Abstract
This paper examines the connections and continuities of the idea of groups in Fanon’s work as a mental health professional and as a professional revolutionary. The first part looks at Fanon’s socio-therapeutic work at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in colonial Algeria, including his critique of the failures of sociotherapy (which I prefer to call socio-psychotherapy), arguing that psychiatry must become political. The second part considers his analysis of the Algerian revolution, highlighting the radical changes in consciousness that it has engendered and the pitfalls it faced because ‘consciousness needs help’ and militants need enlightenment. The idea of group work — including everyone in discussion and breaking down the divisions between ‘leaders’ (experts) and the ‘led’ — is aimed at disalienation and enlightenment of individuals, whether in the clinic or in the shack settlement, and can be considered a fundamental element of Fanon’s praxis.
Introduction
The sense of time must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather that of the rest of the world. (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2004: 135)
Fanon’s war years experiences (he was 17 when he first committed to fight with the Free French against the Nazis) can undoubtedly be considered as part of his decision to become a doctor of psychiatry. It could be argued that Fanon was impelled to try to understand these traumatic experiences through diagnosis and analysis that would see into the core of racism and colonialism. As he explained to his family in April 1945: ‘We must no longer look to this false ideology, behind which secularists and idiotic politicians hide, as our beacon. I was wrong! Nothing here justifies that sudden decision I took to make myself the defender of the farmer’s interests, when the farmer himself couldn’t care less’ (quoted in Fanon J, 2014: 34).
Throughout his work (the short decade from the publication of Black Skin, White Masks in 1952 to The Wretched of the Earth in 1961), Fanon’s notions of psychotherapy are always connected with praxis and the need to change the world in the most materialist sense, as he put it in Black Skin, White Masks. For example, discussing a Black man’s dream of becoming white therapeutically, he argues in Black Skin, White Masks that ‘when I try to understand this dream, to analyse it, knowing that this friend has problems with his job prospects, I conclude that the dream fulfils an unconscious desire’ (Fanon 1952/2008: 79). He then immediately adds a vital qualification, ‘away from my consulting room . . . [I] attempt to integrate my findings into the context of the world’ (Fanon, 1952/2008:80). He concludes that what emerges in this reflection ‘is a need for combined action on the individual and the group’ (Fanon, 1952/2008: 80). In these cases, the work of the psychoanalyst is to help the patient become conscious of their unconscious desire so that he would ‘no longer have to be faced with the dilemma “whiten or perish’” (Fanon, 1952/2008: 80). Once these ‘motives have been identified, my objective will be to enable him to choose action concerning the real source of the conflict, i.e., the social structure’ (Fanon, 1952/2008: 80). Here, moving dialectically brings us back to the patient, the consulting room and the psychotherapist’s praxis with Fanon moving from the individual to the universal with the ‘need for combined action on the individual and the group . . . to act along the lines of a change in social structure’ (Fanon, 2008: 80). In brief, the outside world has to be brought inside into the consulting room and vice versa. Breaking down this division was Fanon’s practice. Considering the interrelations and dialectics of psychiatry and politics in Fanon’s thought (see Gibson and Beneduce, 2017), let me start with one example from Fanon’s praxis of institutional or socio-psychotherapy at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. Fanon had joined this colonial hospital in late 1953, a year before the Algerian national liberation struggle began.
Part 1: Psychiatry has to be political 1
Social psychotherapy and football
The founder of institutional psychotherapy was François Tosquelles. Born in Reus, Catalonia, in 1912 and remarkably finishing medical school by 1927, Tosquelles began studying with Emilio Mira y López at the Pere Mata clinic in Reus. It was through Mira y López that Tosquelles discovered Lacan. Tosquelles was one of the founders of the anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista in 1935, which, along with advocating revolutionary opposition to fascist dictator Francisco Franco, supported worker and farmworker collectives in Catalonia as an antifascist expression of the society they were fighting for. Tosquelles became the director of the Spanish Republic’s Psychiatry Services during the civil war while also practising therapeutic communities in situ in military camps on the frontline (see Robcis, 2021: 17–26).
