Fiorenzo Polito reviews a book “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon” by Adam Shatz (Bloomsbury Publishing 2024).
Fiorenzo Polito is a social researcher and development practitioner with a Ph.D. in Sociology and Political Science from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. Specializing in gender justice, social inclusion and organisational development, he combines academic research with consultancy services for the non-profit sector.
Against canonization
In “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon”, Adam Shatz takes on the daunting task of presenting a wide-ranging and in-depth examination of psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Shatz, the US editor of the London Review of Books, proves a skilled chronicler, navigating the complex layers of Fanon’s life and challenging the somewhat simplistic narratives that have often surrounded the Martinique-born revolutionary luminary’s life. While this biography may not offer a groundbreaking perspective on Frantz Fanon’s existence, a subject that has been thoroughly explored in numerous works, its success lies in providing significant value through a contextualised understanding of the Martinican psychiatrist. It may not be ideal reading for those seeking an in-depth exploration of specific aspects, but it will prove extremely useful to the general reader who is interested in gaining a comprehensive overview of Fanon by placing his work within the broader context of his life and the socio-political environment in which he lived and operated.
Shatz’s biography not only explores the many roles Fanon played during his short but influential life (Fanon died in 1961 at age 36), but also sheds light on the wider socio-political world he passionately sought to transform. Known for his contributions as a public intellectual and his extensive reporting from Algeria on French and Middle Eastern cultures, Shatz takes us readers through Fanon’s life, lived “as a perpetual stranger,” in a long parabola from his time as a soldier in the French army during the Second World War to his role as a non-Muslim active participant in the Algerian resistance during the anti-colonial struggle. But Shatz’s exploration goes beyond mere homage; it seeks to restore complexity to a figure who is often polarizing for his militant stance, offering a nuanced perspective on Fanon’s contradictions, fragilities and idiosyncrasies.
The biography explores the various masks Fanon adopted throughout his life, some imposed by circumstance, others the product of his own imagination, as Shatz himself affirms. Fanon occupies a nuanced and ambiguous position as an intellectual celebrity, with his writings used for a variety of often conflicting agendas, spanning secular and Islamist, black nationalist and cosmopolitan movements, each seeking to appropriate his indefatigable energy. Shatz’s book aims to counter the fragmentation of Fanon by those who seek to isolate specific aspects and to restore a sense of wholeness to the man and his work, a task he approaches with evident admiration but not unqualified approval or canonizing intent. Shatz rather frames this work as an account of the impossible life of a perpetual stranger.
Reconstructing constant exile
Shatz takes a conventional chronological approach to explore the complex life of Fanon, the perpetual exile and prophet. The narrative begins with his upbringing in Martinique, where his socialist family passionately supported the French Republic, which had abolished slavery. The post-colonial condition of Martinique, officially recognised as a French department, intensified Fanon’s rebellion against the subtle mechanisms of colonialism and discrimination. This period also raised doubts in his mind about the efficacy of achieving black rights through democratic reform.
Next, we see young Fanon during his time in France, first as a member of the Free French Forces in 1943 and later as a medical student in Lyon in 1948, two events that definitely shattered his own notion of French subjectivity. Notwithstanding his privileged position as a West Indian French citizen, he had to witness segregation among soldiers in the war and had the feeling of being “different” in what he called “white Lyon”, confronting a reality that contradicted the fraternity in which he believed.
Later, as a clinical psychiatrist in Algeria, Fanon dedicated himself to the liberation of the racially oppressed, imagining his hospital as a “healing collective” in which the boundaries between doctor and patient would eventually fall. There he developed the disalienation methods of the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelle and introduced his “institutional psychotherapy”, a form of psychiatry based on decolonization, political consciousness and community. In Fanon’s innovative approach, personal pathologies are seen not as individual but as political symptoms, giving the mentally ill control over their lives in order to decolonize, humanize and empower marginalised populations. Shatz presents it as a “collective approach to care” that fuses insights from Freud and Marx, emphasizes mental illness as a reflection of social conditions, and highlights Fanon’s transformative role in mental health discourse within broader social dynamics.
