Adam Shatz Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted?

It is, of course, deeply gratifying to be longlisted for the Baillie Gifford, given the prestige that the prize carries, as well the extraordinary list of books under consideration. When I set out to research the life and work of Frantz Fanon, prizes of this sort were the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t even sure that a book about Fanon – a subject of acute interest in postcolonial studies and among political activists, but nonetheless a relatively obscure figure in the UK (as one London-based editor explained in his rejection of my proposal!) – would attract much attention at all beyond the usual suspects. But history seems to have intervened, in the last year, to make Fanon seem all the more urgent and topical. This is hardly the first time Fanon’s writings have experienced a revival of interest. In periods of crisis sparked by conflicts involving racism and injustice, his work tends to acquire a newfound immediacy - an immediacy that is alternately instructive and misleading, since Fanon is writing about a world very different from our own, whatever its resemblances, whatever the traces it has deposited. And throughout the writing of this book, particularly the epilogue on the ‘spectres of Fanon’ since his death, I’ve found myself reflecting on what in Fanon remains timely, and what has receded into history. I’m still puzzling over this, because the relationship between the pertinent and the obsolete can shift under the pressure of unforeseen events. He is both a prophetic thinker and a radiant (blinding?) anachronism – and how people react to him, I’ve discovered, is a kind of Rorschach test. 

How did you conduct your research?

Strangely enough, I began my research without even knowing that I was doing research about Fanon, or even that I would be writing a book about him. Back in 2001 I conducted interviews in Paris with Mohammed Harbi, a historian and former FLN activist who knew (and quarrelled with) Fanon in Tunis, and with Alice Cherki, an Algerian-Jewish psychoanalyst who was Fanon’s intern and confidante in Algeria, and who went on to write a biographical portrait of him. At the time, I was interested in their experiences of Algeria’s war of independence, on which I’d begun to write for The Nation, and later the New York Review of Books. Little did I know that their testimony about Fanon – later amplified by subsequent conversations – would become a part of this book. It was only in 2018 that I began to interview historical figures who knew Fanon, including Harbi; Guy Sitbon, a Tunisian-Jewish journalist who befriended Fanon in Tunis; Herbert Weiss, an Africa researcher who had a fascinating encounter with Fanon in Leopoldville/Kinshasa, during Lumumba’s crisis in the Congo; and, above all, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, Fanon’s secretary and friend in Tunis, to whom he dictated his books A Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth.

I also spent considerable time in the Fanon archives at IMEC, the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, housed in a former abbey in Caen, France – a particularly thrilling experience, since I was able to hold Fanon’s vrai faux passport, the document that allowed him to travel under the nom de guerre Ibrahim Omar Fanon.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I read widely and deeply. I pored over Fanon’s writings in the original French, teasing out their political and biographical meanings, and I tried to reconstruct Fanon’s vast intellectual and political universe by exploring the histories of existential philosophy, phenomenology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and, not least, the literature on decolonization, Algerian history, the creation and the disintegration of France’s African empire. The more I read, the more I became aware that the book I was writing, though focused on Fanon, was also a collective portrait of movements and individuals who set themselves the task of overthrowing colonial rule – and the even greater task of envisioning and building another, more just world that would take its place. 

How do you think Fanon's ideas resonate with today's conversations around race and colonialism?

Fanon’s ideas could not resonate more deeply with the conversations about race and colonialism that have exploded since Black Lives Matter and which have grown even sharper and more contentious in the wake of 7 October and Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon examined the ‘lived experience’ of racial and colonial subjugation, and the dynamics of resistance on the part of the oppressed, with verve, visceral power, and striking insights that he derived from his work as a psychiatrist in what I call ‘the rebel’s clinic’. He wrote from the vantage point of the oppressed, the ‘wretched [in French, ‘the damned’] of the earth’, but he was also remarkably attuned to the way that racism, colonial ideology, and complicity in a system of domination shaped the lived experiences – and the dream life, the fantasies and nightmares – of the perpetrators, who were also, in a sense, the victims of the system they upheld. Much of what we take for granted today, particularly the understanding that racism results in psychological damage and even physical harm, and is therefore a public health concern, can be traced to Fanon’s writing. But he is also refreshingly out of sync with contemporary thinking – or rather with contemporary pieties – in his insistence that we have the power to overcome the horrors of race, an illusion that is, after all, a human, not a biological creation; and in his radical universalism, which led him to reject the temptations of a politics based on cultural belonging or narrow conceptions of identity. ‘The Black man is not, anymore than the white,’ he argued – an idea that remains challenging in our time, when, understandably, many anti-racists have sought a sanctuary from racial domination in a consoling politics of identitarianism. 

How did you approach the task of balancing Fanon's controversial ideas concerning violence and its uses, with the clear positive impact his work has inspired?