Escaping fascist Spain over the Pyrenées in 1939, he took two books with him: Lacan’s 1932 thesis on paranoia and Hermann Simon’s Psychotherapy in the Asylum. He would translate and distribute both when he joined Saint Alban Psychiatric Hospital. Interned in France as an ‘undesirable’, he was recruited to be a nurse at Saint Alban after most of the staff had left for military service. He immediately began to transform the institution into a caring community as the hospital became a space of survival, resistance, and innovation, which included the ‘patients’ and refugees living there in decision-making. After the war, Saint Alban hospital became known as a psychiatric hospital, in contrast to others, where the vast majority of psychiatric patients had survived Nazi extermination and Vichy fascist rule, and also a place of radical psychiatric innovation and ‘disalienation’ (see Robcis, 2021). Under Tosquelles’ supervision, Fanon joined the hospital as an intern in 1952 and stayed for about 15 months (see Gibson, 2024: 52–53, 73–77). In late 1953, a year before the Algerian war for national liberation began, Fanon got a position as ‘chef de service’ at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria.
The idea of institutional psychotherapy was to create a new society inside the hospital, breaking down its social structures and social hierarchies (between doctor and patient, nurse and patient, and doctor and nurse) that were reproduced in the cycle of restraint, agitation, restraint, by involving patients (or boarders as Fanon called them) in decision-making and group discussions through group activities. Fanon asked the staff to find activities that were able to awaken ‘a team spirit’ (Fanon, 2018: 369). One example was creating a football team as well as a football field. There were group discussions, decision-making, and group work about creating the field, marking it out, as well as playing the game. The game itself, body movement in time and space—running, dribbling, passing, tackling—is joyful, but working as a team is a challenge. Fanon liked to kick the ball around and had played with his brothers on a team in Martinique. But how to create a football team at the psychiatric hospital? A team where players might suddenly walk off, become disengaged, or have arguments and no longer be able or want to play? It was a process and practice that would become part of the psychotherapeutic treatment. Players might get angry, they might feel left out, and so on. So, it became a constant source of group therapy. But how to officiate? How to referee the game? How to control the passions of the moment and indeed the passions about the result. Fanon discussed all this, especially as the team began to play other teams outside the hospital, which meant developing a schedule of matches with local Blida teams. It meant discussing refereeing, which Fanon took up therapeutically in the hospital newsletter Notre Journal, which he had started in December 1953 (2018: 311–348). By April 1955, there were three teams with regular training sessions, and they attracted a ‘considerable crowd’ (see Fanon, 2018: 333). One Fanon biographer reported that on one match day, an administrative official found out that a number of Fanon’s patients, as well as Fanon, were missing from the institution. He informed the director of the hospital, who ‘telephoned the préfect’s office to report the “possibility” of what might best be described as a jail break’. Of course, the bus returned with the ‘hospital’s victorious team, which the director didn't know existed’ (Geismar, 1971: 67).
Discussions in Notre Journal provide concrete examples of Fanon’s attempt to create a curative environment and break down the authoritarian, normalized attitudes. In 1956, a sports committee was established, developing rules and regulations concerning improper conduct, and attitudes ‘toward the referee, officials or spectators’ (Fanon, 2018: 341). A week later (November 15, 1956), Fanon’s reaction was telling:
‘Punishments, court, inquiry, filing, reprieve’: the draft of the ‘rules and regulations’ uses these words with astonishing ease. Is it standard for a committee with therapeutic pretensions to employ such words in this way? . . . If sport is therapeutic, it must serve to cure . . . penalizing a player is neither more nor less than adopting within the establishment ways of proceeding that are common outside. (Fanon, 2018: 341–342)
The discussion continued into December. ‘I am bothered when I observe the refereeing of some orderlies’, Fanon admits. ‘They act as though they were not orderlies, as if the whistle in their mouth removed from them the quality of being an orderly. They forget sometimes that their function is to be a nurse referee, not an official referee’. While there might be different ways of being a referee, ‘there is only one way to be a good referee at the psychiatric hospital where sport is offered as a therapeutic element within the general atmosphere of the establishment’ (Fanon, 2018: 347)
2
. Fanon was demanding a more critically engaged attitude from the staff to transform the hospital and its normalized practices. In a psychiatric clinic, he continues, where boarders might stay for several years, these practices become pronounced. Orderlies, he argues,
may adopt the habit of ordering the boarder around . . . we have all heard orderlies say, for example: ‘Who gives the orders around here?’ Behaving ‘like a parent’, the orderly tends to infantilize the boarder and scold and punish them: ‘You will not go to the cinema tomorrow’; or: ‘You will not be allowed go on the walk’; or: ‘You will get no dessert’ . . . [I]f care is not taken, the hospital establishment, which is above all a curative establishment, a therapeutic establishment, is gradually transformed into a barracks in which children-boarders tremble before parent-orderlies. (Fanon, 2018: 346)
Critique and reform of institutional psychotherapy at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital
Fanon’s own critical ethnopsychiatry (see Gibson and Beneduce, 2017) follows from the failures of applying a Eurocentric-based institutional therapy programme. The idea of creating a new society inside the hospital including the institution itself—its structure, hierarchies and ideology—and thereby breaking down the medical hierarchies was a radical move and group therapy played an important role but Fanon also knew (as suggested earlier) that however much the new society inside the hospital could be realized it also could not be authentically sustained while the society outside—namely settler colonial Algeria—was systematically dehumanizing. As he makes clear in his (November 1956) letter of resignation from Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital to the socialist Resident Minister Robert Lacoste, ‘If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, l owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. What is the status of Algeria? A systematized de-humanization’ (Fanon, 1964/1967: 52–52).
Questioning his own methods in 1954, Fanon deduced that they had engaged in a programme of what he called ‘masked assimilation’. At the basic level, the patient’s reaction to the hour-long meetings, which were supposed to provide space for the creation of a ‘coherent group with collective concerns’ (see Fanon, 2018: 358) was silence. Devoid of meaning, they were closed down after just a few weeks. Staff reported that patients were indifferent to other group activities, such as playing cards and games, and were not much more successful with other ergotherapies (occupational therapies) based on physical activity (see Fanon, 2018: 360). Nurses were criticized for not making an effort and were replaced by others, but with the same result. On the individual level, one reason for the failure of psychotherapeutic sessions was that neither Fanon nor his intern, Jacques Azoulay, could speak Arabic. They had to rely on interpreters who, in the mind of the Arab patient, would be associated with the police and the courts and whose presence, Fanon and Azoulay argued, ‘fundamentally vitiated the psychotherapeutic doctor–patient relationship’ (see Fanon, 2018: 367). In addition, the translation of a patient’s detailed speech was derailed. A long speech would become a short interpretation in French stripped of all content, which trivialized complex experiences. When, for example, Fanon was told the patient hears djinns (spirits), he could not tell ‘if the delusion was real or induced’.
Additionally, alongside what might be considered problems of interpretation, Fanon noted that a specific aspect of technique in a psychodynamic situation is arrived at through language and culture: ‘How could a structural analysis be possible if we bracketed off the geographic, historical, cultural, and social contexts? . . . Socio-therapy would only be possible to the extent that social morphology and forms of sociability were taken into consideration’ (Fanon, 2018: 362, 364).
Self-critically, Fanon and Azoulay argued that their ‘attitude was absolutely not adapted to the Muslim men’s ward. A revolutionary attitude was essential — for we needed to move from a position where the supremacy of western culture was self-evident to one of cultural relativism’ (see Fanon, 2018: 362–3). Underlining the importance of language to the psychodynamic process, Fanon quoted Merleau-Ponty — as he had done in Black Skin, White Masks — that to speak a language is to carry the weight of a culture (Fanon, 2018: 38), adding that ‘there are mutual supports between language and the community’ (Fanon, 2008: 21). (In the first English translation, Charles Lam Markmann translates collectivité as ‘group’, see Fanon, 1952/1986: 25: ‘As I said at the start, there is a retaining-wall relation between language and group’.) Refusing to accept the Algiers School explanations for failure also echoed by some of the staff, Fanon maintained that the problem was not with the Muslim men, but with the presuppositions of the experiment itself. As Azoulay put it in his dissertation: ‘We proposed to implement a western-based sociotherapy programme that disregarded an entire frame of reference and neglected geographic, historical, cultural, and social particularities in a pavilion of mentally ill Muslim men’ (quoted by Cherki, 2006: 69). The mission of the newsletter, Notre Journal, for example, was ‘not to make public so-and-so’s fictional or irrelevant fantasies’ but making ‘public the community’s efforts and accomplishments’ (Fanon, 2018: 325). But in practice, the idea of developing a space, with patients as writers and readers, was limited simply because most of the Muslim patients were illiterate. Out of the 220 patients in the unit, ‘only five knew how to read and write in Arabic and two, how to read and write in French’ (Fanon, 2018: 370). In their conclusion, Fanon and Azoulay wondered: ‘Are we not guilty of having thoughtlessly embraced a policy of assimilation?’ (quoted in Cherki, 2006: 69). As they argued:
North Africa is French, and if you are not looking for it, you will not see why approaches should differ from one ward to the next. The psychiatrist unthinkingly adopts the politics of assimilation. Algerians do not need to be understood in their cultural originality. They are the ones who must make the effort to adapt, and it is in their interest to resemble the kind of person being proposed. (Fanon, 2018: 362; my emphasis)
In the article, Social therapy in a ward of Muslim men: Methodological difficulties (published in the major French journal of psychiatry, L’Information psychiatrique) they continue: a ‘politics of assimilation, does not propose a reciprocity of perspectives’, but rather an insistence that one ‘culture must disappear for the benefit of the other’ (Fanon, 2018: 362). Thus, on reflection, Fanon and Azoulay needed to ‘orchestrate a major leap’ and undertake ‘a transmutation of values to. . . move from the natural to the cultural’ (Fanon, 2018: 363).
Insisting that they had to move critically, the failure was far from worthless. In fact, failure was necessary. When another intern, Charles Géronimi, asked why the author of Black Skin, White Masks and ‘The “North African Syndrome”’ could have been so wide of the mark about the socio-psychotherapy program they had instituted, ‘Fanon smiled and said: “You can only understand things with your gut, you know”’. Fanon was not naïve. He knew that much would be learnt through practice, which mainly included the education of staff, to move from uncritically adopted Algiers school racist assumptions toward an understanding of their non-understanding of the Muslim patients’ resistance by instead viewing resistance ‘as a positive sign . . . by a culture that refused to bend when faced with its own denial’ (Cherki, 2006: 69). In response to Géronimi, Fanon added, ‘it was not simply a matter of imposing imported methods that had been more or less adapted to the native mentality. I also had to demonstrate a number of things in the process: namely, that the values of Algerian culture are different from those of colonial culture . . . [and] I needed to have the support of the Algerian medical staff in order to incite them to rebel against the prevailing method’ (Cherki, 2006: 71–72).
The point is not what he should already have known, but what Fanon and the staff learnt through the process. One thing that became clear was that for psychiatry to be political, action had to be taken. As the failure of the project helped highlight its unquestioned ethnocentrism, Fanon began involving all the staff in a reorientation of practical measures. In addition, inside the hospital, attitudes to language and culture were challenged. A traditional Moorish café was developed, and storytellers and musicians were welcomed. Muslim holidays and festivals were celebrated. All this became part of the socio-psychotherapy’s new praxis, which became essential and critical for the staff to understand:
We do not punish our patients; we are obliged to understand each one of their attitudes. Each time we disregard our profession, each time that we give up our attitude of understanding and adopt an attitude of punishment, we are mistaken. (Fanon, 2018: 346)
As well as many group therapy and ergotherapy projects, Fanon emphasized the importance of self-critical listening and learning from the patients as part of the therapeutic practice. That one could learn from those who are made to be passive by the institution was innovative, requiring the staff to change their ideas.
Part II: Fanon and the politics of social revolution
News about Fanon and his project at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital quickly spread, attracting new staff and interns. Around the same time, the FLN (National Liberation Front)’s armed struggle began on 01 November 1954, and Fanon quickly became drawn into FLN circles (see Gibson, 2024: 158–160). By 1955, Fanon had become close to some of the local leaders, including Abane Ramdane, who was the architect of the Soummam conference that took place in the Kabyle region in August 1956.
At the conference, a programme of principles and perspectives was developed, including what kind of new society was being fought for and how it would be fought. One answer to the latter was to create a political leadership that would determine military strategy. One outcome of this would be the Battle of Algiers, which began immediately after the conference ended. Critical of Islamism and militarism and underscoring the importance of democracy, central to the platform was a vision of the future Algeria as a secular democratic society with the ‘primacy of citizenship over identities’ (Abane, 2011: 39). The programme of the revolution would be socialist, democratic, and anti-theocratic, including ideas of woman’s equality and action (which Fanon would write about in A Dying Colonialism). Fanon met with some of the most left-wing and secular leaders while at Blida-Joinville Hospital, including the key figure behind the platform, Abane. Fanon considered Abane a great friend and teacher whose teaching included the responsibility of ‘revolutionary discipline’ (see Gendzier, 1985: 285) and it was Abane who convinced Fanon to join him in Tunis and work on the FLN publication El Moujhadid.
Abane, as well as the Soummam Platform, would continue to have a profound influence on Fanon’s politics, including the idea of a democratic future which included agricultural workers, the landless and urban poor: the colonised wretched of the earth. Indeed, one could consider some of the language of the Soummam Platform’s analysis is also influenced by Fanon as it describes the FLN army’s violent action provoking ‘a psychological shock which had liberated the people from their torpor, their fear and from their skepticism’, making ‘the Algerian people conscious of their national dignity’ (Panaf, 1975: 179).
