Adam Shatz‘s latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, examines the intersections of the African diaspora in the Caribbean Islands, WWII France and it’s aftermath, and the inevitable violence that colonialism creates and requires to maintain itself. He is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is also a visiting professor at Bard College and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”  He is the author of two earlier books: Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination.

Perhaps like me, you were aware of Frantz Fanon. You saw his books, particularly THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, in the bookshelves of people your respected, but you didn’t really know too much about him.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925. He was educated to identify as a French man, and as he wrote in his book, BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK, it was a shock to serve in WWII, be wounded, receive a medal and still be seen as an African, an object of fear. He studied in Lyon, France, and became a psychiatrist in the post-war intellectual ferment of existentialism and the rise of decolonization movements.

He was a playwright, a practicing psychiatrist, the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, a teacher, a diplomat, a journalist, the editor of an anti-colonial newspaper, the author of three books, and a major Pan-Africanist and internationalist, who became a political militant as France efforts to suppress the Algerian independence movement became more violent and vicious. But unlike most militants, he had the training and intellectual capacity to analyze and articulate the processes internal to the individual and external to the culture that lead to the point of violence, and whether violence can be justified or even dis-intoxicating.

Like Ernesto “Che” Guevara–another revolutionary who valued the poetic and was a committed internationalist, doctor, soldier, teacher, and theorist–Fanon’s life has much to inform our understanding of where we find ourselves in struggle today.

Thanks to David Rovics for permission to post his song, “As the Bombs Rain Down” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQbx5zPxGAk&list=OLAK5uy_lNIlbd6R0lC4TICKXq2ylk9-CrjXHDcc4

The World May Be Entering a Much Bloodier Era https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/international-world/coups-climate-change-africa-sahel.html

Dossier no. 26: Frantz Fanon: The brightness of metal https://mronline.org/2020/03/04/dossier-no-26-frantz-fanon-the-brightness-of-metal/