by Nigel Gibson
What I want to present here is a part of a larger ongoing discussion of the centrality of Frantz Fanon’s work as a decolonizing psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker in the wake of the translation of his psychiatric writings into English in the collection Alienation and Freedom. New research along these lines has actually been going on for some time, as seen in several academic conferences, articles, and books such as Frantz Fanon Psychiatry and Politics.
This work is helping us reconsider Fanon’s work as a totality and as an opportunity to re-engage Fanon for our age. Some of these reconsiderations have refocused attention on The Wretched of the Earth with new appreciations of the importance of its concluding chapter “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” a chapter, which Fanon warned, might seem “out of place.” We are, in short, returning to Fanon’s concern about the dialectical depth of decolonization.
The chapter “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” stands on the conclusions of the book’s previous chapter, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” where the emphasis is not simply on the corruption and betrayal of the nationalist political elites, but also on the self-action of the masses, along with the necessity for a new conception of time and space for “human things.” In “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” Fanon worries about the psychological costs of the colonial war and the work and the time required for rehumanization, which is needed to create real independence.
What also appears out of place in this chapter is a discussion of “borderline cases,” such as the militant who suffers from anxiety attacks and suicide obsession around the anniversary of a day he had been ordered to place a bomb. These cases pose the question, Fanon says, “of responsibility within the revolutionary framework.”
What does he mean by “the question of responsibility within the revolutionary framework”?
At one level we could simply translate “the revolutionary framework” (le cadre révolutionnaire) as the FLN militant’s responsibility to that organization. At another level “the revolutionary framework” could be considered in the context of the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, the necessity to start a new history, develop new ways of thinking intimately connected with the creation of a new humanity. This is, in part, the larger question that the revolution has to ask itself: How can this possibly be done in the context of the brutal colonial war?
The Pedagogy of Fanon’s Clinical Practice
Erica Burman’s Fanon, Education, Action is a new book on Fanon that interrogates his thought by focusing on his myriad references to children and childhood. By doing so Burman reinforces the inseparability of Fanon’s psychiatric, philosophical, and political praxis. Burman develops a pedagogical typology of four distinct forms of child in Fanon’s texts in which she frames “child as method” (her subtitle), highlighting Fanon as educator.
What I want briefly to discuss here is, in fact, not one of Fanon’s children, but Burman’s analysis of the notes on the case of B, which are included in “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders”(Series A, Case No. 1) titled, “Impotence in an Algerian following the rape of his wife.” Burman’s analysis is original and suggestive of new areas of research. Here, Fanon makes clear his view that the individual patient can only regain agency and self-determination as part of the community. B’s attitudes, his shame, his depression, and his obsessional suicidality are social manifestations not only under the pressure of colonialism but also products of colonial war and torture. They are also the results of growing up in a culture that is undergoing change as a result of the anticolonial struggle. It is in this social and cultural context that Fanon’s therapy with B, formerly a militant committed to social and national liberation but who has withdrawn from politics, turns on his relations with his wife and child.
The case concludes with a dialogue between Fanon and B:
He then asked me whether his “sexual failing” in my opinion was caused by his worrying.
Answer: “It’s quite likely.”
He then sat up in bed.
“What would you do if it happened to you?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Would you take your wife back?”
“I think I would . . .”
“Ah, you see . . . you’re not quite sure.”
He put his head in his hands and after a few moments left the room.
From that day on, he gradually accepted to listen to political discussions while his migraines and anorexia lessened considerably.
Rather than diagnostic, the dialogue is important because of Fanon’s active role in expressing ambivalence in his answer to B’s question, “What would you do if it happened to you?” Fanon’s answer, “I don’t know . . . ,” gives B room to allow for ambiguity and space to think about alternatives. For B, Fanon might be considered an ego-ideal whom he asks for advice, which he might follow. What would you do? “Would you take your wife back?” Fanon’s answer is not simply a question of truthfulness; it is also importantly empathetic. It is not a question of advising but helping B gain mental space to become actional.
“I think I would . . . ,” Fanon answers
“Ah, you see . . . you’re not quite sure” (my emphasis).
The dialogue indicates some interesting doublings and identifications that go on between B and Fanon, but also perhaps in B’s thinking as well: comparisons between his wife (chosen by parents in an arranged marriage) whom he did not love and his cousin whom he was in love with; and between his wife’s rape by the French military and his attitude toward his young child. (As Fanon notes, “‘This girl,’ he told us one day, referring to his daughter, ‘has something rotten inside her.’”)
Burman explores B’s attitude toward the rape of his wife and suggests that his young daughter “represents something more”—namely, someone whose existence comes into being as a “kind of rape,” as an “outcome of his lack of care for his wife,” who we are told he does not love but has survived rape and torture by the French for him. Debilitating shame overwhelms B. Shame that he did not love his wife who has been raped in the course of protecting him, and shame that his child is a product of a non-loving relationship, which is akin to rape.
Burman argues: “If Fanon as presenter of this case is also a didact, teaching by such narratives of distress colonialism’s crimes, he is also in pedagogical mode offering a working through of the process for an Algerian man to welcome back rather than reject his loyal wife who survived rape and torture for him.”
