Book Review: The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
by Adam Shatz
Publication Date: Jan 23, 2024
List Price: $32.00
Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780374176426
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
Parent Company: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Book Reviewed by Robert Fleming
For decades now, the writings of noted psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who died in 1961, have been essential reading for anyone who wanted to dig deeper into the cultural conflicts of the colonial empires and those they oppressed. Literary and scholarly writers and filmmakers have continued to mine the Fanon fascination, including a 1995 documentary screen project, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, by Isaac Julien and Mark Nash; several magazine articles; and books such as David Macey’s massive Frantz Fanon: A Biography, published in 2001. However, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon stands out among the top of the list.
Fanon was neither a Frenchman nor Algerian. Born in 1925, he was a part of a proud middle-class family in Martinique, a French Caribbean colony with dueling intentions of Blacks and Creoles. People remember him as intellectual, ambitious, and determined to make his mark. After the Nazi onslaught of France during the Second World War, he was eager to join the resistance because he knew what Fascism would mean to passive Europe. His family, including his brother, tried to dissuade him. One of his professors warned, “What is happening in Europe is no concern of ours. When whites are shooting each other, it is a blessing for Blacks.”
Shatz reveals that after Fanon left the island and joined the Free French Forces in Morocco and Algiers, he found himself in the thick of battle. He didn’t cower or hide like some others did. In February 1945, he was hit by shrapnel from a hot mortar round and seriously wounded. War twisted him and he realized that the France he was fighting for didn’t exist. He also acknowledged the North African Arabs loathed Black men. Black men fighting for the Free French Forces were shunned when the military regulars put the soldiers of color at the rear so the locals would think only the whites beat the fascists.
After the war, Fanon returned home and enrolled in school to study philosophy; he later moved to France where he enrolled in medical school to study psychiatry. Fanon only wanted to be treated fairly, instead of carrying the nègre clichés. “There’s no room whatsoever for any mistake,” the newly minted doctor said. “The Black physician will never know how close he is to being discredited… I was walled in: neither my refined manners nor my literary knowledge nor my understanding of the quantum theory could find favor… I was up against the irrational.”
As a young doctor, Fanon treated people in emergency house calls in a poor Algerian neighborhood. He concluded that death was not far away for these citizens that French doctors believed they were suffering for imaginary ailments and were fakers. The Fanon opinion of mental illness, which was rampant in Arab ghettoes, was not only neurological brain disorders, even when it was organic, but behaviors and attitudes created by social and cultural relationships. “Mental illness,” he argued, “was not freedom’s extreme edge but rather a ‘pathology of freedom.’”
Fanon, ever curious, delved into the French literary world, picking up on his fondness with the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire and the Negritude movement. Like Césaire, he wrote plays, reviews, poems. However, he later broke with Césaire during a series of disagreements over his communist internationalism. Shatz writes: “Still, Césaire remained a hero for Fanon, not only because of his poetry, which made it possible for a generation of West Indian intellectuals to embrace their Blackness, but also because of his increasingly outspoken attacks on colonialism.”
Shatz offers much detail around some of Fanon’s most memorable and poignant experiences and influences in this engaging biography. With pinpoint accuracy and medical expertise, he describes Fanon’s residency at the Saint-Alban asylum in the early 1950s and his directorship of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria in late 1953. Like all conventional psychiatrists, Fanon used the usual tools of his trade: barbiturates, lithium, and electroshock therapy. Although he practiced according to familiar rules, he treated in a therapeutic style with compassion and humanity, and without class discrimination. It was from these profound experiences in the war and in urban Gallic bigotry that formed his four classic works that have been described as “the impact of racism on the Black psyche”: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Toward the African Revolution, published posthumously in 1964.
These fiery words from Black Skin, White Masks are the creative bedrock of the Fanon literary canon: “I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors.… I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.… O my body, always make me a man who questions!”
His words and practices made Fanon a marked man. In May 1959, he was thrown from a car near an Algerian rebel base, seriously injuring his back. Some think the road was mined. On another occasion to Rome for medical treatment for cancer, a car sent by Algerian rebels was rigged with explosives, but a child’s bad ball throw set the blast off. In another event, two armed men invaded his room, only to find the doctor had just left. Sadly, he died of cancer under CIA care in a Maryland hospital in 1961. He was only thirty-six.
Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic revives the busy, chaotic years of Frantz Fanon, illuminating the writer-doctor’s private and public lives. He recreates the insights and intentions of French culture and politics, including the controversial Algerian War. What is the most impressive is his take of Fanon’s ideas, choices, theories, all without overblown analysis and generalizations. Pace yourself when reading this one and get introduced to the real Frantz Fanon.