In French-occupied Algeria, Fanon joined the FLN, recognizing political solutions as the only lasting remedy for social ills. He rejected the false cooperation between colonizer and colonized imposed by the French state’s model of “departmentalisation”, which effectively turned France’s “vieilles colonies” into French regions. Fanon began to play the dual role of revolutionary and doctor in order to heal colonial wounds and achieve justice. During the Algerian war of independence, the end of which he would never see, he resisted French rule, treated FLN soldiers and witnessed the psychological toll of colonial warfare, highlighting the “mental disorder of colonial war”.
Expelled from Algeria in 1957 because of the rebel sympathies of his hospital, Fanon moved to Tunis and continued his revolutionary activities there. As a doctor and writer, he articulated the aims of the FLN and acted as a propagandist for the organization despite its authoritarian development. During what turned out to be the last chapter of his life, Fanon saw universalism in the intertwined destinies of North and Sub-Saharan Africa and advocated a united front against colonialism across the continent. His commitment to African unity, shortly before he died of leukaemia at the age of 36, underlined his belief in a single path to freedom.
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Shatz’s Fanon – too contextualized?
Throughout the book, Shatz brilliantly illuminates Fanon’s life journey, drawing on a variety of influential writers to create a comprehensive synthesis that blurs the boundaries between biography and critical essay. Indeed, he interweaves evocations of Fanon’s intellectual influences, such as Aimé Césaire’s Négritude and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, with the psychiatrist’s perspectives on clinical psychology and colonialism, as well as analyses of Fanon’s key works, particularly Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), to which he devotes entire chapters.
Although the book is generally coherent and engaging, two criticisms can be made. First, the book occasionally indulges in what could be perceived as an excessive focus on detail. Ironically, the very strength of the book, its ability to contextualize Fanon in his own time and culture, becomes a weakness when Fanon disappears for whole passages and chapters, overshadowed by a procession of names and details of contemporaries or successors who reflected his thought. Fanon’s own thoughts are somewhat lost in the crowd of names, historical and political figures, scholars and activists, making certain sections difficult to read due to the abundance of the parenthetical within the parenthetical in the narrative.
Secondly, the book focuses mainly on Fanon the public figure and offers little insight into Fanon the private person. Indeed, perhaps precisely because he was a curiously impersonal figure, the book offers few traces of Fanon’s personal side, which could be seen as one of his most critical aspects and which could have been accessed through the very sources Shatz has used, i.e., Fanon’s secretary Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, whom Shatz knew personally. This might have allowed a deeper exploration of his tensions and contradictions, and a deeper understanding of certain controversial aspects, such as Fanon’s not-so-veiled homophobia or misogyny. Although Shatz expresses a willingness to explore such tensions, he at times tends towards generosity when a more critical stance would be warranted.
Fanon contemporarily
At its core, the book deftly addresses contemporary issues and resonates with the concerns of today’s audiences. In an interview, Pankaj Mishra has aptly underlined Fanon’s enduring relevance as a crucial guide to the continuing challenges of white supremacy in the West and the moral failings of the so-called “darker nations”, even six decades after the publication of his The Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, the contents of this book link Fanon’s insights to the contemporary political, cultural and social landscape as it moves from anti-colonial to postcolonial perspectives, and speaks directly to contemporary challenges, examining global inequality, violence and injustice in the aftermath of colonialism. Despite critics who suggest that Fanon’s vision for the postcolonial world is in tatters and dismiss his universalist rhetoric as antiquated, his critique of power and international relations remains compelling. Indeed, over the years, Fanon’s work has become an integral part of the academic canon, influencing fields from postcolonial theory to cultural studies and leaving an indelible mark on discussions of decolonisation, anti-racism and Afro-pessimism.
In the epilogue, Shatz highlights Fanon’s prophetic foresight, particularly in predicting the power dynamics in independent Africa. Fanon’s warnings about postcolonial obstacles, including corruption, autocratic rule, xenophobic nationalism, the lingering trauma of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger, have proved remarkably prescient. Crucially, Fanon’s spectres continue to linger among today’s global “wretched of the earth”, including political and economic refugees, migrants, and all the perpetually marginalised, impoverished and imprisoned. When we consider its inherent contradictions, the interpretative responses his work has provoked, and the accusations he and his legacy have faced both during and after his lifetime, we can appreciate the profound meaning of Fanon’s own admission when he remarked in a rare diary entry: “Not everything is so simple”.
