A CubaNews translation. Not  yet fully edited.

Franz Omar Fanon was one of the Twentieth Century's most original thinkers. Despite his short life he left us a body of work in the form of essays forged by political, anticolonial, and antiracist struggles. His brief time coincided with the second generation of Black intellectuals (African and Caribbean) who were trained in Europe in the postwar period and were closely linked to the decolonization process that began in Ghana in 1956.

He was born on July 20, 1925 on the island of Martinique, a French colony, where the poet Aime Cesaire, one of the fathers of the Negritude movement, was his teacher and mentor. At the age of 18 he travelled to the island of Dominica to join the French Liberation Forces, and from there he moved into the army of that colonial power, which was, at that time, at war against the Nazis. He distinguished himself in the Battle of Alsace, for which he received the Croix de Guerre in 1944.

Following the German defeat, the French army, in an expression of colonial arrogance, decided to send all the non-white soldiers of that distinguished brigade to Toulon, in Provence, and Fanon returned to Martinique for a short and fruitful period, during which, in the Fourth Republic's election, he worked in the election campaign of the Communist candidate: his former teacher and friend Aime Cesaire. In mid-1946 he returned to France to study medicine in Lyon, graduating in psychiatry in 1951.

The following year his first book was published, Black Skin, White Masks, which was a beacon in psychoanalytical thought due to its reasoned description and blunt denunciation of the persistence of racist colonialism and its consequences for the Black people colonized by France.

Until that time, the practice of psychoanalysis was aimed exclusively at the middle and upper classes; it was a novel approach where the therapist's exclusive position of power often turned the therapist into a manipulator of the patient.

With the publication of this book, Fanon undermined such assumptions, then broke down the exclusivity of psychoanalysis so that it could serve subordinated Black people and could take on a more questioning position toward the colonial power by investigating the causes of the alienation of this colonized, collective individual, who was a victim of historic, cultural, and racist manipulations.

His book opened a discussion about the boundaries of science, the role of the scientist, the critical situation of the subordinated individual, the limits of the colonial enterprise, and colonialism's ability to reinvigorate itself through new cultural forms of domination.

From that time on, there was a change in Fanon's critical perspective and he incorporated an understanding of the colonial reality into his critical thinking and his theoretical approaches in his practice: which was a place to apply the research he had been carrying out.

In 1953 he arrived in Algeria and distinguished himself as Chief of Service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, where he began to apply novel practical applications of social therapy, verifying the primacy of cultural practices in psychopathologies.

While involved in this work, in late 1954 he got swept up into the Algerian Liberation War. He secretly joined the National Liberation Front and used his position as a doctor and researcher to travel throughout Algerian territory carrying out clandestine assignments. But in 1956 the situation became unsustainable and he publicly resigned his medical position; as a result of which he was expelled from Algeria in January 1957.

He returned to France and almost immediately travelled to Tunis where he joined the editorial board of El Moudjahid, publishing various pieces there, which were posthumously collected in Toward the African Revolution. After crossing the Sahara with the aim of opening a third front in the struggle for independence, Fanon was diagnosed with a fatal illness: leukemia.

He travelled to the Soviet Union for treatment and saw a slight improvement in his condition, which allowed him to return to Tunis. There he delivered his political testament: The Wretched of the Earth, his masterpiece, which was published posthumously the same year he died, with a prologue by his friend Jean Paul Sartre, whom he visited for the last time in 1960.

The following year, using a false identity he was able to enter the United States to receive treatment for his advanced illness. He died in a hospital in Maryland on the morning of December 6, 1961 at 36 years of age. He received a well-deserved funeral of honor in Tunis and was buried in the Martyrs Cemetery in Algeria.

The war in Algeria, the independence of the former European colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the impact of the Cuban Revolution in the intellectual field in the 1960s were what marked third-world thinking, despite the fierce winds of the Cold War and the rivalry of the great powers of the time: the Soviet Union and the United States of America.

