Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic **** 1/2

The Rebel's Clinic is a biography of Frantz Fanon. I started it knowing nothing about Fanon except that he's frequently cited in discussions about colonialism, racism, and psychiatry. Recently, his name came up in stories about the Israel-Gaza conflict and in The Best Minds. The glowing reviews for The Rebel's Clinic made me decide it would be an excellent introduction to the man and his thought.

The book traces Fanon's intellectual development, showing how it was influenced by and differed from the larger cultural currents of the time (post-war France).  Shatz describes incidents in Fanon's life only to the extent that they impact the evolution of his ideas. For example, we get more detail about his correspondence with Sartre than about his relationship with his wife and son.

Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, trained as a psychiatrist in France, participated in the lively post-war conversation about racism, and became radicalized by his involvement with Algeria's war of independence. His major influences were the then-ascendent movements of existentialism and Négritude, to which he added a psychiatric perspective.

At the heart of Fanon's analysis is the insidious psychological impact of colonialism. All of society accepts and internalizes the value system of the colonizer, which denigrates the colonized and alienates them from their own culture and identity. The colonial system deforms the psyche of both the colonizer and the colonized. The cure is to "disalienate" the oppressed by replacing the imposed value system with one that is more in line with the colonized people's lived experience.

The most controversial aspect of Fanon's vision is his belief that only a violent revolution is capable of overthrowing a colonial mindset. He compared Algeria's violent struggle to his homeland Martinique's peaceful abolition of slavery. In his view, Martinique did not transcend its colonial past because it achieved its ends through the favor of the colonizing power. Fanon is associated with this apology for violence by both his admirers and his critics, even though his most widely-read work, The Wretched of the Earth, recognizes the many ways that violence results in trauma of its own.

Fanon differs from his peers in his vision of post-colonial culture. Most commentators imagined the post-colonial society returning to a pre-colonial way of life, whereas Fanon favored a more existentialist reinvention. His issue with the Négritude movement was that it promoted a return to a core vision of "Blackness." He was appalled by the Islamic fundamentalism that arose during the Algerian war of independence.  Personally I see this naive view as an example of young Fanon continuing to internalize the value system of left-wing European intellectuals.

The final chapter outlines Fanon's legacy. People tend to pick and choose which of his ideas to adopt, with the result that both sides of an argument claim his support. No wonder I never formed a sense of his philosophy from the various citations.