Photograph Source: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota – CC BY 2.0
Toiling as a clinical psychiatrist in the heart of French-controlled Algeria, Frantz Fanon would conclude after several years of work and struggle, “Today the all-out national war of liberation waged by the Algerian people for seven years has become a breeding ground for mental disorders.”[i]
At the time, the Algerian people, taking inspiration from their Vietnamese counterparts, had been steeped in their own struggle for independence from the clutches of France. Although the major European empires were starting to implode, a direct byproduct of their own self-destruction in the two great wars, France was eager to hold onto some of its colonial outposts, especially Algeria. Once the independence war had started, France simply responded much the same way as Israel has done against the Palestinians, which is to arm settler populations, and impose their will through bombings and a campaign of terror, with tanks rolling through neighborhoods, and militarized roadblocks at every turn. Algerians felt the boot of the police state in all its fascist glory.
From this experience, Fanon’s thinking of colonization and the resistance to it as an extremely visceral process had been reinforced. As a medical practitioner, he not only gathered data on the prognosis of the revolution from what he could witness, but very much leaned on the insights of Algerian patients, many of whom took part in the independence movement, and because of this faced intense forms of repression, thus developing depression, anxiety, psychosis, sexual incontinence, among other physical and mental ailments.
“As a philosopher, psychiatrist and political activist, Fanon operated on the assumption that capitalism deforms the bodies of those it exploits; and that, more or less, coercively, it produces certain characteristic deportments, certain characteristic dispositions” Matthew Beaumont writes in How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body, adding, “But he applied this principle to colonialism in constructing a comprehensive critique of his social formation’s highly specific mechanisms of oppression (15).
Beaumont, an English professor, and theorist, explores the deep connections Fanon would make between colonialization and capitalism and the impact such systems have on our physical and mental welfare. Some of these connections can seem obvious today and yet, if they do, it was Fanon who’d been part of the tradition pushing this connection between a person’s physical and mental state and the conditions they’d been left to navigate, conditions sustained by such things as French colonial rule, or simply, the day-to-day reality of working at a factory, or more contemporarily, hunched over a keyboard, eyes starting to burn at the screen. Even then, we still find ourselves existing in a world that refuses to take seriously at times, especially institutionally, the physical and mental ramifications of being an oppressed body under capitalist dogma and imperialist domination. Some of that logic has been breaking through to the broader public as we witness a famine being imposed upon the people of Gaza by the Israeli state. Bodies, in real time, are being reduced to mere bones and 
sunken eyes.
Beaumont’s How We Walk, therefore, is a necessary reminder of the depth and relevancy of Fanon’s political thought and philosophy. In a world dominated by U.S. imperial interests, gutted by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent rise of neoliberal hubris, Fanon’s combination of Marxism and Lacanian analysis is a welcome recurring contribution to how people can correctly analyze the world swirling around them. Beaumont’s highlighting of Fanon’s materialist analysis, sometimes lost in the sauce of Afro-pessimism or elements of post-colonial meandering, returns to us a thinker whose exploration of mental and physical health as it relates to both capitalism and anti-capitalism, colonialism and anti-colonialism is one that’s unfortunately, evergreen. It’s an analysis, though, that also pushes us beyond the symbolism of some aspects of anticolonial politics. A Palestinian state, for example, cannot simply be about vague notions of “pride” or flag waving. The wellbeing of the average Palestinian, their capacity to finally live free, is rooted in the redistribution of resource, from land to universal programs. Everything else is white noise.
FANON THE INTERDISCIPLINARY REBEL
A major strength of Beaumont’s work is its showcasing Fanon as not simply a thinker of “violence” (although it was a core part of his work), but rather as an anti-colonial figure, whose analysis was extremely interdisciplinary and must be situated with the analysis and thinking of other great minds. If anything, Fanon was part of a great tradition of academics whose intellectual curiosities and obsessions carried them beyond the niche concerns of any one field or set of interests. Beaumont clearly has us place Fanon in the same league as a Du Bois, a Marx, and contemporary political and social critics, such as a Judith Butler, or Angela Davis. Both Fanon was ahead of his time and a great repository of burgeoning political traditions daring to unveil the true essence of social and political conditions swirling around them and those they aligned themselves with, whether it was the English working class or the Algerian masses striving for a sense of self amidst bloodshed and repression.
Beaumont’s intervention in this regard is extremely welcome, given some of the ways Fanon’s work has been reduced to either questions of violence, or in presenting colonialism and anti-blackness as merely forms of psychological harm versus forces that are meant to deform the body, both physically and mentally.
“While most Fanon studies scholarship helps us better a complex figure who died too young— Fanon succumbed to leukemia when he was only thirty-six— the discipline has also spawned some strange interpretations, or rather misreadings, of his oeuvre,” Kevin Ochieng Okoth explains regarding how Fanon has been used by some sections of Afro-pessimist scholarship, adding, “At times, it might sound like Fanon is theorising Blackness as an eternal and essentialist category. But this isn’t the case.”[ii]
In How We Walk, Beaumont instead has us read Fanon who had a far more complex and materialist reading of such things as anti-blackness and racial oppression, and of course, colonialism. Some of the thinkers Beaumont has Fanon connected with range from the Marxist scholar of hope, Ernest Bloch, to the Algerian novelist who took part in the Algerian struggle, Assia Djebar.
