Word: algerianness
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Torn between Freud and Marx, Fanon flung himself into the opening phase of the Algerian revolution and became one of the FLN's chief pamphleteers and theorists. He fell sick, journeyed to Moscow for a cure, but was eventually told by Soviet specialists that the only hope for his leukemia lay in Washington, D.C. In the National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Md., weeks before he died in 1961 at age 36, he received the first copies of his last and most revolutionary book, The Wretched of the Earth. The FLN had his body flown to Tunis...
...influenced by Sartre, who (in Anti-Semite and Jew) gave Hegel's master-slave analysis labyrinthine new twists. Hegel was not a slave, however, nor Sartre a Jew. But Fanon was black. His most significant work came out of his sudden realization, as a black psychiatrist in an Algerian mental hospital, that the fact of French colonial domination caused unique and grave psychic disorders in the objects of oppression, Fanon's Moslem patients...
...hard to get. Fanon's widow, for example, refused to be interviewed. Gendzier then turned to what she subtitles "a critical study." It bears its best fruit in the rediscovery of Fanon's least-known works, the several professional psychiatric papers he wrote directly out of his Algerian hospital experience, before committing himself to the revolution...
Thereafter, as Fanon grew more prominent, he grew more controversial and more lost in the Algerian and Third World factional disputes that still swirl around his memory. Author Gendzier succumbs to what amounts to a left-wing psychic disorder in its own right: the compulsion to pursue and defend Fanon's reputation through increasingly irrelevant intricacies. She does this in a prose crippled by repetition and neo-Marxist jargon. Fanon himself quickly escapes her-and the reader is glad to follow him. · Horace Judson
When Français, Si Vous Saviez finally opened in eight small theaters in Paris last month, it proved to be a prodigious (eight hours), three-part history of modern France from the First World War to the death of Charles de Gaulle. Its characters range from French-Algerian "Secret Army" Colonel Antoine Argoud to Communist Leader Jacques Duclos, from a patriotic old Lorraine grocer to a Gandhi-quoting Algerian nationalist. The two film makers, who describe themselves as non-Communist leftists, use all these characters to document their thesis: that liberté, egalité, fraternité are more rhetoric...