![]() His father was a civil servant who worked in the customs office his mother, who evidently had Alsatian ancestors, had a shop and-according to David Macey, the author of the most deeply researched and judicious biography of Fanon 1-a head for business. Born in 1925 on the Antillean island of Martinique, a French possession, Fanon was reared in a household that had servants, private music lessons for his sisters, and, in addition to a comfortable home in the capital, a country house with luxuriant gardens. It is an awkward fact of history that our fiercest anticolonial leaders generally came from the educated bourgeoisie. How did a psychiatrist find himself in the midst of such madness? How did a son of the Antilles become an Algerian revolutionary? For that matter, how did a once-obscure figure emerge as the revolutionary intellectual “most relevant for the twenty-first century,” as Cornel West writes in an energetic introduction to the sixtieth-anniversary edition of The Wretched of the Earth? To understand where Fanon ended up, it’s helpful to understand how he started out. As Fanon and his comrades set out for Conakry by car, the flight on which they had been rebooked was diverted to Abidjan and searched by French security. Fanon was on his guard: everyone remembered how the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella had been captured four years earlier when his French-crewed Rabat-to-Tunis flight made an unscheduled stop in Algiers. Marvelously solicitous employees of Air France assured him that the airline would book them on a flight leaving the next day and cover their overnight expenses. ![]() They drew their guns on an empty bed, Fanon having stealthily had himself relocated.Ī year later, he was at an airport in Monrovia, Liberia, awaiting a flight to Conakry, Guinea, when he and his FLN companions were told that the plane was full. Then a local newspaper reported on the arrival of an injured FLN official to whom the explosion was seemingly connected, even naming the hospital that was treating him-where, sure enough, two armed men burst into the room he had been assigned. Fanon was spared only because a child’s errant ball triggered the bomb prematurely. Another close call: his confrères in Algeria’s National Liberation Front ( FLN) arranged for a car to pick him up at the airport-a car that their adversaries rigged with explosives. He was flown to Rome for medical treatment. Some suspected that the road had been mined, others that the vehicle had been sabotaged. ![]() In May 1959-to choose one consequential incident-he was being driven near a base that Algerian insurgents had set up on the Moroccan border when the driver lost control of the car and Fanon was hurled from it, badly injuring his back. Frantz Fanon was targeted as an Algerian revolutionary, but he was also a psychiatrist, and he knew how emotions could be linked with their opposites. It was at once a source of terror and a form of tribute.
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