Fanon’s Memory and Sartre’s Gaze
Forty years after Frantz Fanon died in 1961 at the National Institute of Health, in Bethesda, Md., David Macey has written a new biography of him. Macey’s FRANTZ FANON, at 516 pages, is the most voluminous biography yet of this great revolutionary thinker. The reader is taken on a long journey through Fanon’s lifetime of struggle against all forms of human alienation. The issue for Fanon was the unity of humanity, which in the colonial experience had not been positively manifested. This unity could only be achieved by the negation of social conditions that deny the common human essence.
The Black Soul of Jean-Paul Sartre
In his now classic essay Black Orpheus (1948) Sartre offers a defence of Negritude and opens with passionate address to white people: “When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you - like me - will feel the shock of having been seen.”
September 26th, 2001 at 5:41 pm
Leave it to a British academic to make the life of a fascinating individual like Frantz Fanon seem so uninteresting. I just read this David Macey book, or what I could endure of it, and was nearly bored out of my chair. My wife had to wake me up eight or nine times. It is 516 pages of mostly irrelevant, unsorted facts.
Maybe I’m being unduly critical, but it’s hard to have much patience after reading a very fascinating biography of Fanon earlier this summer– a much shorter book by Patrick Ehlen that was absolutely gripping. I could not put it down. That book was incisive, selective, and wonderfully written. If you want to read a book on Fanon, I would definitely recommend the latter one, and not Macey’s, unless you’re an insomniac (in which case the first book might be of some use).
September 27th, 2001 at 2:18 am
Can you give us a fuller citation or reference to the Ehlen book? When was it published? By whom?
Sounds interesting. I’ll probably read both.
October 14th, 2001 at 3:31 pm
It was published just this year, by Crossroad.
Here is a link to the book on Amazon:
Ehlen
By all means, give it a read. I think it’s the best one I’ve read on Fanon.