At the Carthage Film Festival, one of Africa’s oldest film gatherings, in late December, screenings of Frantz Fanon by Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah played to full houses. For months, Tunisians have been following the war in Gaza closely, and the life of this French anti-racist and anti-colonialist activist and writer resonated with current events.
Visiting Tunis to present his film, which looks at Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in 1953 and the sweeping changes he brought to psychiatric care there, Algerian filmmaker Abdenour Zahzah was not surprised by the renewed interest. “It's always the right time to talk about Fanon because he echoes our present day,” he says. “In his writings, he spoke a lot about the coloniser and the colonised. That's useful when it comes to considering what's happening in Gaza today. He remains something of a conscientious objector, a guide reminding us that there's still work to be done.”
The filmmaker has been interested in Fanon for years; in 2002 he made a documentary called Frantz Fanon, mémoire d’asile ('Frantz Fanon, asylum memoir'). And he notes that Fanon, the centenary of whose birth falls this year, is revered yet little known in Algeria despite his very public support and activism for Algerian independence. “People know the name, there's a Fanon Street or a Fanon Library, but sometimes it doesn't go beyond that. It's good that with his centenary, we're also beginning to explore the impact and relevance of his thinking,” says Abdenour Zahzah, whose film has been released in both Algeria and neighbouring Tunisia.
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Renewed interest
Frantz Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria from 1953 to 1956, then spent four years in Tunisia where, while continuing his work with the Algerian independence movement the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), he wrote one of his best-known books 'Les Damnés de la Terre' ('The Wretched of the Earth'), and practised psychiatry at Charles-Nicolle hospital in Tunis. Yet 60 years on, few Tunisian doctors or sociologists study the psychiatrist’s ideas.
“In Tunisia, Fanon doesn't have the same hallowed status that he has in Algeria,” says anthropologist and writer Lilia Labidi. “When Fanon arrived in Tunisia, medicine was strictly divided into set fields. So his multidisciplinary approach, which drew on social sciences, history and anthropology, was not looked upon kindly,” she explains. Though overlooked and often forgotten, Fanon’s time in the Maghreb region of North Africa was one of his most important periods, both for his thinking and his activism. Today, thanks to world events and the work of some scholars, awareness of the period he spent in the Maghreb is beginning to grow, not just in Algeria, but in Morocco and Tunisia as well.
In France a biopic directed by Jean-Claude Barny was released on April 2nd. It looks at Fanon’s Maghreb legacy, but the way the writer's work is viewed and interpreted differs on the two sides of the Mediterranean. “In France, there's been a renewed interest in Fanon for some years, mainly among diaspora and immigrant communities who use his thinking and writings in the anti-racist struggle. The same is true in the United States, where he 's always been widely read and studied in universities,” says Montassir Sakhi, an anthropologist and researcher at KU Leuven university in Belgium and at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) in Morocco.
Two different approaches
For this specialist in Fanon’s influence on leftwing movements in Morocco, the renewed interest in the writer in the Maghreb is linked to the way the Northern Hemisphere and the so-called 'Global South' focus on different aspects of his work. “In the North, Fanon’s 'Peau Noir, Masques Blanc' ('Black Skin, White Masks') and his denouncement of the racial order are central, whereas with us, it's his writings on colonisation and breaking free from colonial systems that resonate the most,” he explains.
“In the South, when people read Fanon, what stands out most is this challenge to what remains of colonisation, the need to change economic models, and the question of sovereignty,” adds the academic, who attributes the rediscovery of Fanon to the timing of the Arab uprisings in 2011, the so-called 'Arab Spring'. “It was from that time that there was a challenging of the ongoing influence of colonisation in the Maghreb, particularly in how it shapes the policies of national elites while also sealing off borders between us and Europe,” says Montassir Sakhi.
He points out that Fanon had already described “this neo-colonial bourgeoisie as one that builds economies based on extraction and offshoring, which is predatory in nature, and which does not lay down the groundwork for an economy that meets national needs or fosters local industry. For him, the route out of colonisation lay in the ability to produce and to defend oneself”. Fanon developed this thinking in a near-sociological way during his conversations with leftwing writer François Maspero, while writing his 1959 essay 'L'An V de la révolution algérienne' ('Year Five of the Algerian Revolution'), which explored the rise of Algerian national identity.
This contrast in approaches towards Fanon's work is also reflected in the way his ideas have been studied in the United States, says Muriam H. Davis, a history professor at Santa Cruz University. “Fanon was brought to the United States by the Black Panthers movement: he was read through the lens of anti-Black racism in America, while Fanon actually examined different racial categories, and his thinking evolved significantly when he arrived in the Maghreb and encountered other forms of discrimination,” she says. “He himself was influenced by Algerian thinkers, as his own references were largely Western - Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. He was not familiar with the 14th-century thinker Ibn Khaldun or the contemporary Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khatibi.”
Fanon did not speak Arabic and had a “slightly secular outlook” according to the historian. “It's interesting, from a historical perspective, to see how he was influenced by Maghrebin thinkers and even criticised, such as by Algerian sociologist Abdelkader Djeghloul. In Algeria, many intellectuals were rediscovering and debating Fanon from the 1980s,” says Muriam H. Davis.
Migration
In Tunisia, the reclaiming of Fanon’s ideas is a more recent phenomenon. An international symposium at the Faculty of Medicine in Sousse, held in February, brought together many medical students as well as those studying human sciences and psychology. “I had never even heard of Fanon before studying him this year in my first year of medical school,” says Chahd, a 19-year-old student. “I was really surprised to see how much his writings chime with certain debates on identity, particularly around learning French and this French-speaking world that is rather forced upon us.”
The issues of closed borders and irregular migration to Europe were also raised by one of the symposium’s organisers, Wael Garnaoui. “I believe that all questions of lack of mobility and the lack of freedom of movement stem, in part, from the colonial past, and that reading Fanon can help us,” says the psychologist.
“Visa policies and administrative restrictions at borders are almost identical to the ways in which populations were categorised under colonisation. The alienation Fanon spoke of can still be seen today in the harraga [editor's note, an Arabic word referring to people trying to cross the sea to Europe] crossing the Mediterranean, driven by their longing for the West,” adds Wael Garnaoui, who has explored this idea in an essay entitled 'Fanon and the Wretched of the Sea: The Forbidden Mobility of Tunisian Youth'.
From the decolonial struggle to the issue of migration, reading Fanon today conveys the “urgency of communicating a kind of radicalism”, says Muriam H. Davis. Yet Fanon’s combat and his influence are still under-explored or even avoided, particularly when it comes to addressing sensitive topics in the Maghreb, such as the question of the disputed territory of Western Sahara or the mistreatment of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia.
Moreover, the revival of interest in Fanon's thinking remains limited to certain circles, explains Inès Abidi, a 25-year-old researcher working on Fanon for her master’s degree 'Le monde méditerranéen en mouvement' ('The Mediterranean world on the move') at Paris-VIII University. “His legacy in France and the Maghreb is rather fragmented,” she says. “The process of reclaiming his ideas is still recent and often confined to leftwing movements. So, while Fanon’s work can be read in different ways, it remains on the margins because, overall, public awareness of him in the Maghreb is still too low.”
“I believe that as intellectuals and historians we have a duty to make his work accessible to as many people as possible,” says historian Kmar Bendana, author of the article 'Sur les traces de Frantz Fanon à Tunis' ('In the footsteps of Frantz Fanon in Tunis'). “Fanon has been translated into Arabic, so we have no excuse not to study him or to give him back his rightful place in university teaching,” she says.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter