Fanon

by Peter Geismar

KIRKUS REVIEW The early death of this Third World psychiatrist-cum-revolutionary has established him as a romantic, precursory enigma. Geismar's biography, part political, part personal, weaves the two dimensions too ineptly to illuminate Fanon's life and character or put his thought in historical context. Often relying on Fanon's own elliptical style with little of Fanon's explosive force, Geismar disjoints the narrative line and disorients the reader with his splicings of political interpretation. According to Geismar, Fanon was ""overwhelmed with shame and self-hatred"" as a student in Lyons (where he married a white French student) and ""turned away from the white world"" -- a turn which arguably reflects the strains of Fanon's childhood in Martinique more than his circumstances in France; but Geismar is seeking an immediate rationale for Fanon's first book, Black Faces, White Masks. Geismar later acknowledges that Fanon did not break with the colonialist world until he became a daily witness to French army tortures in his Algerian mental hospital. This drove him into the FLN, where, Geismar claims, he was a leading propagandist, though in fact his quite different role was that of literary spokesman. Geismar gives almost no Algerian War background, and minor factual errors recur, e.g. misdescription of the postwar Gaullist government and a claim that Bourgiba was totally pro-FLN. Focusing on Fanon's racial theories, Geismar treats only lightly and uncritically Fanon's notion of ""purgative violence,"" probably his most important concept for his worldwide radical audience; and indeed he neglects to explain Fanon's appeal to Western leftists. Though with its elaboration of Fanon's medical career it has more biographical substance than Caute's Frantz Fanon (1970), it is equally ill-structured, more rhetorical, and weaker on intellectual-historical connections.

Paperback

Published January 1, 2000