Frantz Fanon Quotes

“As I have argued in Chapter 1, to confuse the anti-colonialism of the 1950s and 1960s with the post-colonialism of the last decade of the twentieth century is to depoliticize Fanon to a disastrous extent. After all, no one is going to take to the streets in the name of post-colonalism. And no one is going to die for it.”
― David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography

“Given Fanon’s subsequent traumatic encounter with the white gaze (‘Look, maman, a negro’), it is ironic that it was he and Manville who gazed at the children and could not take their eyes off them. They had never seen a girl with truly red hair, or such a blond boy, and they were fascinated.”
― David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography

“Fanon had learned that freedom was not indivisible. He was a black soldier in a white man’s army. Writing to his mother that same month, Fanon tried to hide his true feelings, and spoke longingly of the punch and blaff he was looking forward to when he got back to Martinique, but another letter written to both his parents on 12 April 1945 tells a different story: Today, 12 April. It is a year since I left Fort-de-France. Why? To defend an obsolete ideal. I don’t think I’ll make it this time. During all the scraps I’ve been in, I’ve been anxious to get back to you, and I’ve been lucky. But today, I’m wondering whether I might not soon have to face the ordeal. I’ve lost confidence in everything, even myself. If I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say: God called him back to him. This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong!”
― David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography

“In the United States, civil rights workers did encounter terrible violence and the protests of the Black Panthers did meet with armed repression. But they were not faced with General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Parachute Division and the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion. When Fanon speaks of ‘violence’, he is speaking of the French army’s destruction of whole villages and of the FLN’s bombing of cafés, or in other words of total war and not of limited low-level conflict.”
― David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography

“Carmichael seems not to have realized that his patron saint was simply not a black nationalist.”
― David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography