages, and Shatz’s.

Another way​ of putting Fanon’s difficult originality would be this. The essential move in The Wretched of the Earth is simply to envisage ‘decolonisation’ from the point of view of the oppressed. Clearly Fanon, like any bourgeois intellectual, is not going to be able to occupy that point of view, or sustain it. I did say ‘envisage’. What had happened in Algeria in the later 1950s, in the mountains and countryside, remained in many respects a mystery. Fanon admits he is pushing at the limits of his knowledge when he deals with it, building his picture of revolution, in the places where it had been crucial, from clues and speculation, gleaned partly from testimony from comrades returned from the hinterland, partly from his work as a psychiatrist. But about one thing he is clear. The wretched of the earth had risen. The atmosphere of peasant society had been transformed for a while, and the transformation had taken place at the level of the everyday – the ‘lived’. That was the level, it followed, at which the Algerian revolution had to be thought about.

Fanon was very far from being a naif. He knew that campaigns of terror in key cities had been crucial to the revolution’s survival, and that without Abane’s guerrilla army the French would no doubt have regained control of the countryside. He is aware that ‘decolonisation’ was taking place (in his time) in the context of Cold War and a globalising capitalism. He knows that it had turned out to be in the interest of capital for empires to dissolve into markets, ‘strategic alliances’, open sources of labour and materials, congeries of consumers. He did not expect Algeria – still less South Africa or Angola or the Congo – to reach an independence free from the attentions of puppeteers. He writes at length, in The Wretched of the Earth and elsewhere, about the making of nationhood (‘conscience nationale’) that had to begin once the revolution was over: the reconstruction of institutions, the invention of new ones, the struggle to perpetuate the participation of ‘the masses’ once the fighting had died down. (What Fanon would have made of the effort, for two or three years immediately following independence, to organise various sectors of the Algerian economy, including various kinds of agriculture, into comités d’autogestion and conseils des travailleurs, we shall never know. Similarly, the suppression of such councils from 1965 onwards, a dimension of the counter-revolution that has been largely forgotten.)

But none of these later qualifications and recognitions alters the message of Fanon’s ‘On Violence’. At the heart of the revolution had been a peasant uprising, vengeful and appalling. The French state’s answer – the torture chambers, the fortified hamlets, the bombing, the mass executions – was, with its obfuscation and hypocrisies, even worse. But comparisons are useless here. What matters is to understand the function of violence – indeed, of vengefulness and atrocity – at moments of crisis and breakdown. What, in a word, does violence do to a ‘social group’?

It depends, Fanon says, on the group. He is an empiricist. Here’s where his first serious interpreter and critic, Hannah Arendt, gets him wrong, I think. Inevitably, and eloquently, she parses his argument in universal terms – as a description of one extreme state of the human, one recurrent human condition, and its effect on understanding, being-together. Violence and the proximity of death go together, she reminds us. (The word ‘death’ is a rarity in Fanon’s pages.) Death, faced individually, is the most anti-political experience there is. It drives us back to absolute individuality. ‘But faced collectively and in action, death changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity.’ We experience ‘the potential immortality of the group’. ‘It is as though life itself, the immortal life of the species, nourished, as it were, by the sempiternal dying of its individual members, is “surging upward”, is actualised in the practice of violence.’

This is inspiring, and maybe, from Arendt, unexpected in its lyricism. The date of composition – 1969 – is important. But I wonder what Fanon would have made of it. When he talks of collectivity and vitality, and of the effect of violence on either, his language is entirely different. Arendt’s integers are the individual and the species (or its representative, a bonded indestructible group). Fanon’s are the subjected and the subject, the non-being and the being – those last two nouns with or without the substantive. And always behind the absolutism of his categories lies the seeming indelibility of race, of skin colour. For subjection is black. Only the bicot knows what non-being truly is.

Fanon’s account of violence is uninspiring – that is his hardest message. Violence is entirely ordinary, known to its usual victims through and through, as the very texture of their everydayness. When they take this banality into their own hands, it is to transfigure not it, but them. The thing itself is vile. But it is the only weapon at their disposal. It is the only way out of their psychic stalemate: the immense structure of fears and false palliatives that has naturalised – super-naturalised – their grovelling to the master. Fanon is merciless on this subject: no one has ever offered a more withering picture of ‘traditional society’ and the disabling side to its ideologies. The evil eye, the leopard men, zombies, night-time terrors, the thousand threats of pollution. Possession by spirits. Dance (even dance) as a hopeless pseudo-release of libido.

Of course, the master is there in the peasant’s phantasmagoria. He is hated and belittled: monstered, dehumanised, served his own dish in return. But this ‘permanent confrontation at the level of phantasy’ is useless.

