Opinions have always differed on Frantz Fanon. During the revolt in the l960s by Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael said simply: "every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon". Over two decades later, Professor Allan Bloom said simply that he was "an ephemeral writer once promoted by Sartre because of his murderous hatred of Europeans and his espousal of terrorism".
Thus the closing of the American mind.
The truth is more complex. Fanon was born in l925 into a prosperous middleclass family on the island of Martinique. It was a French departement and every child grew up believing that she or he was French. While still only a schoolboy, Fanon fought for the French army in the second World War and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre for bravery. Only when French girls refused to dance with their black liberators did he recall the warning voices which had said, back on the island, "this isn't your war. When whites kill each other, it's a blessing for blacks".
He went home to finish his schooling, nauseated now by French racism: "nothing justifies my decision to defend the interests of farmers who don't give a damn". Though he became a skilled psychiatrist, his childhood identity had been shattered. David Macey suggests that his aggressive manners and gleaming white shirts may have been defence mechanisms against an inner uncertainty: yet this biographer is honest and subtle enough also to quote Fanon's critique of the imitative colon: "the hysteric is often unaware of the fact that he is merely imitating a disease".
Fanon's red-hot literary style may also be an attempt to quell uncertainties - but Macey remarks that it was rooted in the fact that Fanon couldn't type, preferring to dictate in the rhythms of an urgent speaking voice. In France again, Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks, which wasn't exactly a dissertation or a polemic but what Macey astutely calls an exercise in bricolage. It is now the most cited of postcolonial texts for its primal discoveryscene ("Look ma, a nigger"), but it went largely unnoticed in 1952.
Fanon soon quit the French medical scene, writing to his brother Joby: "You understand: the French have enough psychiatrists to take care of their madmen. I'd rather go to a country where they need me". A Freudian has called this a classic family romance. Despairing of progress in sleepy, imitative Martinique, and rejected by the racists among the French, Fanon projected on to Algeria all his hopes for a liberated world. Yet he was no Freudian. At the Blida Hospital in Algeria, he became known for promoting self-help therapies and film discussions among patients. He also concluded that psychoanalysis was inapplicable to Africans or West Indians (97 per cent of whom, he joked, were incapable of Oedipal neuroses.) The Algerian revolution began in 1954 and Fanon used the Blida to shelter rebels and provide treatment for wounded insurgents. It is interesting to learn that, in his professional role, he also treated policemen and later wrote with authority of the damaging effects of torture on perpetrators as well as victims. But he never betrayed a single policeman to his comrades in the rebel FLN.
French magazines at first dismissed the FLN as minor brigands, preferring to lead with pictures of Gina Lollobrigida, but soon the "socialist" Francois Mitterand was saying that war would be the only form of negotiation. Fanon would later accuse even anti-colonial French leftists of opposing the war, less because of outrage at the hurt to Algerian bodies than at the insult to French honour. And he would draw the necessary parallel between the torture policy and the methods of the Gestapo.
With A Dying Colonialism (1959), his view of the cathartic effects of insurrectionary violence brought fame and notoriety: "it makes a man intrepid, it rehabilitates him in his eyes". In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) he went further, arguing that when a native kills a settler, two slaves are eliminated and in their place stands a free man. By the time he wrote this classic text, Fanon was terminally ill with leukaemia. By the cruellest of ironies, he died in a Washington hospital, under surveillance by the CIA at the heart of an empire he despised.
Today his psychological theories of redemptive violence are not much countenanced, even by insurrectionists: and Macey is rightly embarrassed by them. But Fanon's cultural analyses of the progress of decolonisation from colonial mimicry, through nationalist self-assertion, to a universal humanist liberation have inspired such brilliant writers as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. Fanon's insistence that rebel forces may use the colonisers' language, thus "liberating it from its historic meanings", has resonance for Irish students of the literary revival led by Yeats and Joyce. And a kinder, gentler Fanon is revealed by Macey to have been as concerned with liberating French minds from the deforming effects of colonialism as with freeing Africa. Allan Bloom was simply wrong.
Algeria, sadly, is today in the grip of zealots who routinely expel intellectuals and would hardly endorse Fanon's liberal view that "any individual living in Algeria is a potential Algerian". Macey's research has been clearly curtailed by the effects of this censorious regime, but that is no fault of the author: and his book richly documents the background, work and writings of Fanon. Because it is critical of his blindspots, it is all the more convincing in establishing his final greatness. Quietly authoritative, it is the best book yet written on Frantz Fanon.
Declan Kiberd is a Professor of Anglo- Irish Literature at UCD