Outside of that vaunted "first world" confrontation, a Third World existed, non-homogenous with its own special set of problems, which was not always noticed by the great powers. The artists and intellectuals of that part of the planet (which in 1964 the French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy would call the Third World, a term he modified in 1989 to the Global South) began questioning old and new theories of social and political thought in that era, assimilating them in a special way, reworking them from a more radical perspective, from a more contextualized criticism from which they questioned Eurocentric, supposedly universal, patterns, and went in search of their own model based on knowledge of local histories, national conflicts, and very concrete historic and cultural factors such as the dependent economic structures, the native bourgeoisies, the educational models, the linguistic conflicts, the religiosity or the ethnic and/or racial configuration of a country.

Fanon was a thinker from the postcolonial world. Perhaps for that reason he was a great critic not only of Eurocentric thinking, but also of Caribbean, African, and Afro-American thinking of that period, especially of the concept of Negritude put forward by his teacher Aime Cesar, with whom he differed in the ideological sphere while honoring his historic values - many pages have been written about this controversy. What needs to be said is that Fanon dialectically grasped the racial question in the new context of the decolonization that had recently begun in Africa and the Caribbean, a few years before his death in 1961.

Fanon's three most important titles put forward this requirement for these new decolonization struggles: that the independence they achieve must have an emancipational foundation that would make them truly and fully independent and not mere changes of government. Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, and Toward an African Revolution are characterized by a strong revolutionary stamp, a clear programmatic intent, and some critical and self-critical perspectives not usual in the thinking of the left up to the present.

Black Skin, White Masks (Paris, 1958) was published in Cuba for the first time in 1968. This second publication took place in a very different and perhaps more auspicious context in which to assess its value. This book is undoubtedly one of the great Third-Worldist manifestos produced in the Twentieth Century.

Its special quality, like that of very few manifestos, lies in the fact that its reach extends beyond those who share the same trench, those whom it aims to serve and stir up. Its message also aims to emancipate those it is fighting. Even as it frightens them a bit, it also takes them into account, at the same time that it criticizes them and points out their errors with a pointed finger, hungering for justice.

It is an aggressive critique of those individuals who are the bearers of the racist ideology. But while pointing a finger at others, Fanon also lays out for the Black individual himself the course of his suffering, the causes and diagnosis of a neurotic and historic illness that corrodes the body and soul of every victim who suffers racial discrimination.

In this book, which was the result of seven years of observation and investigation, Fanon describes and evaluates the low self-esteem, the invisibility, the constant devaluation, the habitual servitude, the fear of raising one's glance, and the impossibility, in the personal sense, of being a full individual; of being ordinary men or women who daily sing out their aspirations, who fight fiercely against their history, and possess a utopian goal like any human being. They are denied all of this in a racist environment, no matter how cultured that environment might be (or might appear). And in their collective, they must suffer the fate of a group pushed into ultimately being regarded as morally, religiously, and esthetically inferior; in short a group that is not worthy of a place in the world.

Piel negra, máscaras blancas es el desmontaje sicoanalítico e ideológico del racismo; sus argumentos están sustentados en las grandes discusiones que atravesaban las diversas tendencias del sicoanálisis freudiano-lacaniano y su relación con el marxismo: "De cualquier manera que hubiésemos abordado la alineación psíquica del negro, no podíamos silenciar algunos elementos que, por muy psicológicos que fuesen, engendraban efectos que nos remitían a otras ciencias" , nos advierte Fanon en el segundo capítulo de este libro, pero en el cuarto ya nos indica: "En tanto que psicoanalista debo ayudar a mi cliente a que haga consciente su inconsciente, a no intentar más una lactificación que es alucinación, pero también debo actuar en el sentido de un cambio de las estructuras sociales"1.

Black Skin, White Masks is the psychoanalytic and ideological dismantlement of racism; its arguments are based on the great discussions that have swept the various tendencies of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and its relationship to Marxism: "However we might approach the psychic alienation of the Black, we could not silence some elements that, however psychological they might be, engendered effects that referred us to other sciences," Fanon advised us in the second chapter of this book. But in the fourth he already tells us: "In my role as psychoanalyst I must help my client become conscious of his unconsciousness, to no longer attempt a LACTIFICATION??? [amelioration?] that is illusory, but I must also act in the sense of a change of the social structures."(1)

Here we see simultaneous movement to psychiatry and politics in search of an individual who has lost his place in History through the alienation of his racial and cultural nature as a result of small conditioned rhetorical or sexual actions through which this devalued image of self is reinforced, an image created by European racist bias and imposed by an already entrenched dominant (religious, economic, and cultural) structure.

