“On that small island a cultural schizophrenia was born, ” noted Chicago Sun-Times writer Hazel Rowley.įanon ’s childhood was outwardly uneventful, but he had an intense temperament that showed itself as World War II broke out in 1939. Fanon ’s teachers emphasized that Martinique was part of France and that he should consider himself a Frenchman -yet he also became aware of racism early on, for it was clear that a black Frenchman did not have the same stature as a white Frenchman. His parents were better off than most of the island ’s African-descended population, which consisted largely of sugar-plantation workers, and he received a strongly French-oriented education. Fought for France in WWIIįanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony. Fanon, a psychiatrist, crossed disciplines in his life and his writings, always striving to make connections between his insights into the effects of racism and the concrete political steps that poor people needed to take to bring about change. Yet, even as many of the politically radical pronouncements of the 1960s had come to seem quaint or innocent, Fanon ’s writings inspired a resurgence of interest in the 1990s and 2000s. Fanon ’s extreme statements seemed outdated to young people seeking societal change, and conservative Western writers mentioned his name with either irritation or outright dismissal. ”Īs the revolutionary ideology of the late 1960s and early 1970s faded, however, even the Algerian people on whose behalf Fanon worked for much of his adult life would forget his celebrity. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. “Violence, ” Fanon wrote, “is a cleansing force. ” The Wretched of the Earth advocated the violent overthrow of the European and American colonial presence in Third World countries. The book ’s publisher called it the handbook for black revolution, and African-American militants and other young American leftists took its message to heart: a widely quoted statement attributed to two different leaders of the radical Black Panther group, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael, held that “every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon. When Frantz Fanon ’s revolutionary tract The Wretched of the Earth appeared in the United States in 1965, it quickly became a bestseller.
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