United as a fighting organization against French settler colonialism, the FLN was, however, rife with factionalism. One of the FLN militarist factions murdered Abane in late 1957. Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism reflects Abane’s continued influence, while Fanon’s revolutionary humanist anti-colonial politics are most fully developed in The Wretched of the Earth. Concerned about the ‘misadventures’ (pitfalls) of national consciousness facing the newly independent nations, he is especially critical of how the nationalist elites ‘make a fetish of organization which is uncritically imported from the metropole’. This ‘fetish of organization’ he argues, ‘will often take precedence over a reasoned study of colonial society’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 108). This fetish is expressed not only by following a party-line but using ‘sweeping, dogmatic formulas’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 199) as a short cut for activism. Fanon explains, ‘the preference for this short cut, in which spontaneity and over simple sinking of differences dangerously combine to defeat intellectual elaboration, frequently triumphs’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 199). It is not a stretch to consider Fanon’s critical analysis of the militant akin to his analysis of the failure of sociotherapy at Blida-Joinville. Both are practical learning experiences and engaged pedagogy, since the militant’s idea of ‘getting things done’ reflects a concern too taken with administrative matters. Fanon’s response echoed his idea of education discussed earlier: ‘It is not enough to tell him he is wrong. We must make him ready for responsibility’, Fanon argues, ‘encourage him to follow up his chain of reasoning, and make him realize the true nature, often shocking, inhuman, and in the long run sterile, of such oversimplification’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 199). Taking responsibility for the true nature of such oversimplification is not just an individual militant’s work but a collective endeavour. The encouragement to follow through their ‘chain of reasoning’ becomes group work and group responsibility, reflecting how ‘the search for truth in local attitudes is a collective affair’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 199).
Continuing the argument, Fanon connects it to the collective work of ‘the search for truth’ arguing that while some can ‘elaborate their thought more rapidly’ they must avoid ‘riding roughshod over the people’ because ‘the success of the decision which is adopted depends upon the coordinated, conscious effort of the whole of the people’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 199). The conscious collective struggle that Fanon is talking about is one that ‘presupposes collective responsibility’ and involves everyone: ‘We all have dirty hands’, he says, and ‘every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 199). Thus, he intimates the connection between the critique of the individual militant and the revolutionary organization itself, which, he argues, must, on independence, quickly be decentralized and directly and democratically involved in open discussions with people.
Radical mutations in consciousness?
Perhaps Fanon’s most under-read book, A Dying Colonialism (L’an Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne), written in the revolution’s fifth year, 1959, focuses on radical changes in social attitudes and consciousness that the revolution has brought. The point here is to become conscious of the taken-for-granted thoughts, actions, and personal behaviour of being colonized in a settler colony. A descriptive analysis of a popular uprising, the book was written with the French left in mind (the French Government immediately banned it). Fanon indicates how profound changes in attitudes to gender (Algeria Unveiled and The Algerian Family), technology and language (This is the Voice of Algeria), medicine (Medicine and Colonialism), and among Europeans (Algeria’s European minority) had taken place (see Gibson, 2003: 127–156) since the uprising had begun. In ‘This is the Voice of Algeria’, Fanon describes a community coming together to listen to the radio broadcast. Being jammed by the French, only fragments could be heard. While a FLN militant might be among the listeners, this was a genuine community discussion and a commitment to reconstruct the news of the nation being created through the fragments they had heard. It meant that there was ‘a radical transformation of the means of perception, of the very world of perception’ (Fanon, 1959/1965: 96) as the listeners became active participants in the revolution. In Arabic and French, the broadcasts also reflected a radical change in attitudes toward the French language, which had been considered the language of order and threat, of the police and the law courts. ‘The reality of combat’ made it clear how a French minority was supporting the struggle. These changing attitudes ‘stripped the Arabic language of its sacred character, and the French language of its negative connotations’ (Fanon, 1959/1965: 92). What Fanon had earlier called the ‘mutual supports between language and the community’ was filled out as ‘the new language of the nation could then make itself known’ (Fanon, 1959/1965: 92).