I would push back slightly against the question, which seems predicated on the idea that these ideas were controversial and therefore negative in their impact, compared to his ‘positive’ (i.e., non-violent) legacy. Fanon was certainly a committed advocate of violence in the struggle against colonial rule, which was, we shouldn’t forget, a system founded on and maintained by violence. The conquest of Algeria in the 19^th century led to roughly a million deaths over three or four decades, about a third of the indigenous population; some Algerians were killed in the so-called ‘enfumades’: i.e., asphyxiated by fires set by French soldiers outside of caves where Algerians took refuge. And Algerians had made countless efforts to achieve reform, equality and inclusion as French citizens, all of which had been scuttled by the resistance of the Europeans of Algeria, the pieds noirs. And after France’s violent repression of the demonstrations on V-Day, 1945, the massacres of Sétif and Guelma, in which tens of thousands of Algerian civilians were killed under French bombardment, violent resistance was all but inevitable. When Fanon argues that decolonization is an inherently violent process, he is describing a historical reality: if a violent system of domination refuses to be dismantled, and continues to impose itself on people seeking freedom, it will ultimately be met with a violent – and sometimes a very ugly – response. Fanon, to his credit, does not seek to conceal the less attractive aspects of violence of the oppressed, even as he defends it. The colonized, he says at one point, is a persecuted man who constantly dreams of becoming a perpetrator. As a psychiatrist, Fanon understood that victimization does not ennoble the victim.

To be sure, there is another side of this argument – a mix of psychological insight and ecstatic projection – that is disputable and even dangerous, namely the claim that violence helps the colonized to overcome their feelings of impotence and fatalism, and to achieve a sense of power and selfhood. (In his notorious preface, on which Fanon maintained a discreet silence, Jean-Paul Sartre offered an even more extreme and indeed unhinged version of this argument.) Taken to its extreme, this claim could underwrite all manner of violence excesses, or what some would call, quite simply, terrorism. But it seems to me that Fanon’s view that violence is of psychological importance to national liberation movements is 1. borne out by the historical record, for better and for worse; and 2. is echoed by other thinkers, particularly nationalist thinkers, who have emphasized the role played by violence in insurrection (including both Zionists and Palestinians). Why, then, is Fanon’s treatment of violence ‘controversial’? It is in large part because, like Malcolm X, he is Black man making a case for violent self-defence, and some readers, particularly white readers, are not comfortable with this.

Alas, what many readers forget – and that includes both detractors and admirers – is that Fanon also wrote very powerfully about the haunting effects of violence on the psyches of the colonized, in the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. He is not merely writing about the impact of colonial violence, but about anti-colonial violence. Fanon certainly wanted to imagine that violence could be a solution, even the solution, to colonial oppression, but he was finally too intelligent, too deep a thinker, to imagine that violence alone could achieve freedom, or that it could be practiced without negative effects of its own.

Finally, while it is true that some of Fanon’s readers have drawn inspiration from his arguments about anti-colonial violence, I believe that he has attracted many other admirers because of his radically humanist vision, his commitment to both collective and individual freedom, his belief that liberation depends on the elimination of social suffering and racial/colonial alienation, and his understanding that the project of liberation is not just a political project, it is a mental and even a physical one (the question of the body is at the heart of Fanon’s writings about racism). Fanon was also a daring and creative psychiatrist who developed new tools for helping mentally ill people to regain a sense of their identity, their capacity for reintegration in the lives they’d known outside the asylum. It is this vision of human liberation, body and soul, not his more incendiary remarks on violence, that explains why he is read with such enthusiasm by psychiatrists, educators, artists, and writers.

What new insights or perspectives does The Rebel's Clinic offer about Fanon's life and legacy that previous biographies might have missed?

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes that all his life, he has longed to be seen as ‘nothing but a man’ – not a Frenchman, not a West Indian, not a Black man, just a man, a person with the desires, dreams and impulses, the attributes and defects, that make one human. In The Rebel’s Clinic, I have tried to write about Fanon as if he were ‘nothing but a man’ – an extraordinary one, to be sure, with many qualities that one might call ‘heroic’, but also a complicated, flawed and vulnerable person who was very much a work in progress. I wanted to depict him as he struggled to create himself, to figure out and give expression to what he thought and who he wanted to be, in conditions that were not of his own making, and to thereby illuminate the emergence of this intellectual engagé and revolutionary. To do so, I have focussed more than his previous biographers on his actual ‘lived experience’, his work as a psychiatrist in the rebel’s clinic, where his thinking and his political practice took shape. Yes, Fanon wrote about, and wrote in praise, of anti-colonial armed struggle, but to understand his thinking, to grasp the conclusions he reached, both in their clarity and in their complexity, you have to sit beside him as Dr Fanon attends to the most vulnerable of people, the damned of the earth, the patients and rebel soldiers under his care, with compassion, humility and determination, and in the hope that they too might eventually live freely and in dignity.