Frantz Fanon

Fanon was born in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique to Eléanore Médélice, a shopkeeper of Afro-Martinican and European descent, and Felix Casimir Fanon, a customs agent and descendent of African slaves and indentured Indians. Fanon was one of eight children, and he lived a comfortable middle-class life and attended Lycée Schoelcher, a respected private high school in Martinique. Fanon enlisted with the Free French forces when he was 18 and joined an Allied convoy during World War II. He was wounded during combat in Colmar, France, in 1944, and in 1955, he was repatriated back to Martinique. Fanon attended university and earned a bachelor’s degree, and then relocated to France for medical school, during which time he began writing and penned three original plays. Fanon became a psychiatrist in 1951, and during his medical residency in 1952, he wrote and published Black Skin, White Masks, which, like The Wretched of the Earth, explores the psychological effects of colonial racism on the black individual. In 1953, Fanon relocated to Algeria, where he also worked as a psychiatrist. He was deeply sympathetic to the Algerians’ fight for liberation from French colonialism during the Algerian War of Independence, and in 1954, he joined the Front de Libération Nationale, fighting on behalf of the Nigerians. He wrote and published The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, which was heavily censored by the French government. Around this time, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He sought treatment in the Soviet Union early in his illness, but he later traveled to the United States for continued medical management. Fanon died on December 6, 1961, at the National Institutes of Health facility in Bethesda, Maryland, at just 36 years old. He left behind a wife, Josie, and a son, Oliver, as well as a daughter, Mireille, from a previous relationship. During his short life, Fanon was an important voice in the fields of postcolonialism and Marxism, and his work has been invaluable to the development of critical theory. He advocated tirelessly for the decolonization of the Third World, and was particularly interested in the psychological impact of colonialist oppression on the colonized individual.