By entangling me in this inextricable web, where every action repeats itself with crystalline inevitability, it is the permanence of my world – our world – that is affirmed. Believe me, zombies are more terrifying than colonials. And the problem, it follows, is no longer knuckling down to the barbed-wire world of colonialism, but thinking twice before urinating, spitting or venturing out after dark.

Only real violence, Fanon thinks, spilling out from the shadows, is enough to break the spell. Vampires and djinns at last leave the village. The possessed recognise themselves as the dispossessed. The bards stop singing the tale of the tribe. ‘Le dos au mur, le couteau sur la gorge ou, pour être plus précis, l’électrode sur les parties génitales, le colonisé va être sommé de ne plus se raconter d’histoires.’

This is, to be sure, an extreme moment in ‘On Violence’. The contempt packed into ‘sommé de ne plus se raconter d’histoires’ is hard to reproduce in English. Constance Farrington, translating in 1961, had it as ‘have no more call for his fancies’. Richard Philcox in 2004 is more literal: ‘bound to stop telling stories’. But reducing the whole world of mythology and magic to ‘telling stories’, as Fanon does – the cruelty and confidence of the seven French words he uses, the certainty that with them ‘du passé faisons table rase’ – that’s Fanon in full untranslatable flight.

Violence as Fanon conceived it, then, was a cure for the almost incurable. It was a weapon in the hands of non-beings, a way out of nothingness. ‘The last shall be first.’ ‘We are nothing, let us be everything.’ (Remember that Pottier’s poem was written in 1871, with the cruelties of ‘la semaine sanglante’ only weeks in the past.) The moments in Fanon’s text when his rhetoric tends towards ennoblement or rhapsody are very few. Violence is ugly. The sentiments that fuel it are not high-minded. ‘We want what the people in power have.’ ‘Land and bread: what shall we do to have land and bread?’ ‘Ce que le peuple demande, c’est qu’on mette tout en commun.’ (This is clear enough, but seems to panic translators. Both Philcox and Farrington opt for ‘pooled’.) ‘For the colonised, life can only grow from the decomposing cadaver of the colonist.’ ‘At the individual level, violence detoxifies.’ At last, the misrecognitions begin to be seen as such. Other people are acted with, acted on – they come out of the world of phantoms. Violence is totalising – which for Fanon is a positive, meaning the making of new unities, new acknowledgments of the Other, new disbelief in the inviolability (or total vulnerability) of the self. And when it comes to nation-building, which Fanon knows is a process with many stages and false steps, it emerges that this too is held together by an initial ‘mortar mixed in anger and blood’. Violence, he says, produces a hands-on scepticism in those who know it first hand, a taste for the concrete in politics, a distrust of charisma. Violence drags down demagogues.

Whatever we think of these propositions, and however many crosscurrents there are to them in Fanon’s pages, I believe they represent the main line of his thought. It is a horrifying thought, no doubt – one that most readers, I suspect, will not want to entertain. All the more so, as I’ve said before, because it is at once so archaic and up-to-date. It speaks to Khan Younis and Kibbutz Be’eri. It says things we know are true, don’t want to think about, and dares to give them a shape. ‘Knife at the throat, electrodes on the genitals.’

It is easy to see why readers want to know about Fanon’s life. His voice is relentless yet forgiving. It can’t be the voice of an intellectual. How close was Fanon to the realities he talks about? How much did he share the hatreds and nullities? There is a hard edge to his prose – does it speak to a hardness in his life? Did he love other people? How did sexual violence, which he talks about often in his harrowing case histories, fit into his map of oppression and freedom? How good a doctor was he? What kind of ‘story’ did he tell himself about himself? Maybe he was impatient of any such indulgence. But he was a psychiatrist – he knew there are stories and stories, not all of them spurs to inaction. Even fate is a double-edged fantasy. Blackness may be my fate. That may make me all the more determined to have it be something that is mine – something I live as opposed to fight against. Or both.

Shatz,​ just as much as Macey, wishes to tell the story of the making of a revolutionary. He too knows that in Fanon’s case the identity ‘revolutionary’ held together (just) many half-identities, many human conditions, some embraced and some rejected, some explicit, others living on in an inflexible Unconscious. There was his Creole upbringing – his privilege and inferiority, his love-hate for his father, his belonging and not belonging to France. There was, to repeat, his being and not being black – in Martinique, then in France and Algeria (who was he in either place?), then in sub-Saharan Africa. And his being in love with a language. And being a doctor of souls – confronted daily by bodies and minds in pain.