Both Bloch and Fanon were inspired by and expanded on the materialist legacy of Marxism. Fanon would criticize some aspects of Marxism as not having developed the proper analysis for the colonial situation. Still, he and Bloch believed in the connection between a person’s material situation and just how “damaged” their mind and body can be.
Beaumont explains, “For Fanon— in opposition both to the medical profession’s self-serving articles of faith and those of a colonial-capitalist class committed to maintaining profits at all costs—material conditions are positively constitutive of the individual’s compromised or deformed physique” (59).
When Fanon was developing such ideas, it was still accepted by most of the French medical establishment that Algerians who exhibited emotional and physical distress within the metropole were suffering from some innate characteristics that had to be somehow overcome. It resembled how mainly housewives in the U.S. were encouraged to find individual level “solutions” to their feelings of suffocation and depression as opposed to identifying the broader societal influence altering who they were.
“Fanon followed his intellectual mentor Tosquelles—who was known as the ‘Red Psychiatrist’ because he had fought for the POUM during the Spanish Civil War—in insisting that the self is constructed in a social context, through its relations to others,” Beaumont writes (92).
As much as we’ve seen a growing recognition among the broader public about mental health and one’s living and working conditions, there remains an industry that Fanon would’ve found himself challenging. Self-help books imploring people to find time for oneself, placing people in a fantasy where they have all the resources one would need, and aren’t compelled to work to pay for their basic amenities, continue to fill our shelves. There are social media influencers eagerly discussing the “grind” and how one can develop techniques to “maximize” their hustle. Not to mention how polices that would dramatically improve our mental and physical wellbeing, such as universal healthcare and housing, are never mentioned in mainstream media or in mainstream politics, even by those claiming to be the hero of the working masses.
The Algerian existed in a political landscape in which resources were concentrated in the hands of French settlers and French military. Whatever opportunities one had to build a relatively safe and dignified life was usually out one of one’s hands. Even for those who could manage some semblance of “normality”, all of that could be snatched away, therefore producing person after person rife with anxiety and angst. And as Fanon learned in his interviews, many Algerians developed physical deformities as well, such as nerve pain in their body from the intense levels of anxiety hitting them, wave after wave, when navigating the land they were born in, flooded with French settlers and barricades.
We may not exist exactly at that same level of oppression. However, in some parts of the country, the police serve to occupy and intimidate residents, mainly the black and brown poor and working class. In such situations, anxiety becomes the norm. Muscles are clenched as one navigates the street, roaming past the police checkpoints, feeling the hairs on the back of your neck start to rise, as you feel someone with a badge trailing after you in their car.
In relation to Djebar, who knew of Fanon during her time in the FLN struggle against French rule, Beaumont promotes the idea that Fanon’s thinking on such issues of the body can be connected to ideas and concepts that he didn’t focus on as much as he should’ve, like the politics of gender. During the FLN struggle (the FLN being the main revolutionary party fighting against the French on behalf of the Algerian peoples), the leadership did recruit Algerian women for the movement. This included women serving propaganda purposes, which is what Djebar had done, and women who participated in the more violent aspects of the liberation struggle, such as dropping off bombs against French targets.
When it came to participating in the violence against the French colonial state, many Algerian women utilized head-to-toe religious coverings as a means of hiding guns and other instruments of war. At the same time, some women who became part of the war refused the veil, believing in a more progressive Algeria once freed from the French.
Fanon himself, as Beaumont explains, was someone who identified this fascinating and complex aspect of the independence struggle, where the veil took on extra meaning for women, from those who adopted it as a political tool, to others who rejected it along with colonial rule.
The body, again, serves as an important vessel for exploring critical elements of colonial and anti-colonial politics shaping many Algerians. Nonetheless, Djebar would critique Fanon for still overtly romanticizing where liberation would lead for many Algerian women. Yes, the FLN promoted a more progressive concept of the female fighter and participant but in the post-colonial aftermath, women still saw themselves as not having attained the necessary policies and politics to truly feel liberated and free, according to Beaumont.
“In her earlier collection, Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1980), Djebar provides an especially valuable corrective to Fanon’s idealized depiction of the transformation of women’s lives in the Algerian revolution,” Beaumont writes, “As Faulkner comments, Djebar reveals in this volume that, two decades after the publication of ‘Algeria Unveiled’, in the conditions of a post-colonial nation that remained profoundly patriarchal and oppressively reactionary in other ways” (171).
