LITMIR.BIZ

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other parts of the empire. Shortages of food and other everyday needs became commonplace. Naval blockades contributed to this scarcity. Over time, this situation generated anxieties that cropped up in small acts of resistance—petty theft, sugarcane fields set ablaze—as well as desertion from the island. Fanon pursued this latter course of action, leaving Martinique in 1943, as did approximately 4,500 others during this period. He went north to the island of Dominica in order to join the Free French and received some basic military training. But he soon returned to Martinique, which fell under Free French control later that year. Fanon volunteered once more to fight overseas, and he left in 1944, against the wishes of his family, with the 5ème Bataillon de Marche des Antilles, a small infantry battalion.

      After crossing the Atlantic via Bermuda, Fanon’s unit was stationed in French-controlled Morocco for training, where it joined a diverse assemblage of military brigades that supported the Free French from across the empire.⁴ Peter Geismar, in an early biography, writes that Fanon observed “noticeable barriers between the French from the metropolitan territory and the settlers in North Africa; both groups, though, looked down on the Moslems [sic] in the army, who [in turn] didn’t care for the blacks. Fanon’s company of soldiers, from Martinique, held aloof from the African troops, especially the Senegalese.”⁵ Such racial and cultural differences influenced Fanon’s views regarding the diversity to be found across the French Empire and the pervasiveness of colonial racism—a fact that would later shape his political thinking. Fanon’s time in North Africa also marked his introduction to Algeria. Stationed at Bougie (Béjaïa today) on the Algerian coast, Fanon was disturbed by the racism and poverty he encountered. “It was far worse than anything he had seen in the Caribbean,” Geismar writes. “In Oran, Fanon had to watch French soldiers tossing crusts of bread to Moslem [sic] children fighting each other for the food. In Bougie, he went into a rage when he came upon Moslem children picking through military garbage.”⁶

      Fanon’s unit ultimately formed part of Operation Dragoon, a plan promoted by de Gaulle to invade southern France from Algeria. In tandem with Operation Overlord—the D-Day assault on Normandy by American, British, Canadian, and Free French troops on June 6, 1944—this invasion would provide a counterassault from the south. The two operations combined would crush German forces occupying France. The Allied invasion of southern France began on August 15, though Fanon’s battalion did not cross the Mediterranean until almost a month later on September 10. Fanon eventually joined a regiment of the tirailleurs sénégalais—as soldiers from Francophone West and Equatorial Africa were called—and later a European unit. As the season of autumn and their movement north progressed, Fanon endured challenging weather conditions in addition to combat. He suffered wounds from mortar fire in November 1944, eventually receiving the Croix de Guerre in February 1945 in recognition of his bravery. But any sense of honor this medal bestowed was paralleled by physical exhaustion, growing emotional discontent, and homesickness as the war reached its end in May 1945.

      Indeed, the experience of fighting for France proved to be highly ambiguous for Fanon, with racism in its multiple forms generating a sense of constant unease. Despite a principle of shared patriotism, sharp differences materialized during his time in North Africa as indicated, with whites occupying the officer ranks and the tirailleurs sénégalais commanding the most respect among the colonial troops. Though Fanon and his two close friends from Martinique, Pierre Marie-Claire Mosole and Marcel Manville, were known as spirited troublemakers, Fanon remained deeply affected by his brief time in Algeria, due to the abject poverty and colonial racism there.⁷ He himself faced discrimination from many Arab North Africans; they were not immune from racist French attitudes. In Europe, Fanon experienced further racism that many colonial troops were subjected to by local communities, despite their status as liberators. By the end of his service, he looked forward to returning to Martinique.

      On his arrival home in October 1945, however, Fanon encountered Martinique with a different sense of the world. Though his military experience left him uncertain about his position as a French colonial, his decorated war service had provided him with an enlarged worldview—imperial in scope, but also beyond it. Alice Cherki writes that he was “disappointed to have taken part in the war, but his opposition to Nazism never wavered and the culture of the Resistance pervaded the whole of his life.”⁸ Fanon would later recall that the Second World War not only affected his perspective but changed how black Martinicans viewed France—a shift away from “the great white error” of an omniscient French colonialism that promised much, but offered little.⁹

      Still, at the age of twenty, Fanon had an education to complete and a choice of career to make. The island of Martinique appeared small, with limited opportunity in the present and for the future. Contemplating both law and dentistry as options, Fanon passed his baccalaureate at the Lycée Schoelcher and left for France in 1946, with the benefit of state tuition support due to his veteran status. However, before leaving, Fanon, along with his brother Joby, worked for Césaire’s campaign as the local communist party’s candidate to represent Martinique in the French National Assembly.¹⁰ Césaire already had been elected to the provisional postwar French assembly and as mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945, a position that he held for a remarkable fifty-six years until 2001. Césaire eventually served in the French National Assembly from 1946 to 1993. In fact, he supported Martinique’s status as an overseas department—an often overlooked paradox given his political reputation and critical rhetoric later captured in Discourse on Colonialism.¹¹

      This political path would further distinguish Césaire from his former student.¹² Césaire would continue to believe in the possibilities of working within a revised framework of French republican ideals, whereas Fanon would gradually depart from this premise. Although Martinique continued to be home for Fanon for reasons of family, it started to recede into the backdrop from this moment of departure forward—being a place of origin, not destination.¹³

       An Elite Education

      Joining his friends Manville and Mosole, Fanon arrived in Paris to study, but soon transferred to Lyon to pursue medicine—a part of France he was familiar with from his wartime service. It was an unlikely decision given the presence of his friends in Paris, as well as of his sister Gabrielle, who had recently moved to nearby Rouen. Similar to the war, this choice marked an initiation into French cultural life distinct from his Négritude predecessors. The provincial character of Lyon contrasted with Parisian cosmopolitanism. It was a time and place apart from the urbane life that Césaire and his compatriots embraced, a fact that Fanon would later reflect upon.¹⁴

      His first year in Lyon was largely isolating. The sudden death of his father in 1947 enhanced feelings of loneliness and vulnerability. But compounding these sentiments was his ineluctable status as a racial minority, despite his privileged upbringing, his military service, and his French citizenship by birth. Fanon was well aware of this demographic limitation of Lyon, joking to his friend Manville, “there are too many Negroes in Paris, I want something more milky.”¹⁵ Among four hundred university students, fewer than twenty were black. Of those, most were from West Africa.¹⁶

      But Lyon fortuitously reacquainted him with Algeria. A sizable Algerian community had been established there during the economic depression of the 1930s, forming part of the working class that labored in the city’s factories. Fanon’s encounters with Algerian patients in Lyon would presage his future experiences during the Algerian War. In the meantime, he gradually developed a new social life. Though he did not become a formal member, Fanon was involved with the French Communist Party, in addition to the university’s Overseas Students’ Association—settings that stirred his political awakening. With education a priority, he took courses in chemistry, biology, and physics to make up for the limited qualifications in the sciences he had gained in Martinique, a necessity before he could formally undertake medical school. This narrow background not only left him unprepared for certain aspects of medicine but also reinforced his literary bent: Fanon was soon drawn to lectures and readings in philosophy, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis.¹⁷

      It is important to stress the differences between psychiatry—a medical field that treats mental health as part of the biological functioning of the brain and human nervous system—and psychoanalysis—a

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