I came away from The Rebel’s Clinic admiring its treatment of all these aspects of the man. But most of all I warmed to the book’s failure to make them add up. There are many examples of this, but the one that seems most telling is ‘Voice of the Damned’, the long chapter in which Shatz takes the measure of ‘On Violence’. Or maybe I should say, takes the measure of his own ambivalence towards it – and, one senses, towards Fanon as a writer. ‘Fanon’s argument for violence was, in part, an official defence of the FLN’s historic decision to launch the armed struggle on 1 November 1954 … Yet his observations about violence were often rich and suggestive. [The ‘yet’ here is interesting.] As always with Fanon, they were based on a mixture of clinical analysis and literary inspiration.’ But was the result a mixture or a mishmash? ‘“On Violence” can be read either as a psychiatric, phenomenological account of the lived experience of armed struggle or as an impassioned defence of armed struggle as a uniquely authentic path to collective and individual liberation.’ Or maybe both. ‘The chapter is perhaps best read as a Hegelian parable, in which the dialectic of the lord and the bondsman [I prefer the old master and slave] is transposed to the struggle of coloniser and colonised.’ Fanon is under the spell of Alexandre Kojève, that crucial interpreter of Hegel for existentialists. ‘“On Violence” tells a story with only two characters: settler and native … The stark binarism of the chapter, with its vision of disintoxicated former natives experiencing rebirth as men over the corpses of their colonial tormentors, is, moreover, a source of its disturbing power as literature.’

I’m not sure what Shatz intends by his last word and its italicisation. But unthinkingly I agree with both, and try to understand why. What I think I mean by ‘literature’ in Fanon’s case is, yes, partly the invention of a style. The style is peculiar (if my response to Fanon’s French is at all accurate) because it is graceless without being deliberately ugly: the correctness of Fanon’s spoken French was a matter of note in his lifetime, and Shatz produces testimonies to the effect that correctness had on ‘native speakers’. It was too correct, and unnerved them. Perhaps because – this is my speculation – they couldn’t work out if it was the sign of an outsiderness, or of an irony at the kind of insiderness that only ‘French’ provides. An irony, or an impatience. An impatience with style can (if you’re good enough) make a style of its own.

Frantz Fanon (1957)

The picture of the man in action that seems to me most telling is of an FLN press conference in Tunis in 1957, at which he’s reading a statement denouncing the French state’s censure of a massacre – an episode of revolutionary terror – that had taken place earlier that year in the mountains near Melouza. (We owe the correct identification of the event to James S. Williams, whose pithy Life of Fanon bears down hard on many items of received wisdom.3 The photo is usually said to be of a writers’ conference in 1959. As Williams puts it, the idea that Fanon had time for such things in 1959 is fanciful.) By the time of the 1957 conference, Fanon and the rest of the central committee – they’re looking on as their spokesman reads from his script – were well aware that Melouza had been a settling of accounts between factions in their own movement. Fanon ‘performed his duty’, Shatz writes. ‘In any case, he had few other options: he was the spokesman of a secretive and authoritarian organisation that did not hesitate to punish – and eliminate – members who disobeyed orders.’ The photograph is evidence in the case. Look at the concentration on the face of Commander Hamaï, the man in the light jacket to the left. But then look back at Fanon. Isn’t there a relish and authorial pride – a care for every full stop – in his eyes, his pursed lips, the two exquisite fingers tracing the text? ‘The rhetorical force of The Wretched of the Earth is undeniable,’ Shatz writes at one point. ‘Yet it also has, at times, the air of an official document: a message to the prince, delivered by his most virtuous, incorrigible, omniscient adviser.’ This seems right. The photograph, to me, shows a man convinced of his virtue. And who are we to say he should not have been?

‘For the good of the cause.’ These are defunct agonies and duplicities, we are meant to think; but they keep coming back from the dead. Listen to Fanon in the chapter ‘Mésaventures de la conscience nationale’. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘everyone must be compromised in the fight for le salut commun.’ (Farrington settles for ‘common good’ here, Philcox for ‘common salvation’. Philcox puts ‘involved’ for ‘compromised’. I too recoil from the Great Terror diction. But Fanon has only just started.) ‘There are no clean hands, there are no innocents, no spectators. We are all constantly dirtying our hands in the filth of our homelands and the terrifying emptiness of our minds. Every spectator is a coward and a traitor.’ Shatz shudders at the lines – he calls them eerie, but at the same time he knows they are boilerplate. He mentions Sartre’s Les Mains sales – required reading for Stalinists in the 1950s. He thinks inevitably of Lenin (one of the few mentions of Fanon’s Leninism in the book): Lenin in the same breath as Rousseau, with Robespierre his essential reader. ‘Volonté générale, salut public, il faut compromettre tout le monde.’ The lines, read again, are horrible, slightly gloating, slightly beautiful, slightly overdone (Sartre on amphetamines). They are literature – and they won’t go away.