That same year, however, he was diagnosed with leukaemia and spent his last year of life writing The Wretched of the Earth. He subsequently worked with the Algerian liberation movement, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and in 1960 was appointed ambassador to Ghana by Algeria’s FLN-led provisional government. This analysis is very much rooted in Fanon’s experiences in Algeria where he initially worked in the psychiatry department of a hospital during the Algerian revolution, treating both Algerians and French soldiers as well as more broadly observing the effects of colonial violence on the human psyche. He furthermore reflects on the collective decolonisation of communities and individuals, “the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom”. It discusses the deeply traumatic impact of this brutality but also the necessity of violent resistance: “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon”. The Wretched of the Earth presents a psychological analysis and critique of the savagery and violence of colonialism on the individual, the community and the nation. Among students, among workers, among the pimps of Pigalle or Marseille, I have been able to isolate the same components of aggressiveness and passivity.įanon’s most influential work, however, came in 1961 with the publication of Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), its title taking inspiration from the first verse of “The Internationale” written by Eugène Pottier, a member of the Paris Commune. I have encountered them innumerable times. The attitudes that I propose to describe are real. He contextualises this analysis with the realities of his own life, writing in the Introduction: ![]() Having qualified as a psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon completed a psychiatric residency during which he wrote his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), an analysis of the deeply destructive psychological implications of the colonial subjugation of black people. After the war, he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France. He was born in 1925 on Martinique, a French colony from 1653.įanon left his home in 1943 at the age of 18 to join the Free French Forces which had been established by the French government-in-exile during the Second World War to fight fascism. ![]() Last month marked 70 years since the passing of psychiatrist, political radical, Marxist and philosopher of the Algerian Revolution, Frantz Fanon, at the young age of 36.
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