National self-determination and the self-determination of self
Fanon argues that the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth—Colonial War and Mental Disorders—is ‘not concerned with producing a scientific work’, avoiding, he says, ‘all arguments over semiology, nosology, or therapeutics’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 251). And yet, Fanon is nonetheless engaged in each of these dimensions. He starts with a prognosis that colonial wars—‘the bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere’ and its ‘generalization of inhuman practices’—constitute, as he puts it, a ‘veritable apocalypse’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 251). While colonialism has a history of murder and inhuman practices (often called pacification), the mental disorders caused by the contemporary war are new and ‘singular’ in the ‘pathology that it gives rise to’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 251). In contrast to the radical changes in consciousness, becoming conscious of the repression of settler colonialism on an individual’s thought action, the chapter highlights the haunting, timeless, and repetitive nature of trauma. Colonial violence, terror, torture, and brutality are absolute, and Fanon knew from a psychiatric point of view that the traumas would have to be addressed for years to come. His approach is far from one-sided. There are psychological costs of struggle ‘sacrifices’ which remain unaccounted. The first case (which is not included in the series and appears as a footnote) ‘raises the question of responsibility within the revolutionary framework’. It is about a man who had been ordered by the national liberation movement to plant a bomb in a café. On each anniversary of the café bombing, the man suffered from anxiety and suicidal obsessions. Fanon explains that after independence, the man had befriended nationals from the former colonial power and wondered ‘whether among the victims of the bomb there had been people like his new acquaintances’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 253). Fanon points out that the café ‘was a meeting place for notorious racists; but there was nothing to prevent a quite ordinary passer-by from going in and having a drink’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 253). The haunting unknown is reminiscent of the bombing of the café in Pontecorvo’s film Battle of Algiers. In the film, there are the faces of those who will be its victims, most memorably a four-year-old child eating an ice cream just before the explosion 3 . Fanon sums up, ‘Our actions never cease to haunt us’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 253).
The chapter is appropriately placed within a discussion of national liberation. First, it highlights the necessity of continued coordinated and serious anticolonial psychotherapeutic interventions required after independence, while acknowledging that such efforts may not always succeed. We are continually ‘pursued by our actions’, aware that vertigo haunts ‘the whole of existence?’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 253). Second, the opening cases also highlight the connection between Fanon’s political/philosophical practice and mental health practice. In the chapter’s first reported case, argues Erica Burman, Fanon, ‘as therapist even more than political agitator, appears didactic but not explicitly directive’ (Burman, 2019: 140). To put it in another context, the idea of not being directive is much like his criticism of the militant or leader who wants to end discussion and debate and tell the people what to do (see Fanon, 1961/2004: 139). In the militant’s case, Fanon argues, the question is not about right or wrong but rather the militant’s responsibility to encourage the community to work out their own experiences in the search for truth. To tell the community meeting what to do is, in Fanon’s mind, sterile and inhuman, and allows for ‘little intellectual elaboration’ (Fanon, 1961/2004: 139).
Fanon considers that colonial domination creates a farmyard structure where the colonized fight over every scrap of bread. Colonialism fragments the group as each individual sees their neighbour as a competitor in the struggle to survive. Every olive is fought over, and relations with the social world are simply relations of how to get food because daily life is ‘famine, eviction . . . the mother’s dried-up breasts, children like skeletons’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 307).
The war of national liberation changes everything (Fanon, 1961/1968: 308). But as much as there have been radical mutations in consciousness (see Fanon, 1959/1965) brought by the national liberation struggle, Fanon insists in his last words of this last chapter of his final work that we cannot wait until humanity is ‘imperceptibly transformed by revolutionary processes in perpetual renewal’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 305). Rather, consciousness needs help now. Almost returning us to the analytic self-criticism of the consulting room, he argues, ‘the important theoretical problem is that it is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to de-mystify, and to harry the insult to humankind that exists in oneself’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 304). Fanon consistently emphasizes this point. As much of individual liberation cannot be achieved without the group—social praxis and changing the world—for Fanon, ‘an authentic national liberation’ can only exist to ‘the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun their own liberation’ (Fanon, 1964/1967: 103, my emphasis). In a 1957 article in El Moudjahid, Fanon describes the Algerian revolution as one that ‘expresses both a process of liberation from foreign yoke and the destruction of feudal relics’, where the individual, he adds, ‘can blossom, advance and exercise [their] personal judgment and initiative freely’ (Fanon, 2018: 57–71). Individual and national liberation are intertwined, and the task of the newly independent nation is ‘first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign inhabitants dwell therein’ (Fanon, 1961/1968: 205, my emphasis, translation altered).
