Master and Slave

By Horace Judson

FRANTZ FANON

by IRENE L.GENDZIER

300 pages. Pantheon. $10.

Frantz Fanon was born an outsider. He lived on the cusp of history, ground between implacable opposites. A black man from Martinique, Fanon grew up in the intensely French and white-oriented prewar culture of that island. Making it there, he went to France to train as a psychiatrist with whites as his patients. Then, in 1953, he moved to Algeria to direct a mental hospital crowded with North African Moslems.

Torn between Freud and Marx, Fanon flung himself into the opening phase of the Algerian revolution and became one of the FLN's chief pamphleteers and theorists. He fell sick, journeyed to Moscow for a cure, but was eventually told by Soviet specialists that the only hope for his leukemia lay in Washington, D.C. In the National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Md., weeks before he died in 1961 at age 36, he received the first copies of his last and most revolutionary book, The Wretched of the Earth. The FLN had his body flown to Tunis and buried him with honors in Algerian soil, while a CIA agent stood by his grave.

Today the Algerians minimize Fanon's role in their victory. They have all but made him a nonperson in the land he struggled for. Yet his early and passionate assertion that black culture is beautiful, as well as his later preaching that the oppressed can heal their souls through the cathartic effect of revolutionary violence, posthumously turned Fanon into a hero for some white radical theorists and some American blacks.

Fanon's books, though not highly original, gain an undeniable authenticity because they spring so intensely from what he lived and observed. He had read Hegel, who wrote in the most abstract way of the distorting effects of the master-slave relationship on the psychic life of the slave. He had also read and been deeply influenced by Sartre, who (in Anti-Semite and Jew) gave Hegel's master-slave analysis labyrinthine new twists. Hegel was not a slave, however, nor Sartre a Jew. But Fanon was black. His most significant work came out of his sudden realization, as a black psychiatrist in an Algerian mental hospital, that the fact of French colonial domination caused unique and grave psychic disorders in the objects of oppression, Fanon's Moslem patients.

In Fanon's life and works there is stuff in plenty for biographers. It is all too tempting to see more in Irene Gendzier's attempt than she actually achieves. Gendzier, an associate professor of history at Boston University, set out first, she says, "to write a psychohistory" that would relate the development of Fanon's "inner forces" to his public life. But she abandoned that aim, in part because the evidence proved hard to get. Fanon's widow, for example, refused to be interviewed. Gendzier then turned to what she subtitles "a critical study." It bears its best fruit in the rediscovery of Fanon's least-known works, the several professional psychiatric papers he wrote directly out of his Algerian hospital experience, before committing himself to the revolution.

Thereafter, as Fanon grew more prominent, he grew more controversial and more lost in the Algerian and Third World factional disputes that still swirl around his memory. Author Gendzier succumbs to what amounts to a left-wing psychic disorder in its own right: the compulsion to pursue and defend Fanon's reputation through increasingly irrelevant intricacies. She does this in a prose crippled by repetition and neo-Marxist jargon. Fanon himself quickly escapes her--and the reader is glad to follow him. . Horace Judson

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