In this book Fanon carries on a very critical dialog with his great teachers: his fellow Martiniquan the great poet and political figure Aime Cesaire, and the French philosopher and novelist Jean Paul Sartre. From both he rejects the historical veracity of their poetic fancies: he considered the Martiniquan's orthodox involvement in Negritude to be essentialist and insufficient, and he pointed to the Frenchman's excessive enthusiasm for the idea that the Marxism of that era - which was itself very Eurocentric - could overcome (or at least understand) the complexity of racism.

Fanon fused both criticisms and continued to develop them beyond this book. In his also classic and posthumous essay The Wretched of the Earth he tells us: "this historic obligation in which the men of African culture have found themselves, to racialize their demands…is going to lead them into a blind alley."

Black Skin, White Masks describes a triangle between the positions of Cesaire, Sartre, and Fanon regarding the colonial individual that Fanon described as fragmented and that each one of them approaches from a different angle. Fanon prefers to take an x-ray of prejudice, of the discriminatory act and to delve into how the racist deed is received by and impacts Black individuals. He describes their typical reactions and proposes a diagnosis that is perhaps a bit overblown but is conscious that the liberation of the colonized Black individual is, in addition to any social therapy, a medium- and long-term political process.

Fanon sets up a mirror with which to look at how these discriminated against and victimized individuals see themselves; suggesting that in this image lies the necessary catharsis, in order to then demand that they take a certain critical distance from that image, even when they are individuals with an advanced identity crisis, many already alienated, accepting their condition as non-persons. His final proposal is to break this mirror, to rise up.

But this is also a book full of fury, sometimes contained and other times not; a fury that he knows could lead these individuals to an act of violence; violence that can be made revolutionary, if they succeed in restoring their demolished identities.

One of the most significant methodological and political contributions of this book is the place from which the author builds his discussion; Fanon speaks from the differentness of the racially oppressed, and as a result takes an openly political and historically contextualized stance within the setting of what decades later would be called the African diaspora. And he speaks of language as the weapon par excellence of colonial domination, which must be confronted with a highly developed sense of identity.

It is a book that carries itself like a Zulu warrior, speaks like a Griot, and spans a broad interpretive and counterpointal spectrum like that of any Central African vocal group. It is a book of strategies and tactics deployed through language and his critiques, through decolonizing thought, psychoanalysis, less orthodox Marxism, literary criticism, linguistics, historiographic revision, and the vindication of cultural models of Afro origins, discussed time and again, to be inserted and understood within the new contexts of the African disapora.

Es un libro sobre la naturaleza de la terapia social que Fanon propone convertir en acción consciente, para transformar el inconsciente político (personal y colectivo) de cada sujeto negro que interpela. Esta lectura-propuesta no resultó tan bien recibida en su momento: pequeñas resistencias, pretextos….; en fin, prejuicios, no les ubicaron en el arsenal teórico revolucionario más visible de la época y esa reserva le convirtió en lectura de capillas; quizá por esta razón la publicación en Cuba de las obras de Fanon se debe al interés del Comandante Ernesto Guevara, protagonista herético y controversial de la Revolución latinoamericana, quien seguramente también fuera un lector crítico de Fanon.

It is a book about the nature of the social therapy that Fanon proposed to turn into conscious action, in order to transform the (personal and collective) political unconsciousness of every Black individual that he interviewed. This interpretation-suggestion was not very well received at that time: small resistances, pretexts…; ultimately, prejudices that did not situate them within the more visible revolutionary theoretical arsenal of that era and this reserve turned into a reading of the catechism; perhaps for that reason the publication of Fanon's works in Cuba was due to the interest of Comandante Ernesto Guevara, a heretical and controversial figure in the Latin American Revolution, who was also surely a critical reader of Fanon.

And this is the position from which one can better appreciate this important Caribbean thinker a half century after his death: from a profoundly critical reading that allows us to reraise some avenging and challenging assumptions with which he denounced the racist and colonizing masks of his era.

http://www.lajiribilla.co.cu/2011/n547_10/547_07.html