In addition, Burman highlights Fanon’s concern with doing therapy with B and notes that unlike the other cases in “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders,” B’s case “is also narrated as a history of a relationship of consultation, of help-seeking, and receiving”—as seen in the dialogue that closes the case, quoted above. Burman importantly adds that Fanon as “therapist even more than political agitator appears didactic but not explicitly directive.” This, she adds, is an instantiation of “working psychoanalytically at the level of ‘failure.’”
At the end of the case-notes Fanon quotes B’s concluding comment: “If it doesn’t work out with my wife, I’ll come and see you in Algiers.” We are not exactly sure of the date. Perhaps it was 1959, the year that Fanon’s L’an cinq de la révolution algérienne, mistitled in English as A Dying Colonialism, was published.
There he said that colonialism was finished in Algeria and the question was about building a new society on the radical mutations in social relations that the Algerian revolution had created. Fanon was looking forward to life in independent Algeria. In this vein, there is something optimistic in the conclusion to the case. “On independence, I’ll take my wife back. If it doesn’t work out,” says B, “I’ll come and see you again in Algiers.”
Burman adds that Fanon “appears to be suggesting that liberation from colonial rule will correspondingly promote liberation from his previous compulsions and mentality.” But rather than repeating old left notions that new relationships would have to wait until after the revolution, or the revolution would be the magic salve, B sees the mention of a future return to Fanon, “if things don’t work out” as the social work that needs to be done. The radical mutations in culture, the changing relations between men and women, fathers and daughters, old and young that Fanon heralds in A Dying Colonialism as he views a new Algeria “no longer in future heaven,” are refocused in this chapter on the trauma of colonial war and its torturing regime. In short, the case concludes with the man’s uncertainty, reflecting Fanon’s uncertain answer to the question, what would you do? It is this uncertainty, however, that appears to give B a sense of openness and perhaps hope about the future.
Children and the new society
This is, in part, the point of “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders”: considering the question how can a new society be built by a generation of children traumatized by colonial war, torture, and dehumanization; and Burman’s idea of “child as method” turns Fanon’s references to children into a critical analytical tool. The cases of the two adolescents who kill their friend and the case of the “apolitical” young man who begins to believe that everyone around him thinks he is a collaborator, included in “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” reflect a larger aspect of Fanon’s work with children traumatized by the massacres of their families, some of whose stories and drawings are collected in a book anonymously edited by Giovanni Pirelli and Jacques Charby called Racconti di bambini d’algeria (“Stories of Algerian Children”) and published in France and Italy in 1962.
For example, after French aircraft continually bombed the Tunisian frontier around Sakhiet-Sidi-Youssef in late 1957 and early 1958, causing a large number of civilian casualties, Fanon worked with some of the victims, using art therapy with the children. Fanon was also a consultant for the film based on children’s drawings and narratives J’ai Huit Ans (René Vautier, Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff and Yann Le Masson, 1961) and Pirelli spoke with Fanon about developing the drawings and narratives into a book.
Additionally Burman helps us reconsider Fanon’s references to children, including to the seven year old in the introduction to A Dying Colonialism who was forced to watch his family being killed “so that he would see and remember this for a long time.” The prognosis that colonial wars constitute a “veritable apocalypse . . . a new phenomenon even in the pathology it produces,” as Fanon puts it in “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders,” is repeated here. “Does anyone think it is easy to make this child of seven forget both the murder of his family and his enormous vengeance?” Fanon writes, “is this orphaned child growing up in an apocalyptic atmosphere the sole message that French democracy will leave?” (my emphasis)
The narrative of trauma “links Fanon the psychiatrist/therapist with Fanon the anticolonial revolutionary and social pedagogue, via this account of a child who has been specifically victimized,” writes Burman. The child “is ‘growing up’ in an ‘apocalyptic atmosphere.’” “What is left open is not only how possible, but also how desirable, it is to make ‘this child of seven forget.’”
This question of the desirability of memory and of forgetting is an important one. As Roberto Beneduce and I put it in Fanon, psychiatry and politics:
In exploring the logic of torture and its perversion, Fanon revealed that [apart from the effort of masking the somatic consequences of trauma], the paradoxical injunction of not forgetting is among the most psychically ruinous and long-lasting effects of this specific form of violence. Fanon invoked the words one French soldier said to B’s wife whom he had raped: “If you ever see that bastard your husband again, don’t you forget to tell him what we did to you.” This injunction to remember the scene of violence, to remember what the victim would like to forget, introduces a block in the tension between forgetting and remembering, rendering the victim literally possessed by their memories.
All this, in short, all this therapy in response to colonial violence and an anticolonial revolution points to the inadequacy, if not downright untruth not only of the popular claim that Fanon offered violence as therapy but also underscores his innovative approach in contrast to depoliticizing classification on PTSD, which often fail to consider the existential and ethical issues of violence refusing to consider rationality of revolt. In addition, Fanon’s wish to continue psychiatry and psychotherapy in an independent Algeria could not be conceived outside of decolonization, which for him requires thinking the question of responsibility within a critical revolutionary framework.
Nigel C. Gibson is an activist and academic specializing in the work of the world revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Gibson is author of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Polity Press, 2003), which won the 2009 Caribbean Philosophy Fanon prize and was translated into Arabic in 2013, and Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo (University of Kwa Zulu-Natal Press and Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). His latest work is Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics, co-authored with Roberto Beneduce (Rowman and Littlefield and University of Witwatersrand Press, 2017). He teaches at Emerson College, Boston USA, and is Honorary Professor at the University currently known as Rhodes, South Africa.