However flawed Fanon’s analysis might be in some cases, he was thinking through connections that are incredibly important to how we must engage on ideas of oppression and liberation in our modern politics. As Beaumont makes clears too, Fanon adopted and adapted ideas from a range of thinkers and mediums, including the cinema, and in that same vein, his ideas on the materialist nature of oppression and anti-oppression politics must be examined and adapted as well.
FANON FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Liberation itself, as understood by Fanon, must be seen as a physically transforming and therefore, visceral process. Once again, not something merely restricted to the mind in terms of psychological distress and its subsequent overcoming. Of course, a part of anti-colonial resistance requires the oppressed to cast aside ideas and concepts that were imposed upon the individual to either believe in their subjugation or at the very least, to accept that no other world can be created apart from the oppressive one we all must learn to navigate. However, as Beaumont identifies, much of Fanon’s own hope in what a post-colonial world would look like was very much predicated on the physical manifestation of liberation, not just a changing of symbols or rhetoric.
“It is a body that is no longer cramped and stiffened by the conditions of exploitation and oppression,” Beaumont explains, “It is a body that rises up” (69).
Scattered across Fanon’s essays and examinations of the colonial and post-colonial possibilities is an insistence that as much as peoples’ minds must be changed, they are more likely to think and behave differently once their material surroundings start to dramatically alter along with them. An Algerian is more likely to feel excited for creating a new world as their basic needs and interests are finally being met, from land redistribution to housing to healthcare. The mental issues one was faced with, especially the constant anxiety, can slowly be lifted when people don’t need to survive on wages that barely pay for what they need, when people don’t need to feel compelled to work every hour of every day for basic amenities, when we’re no longer feeling cramped in our surroundings, our things stuffed into closets, daring to crash over us at any second.
Our minds feel free when bills don’t pile up, when we’re not racing from one job to the next so we can maintain what little we have.
In Palestine, the Palestinian people will be truly free when land is redistributed, and people are no longer crammed into the Gaza Strip or what remains of Palestinian communities across the West Bank. The hopelessness, the depression, the trauma is more easily overcome when there is a state called Palestine that secures basic rights and resources for everyone, especially Palestinians who’ve been forced to starve and endure the most horrid conditions. This would be the foundation of liberation, according to Fanon, not simply the raising of flags, or some measure of “autonomy” all the while water and food remains greatly restricted.
“In opposition to the abject gait, which is the gestus of racial and colonial capitalism, Fanon affirms the upright gait, which is the gestus of some properly post-colonial, post-capitalist society that he identifies with the forms of a radical new humanism,” Beaumont states (103).
One issue with Beaumont’s work, or rather something that could’ve been explored, was the differing conditions in which Fanon’s insights emerged from compared to now, decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time of Fanon’s burgeoning work on anti-colonialism and resistance, U.S. power globally was growing, but it was facing stiff opposition from anti-colonial movements, many of which received support from countries part of the so-called Second World. Other anti-colonial figures, like Amilcar Cabral, who successfully led the people of Guinea-Bissau against the fascist Portuguese, praised the material support, including weaponry, their movement receive from social democracies in Europe, as well as the USSR and other socialist countries that were part of the Eastern bloc.[iii]
When the U.S. threw its weight behind apartheid South Africa, much like it does now with Israel and Saudi Arabia, it was Cuba, which received aid from the USSR, that funneled troops and aid to Angola. This historically was a pivotal moment in which Angolan forces, allied with the Cubans, successfully defeated invading apartheid South Africans. This invasion humiliated South Africa, and prevented what could’ve been a disaster for Angola and other African nations in that part of the continent.[iv]
Much of that global network of support that proved so useful for oppressed groups and radical movements is currently missing and has not been a factor in decades. One could argue that the level of bloodshed seen in Gaza, the intense level of death and destruction conducted by the Israeli state (not to forget the Saudi Arabian invasion of Bahrain and its embargo of Yemen), has been more possible due to the disappearance of state institutional actors, like the USSR, or even Yugoslavia. We exist in a world truly dominated by U.S. capitalist hegemony and the various monsters they’ve bred over the decades, from far-right Zionists to anti-Communist Islamists.
It would’ve been productive for Beaumont to find some way to explore this political situation, perhaps putting Fanon in conversation with figures like Cabral or Walter Rodney, or some contemporary scholars on the subject of anti-colonialism. It is a missed opportunity.
FANON THE FIGHTER
In the concluding section of Wretched, Fanon calls on his comrades everywhere, committed against European empire and cultural decay, to strive for a better world against the forces dragging them away from their political horizons.
“We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light,” Fanon exclaimed, his voice reverberating off the page, “The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute.” [v]
Although there are missed opportunities in Beaumont’s work, including not really incorporating enough of Fanon’s interviews with patients into the texts’ discussion, Beaumont does succeed in capturing this Fanon, a man of analysis and poetics. A man deriving meaning from study, and exuding solidarity.
In How We Walk, Fanon is presented as he truly was: a revolutionary.
Notes.
[i] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 182.
[ii] Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (New York: Verso, 2023), 79-80.
[iii] Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022).
[iv] Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
[v] Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 235.
