Fort-de-France (Martinica), 1925 – Washington (EUA), 1961

By Adriana Veríssimo

He was born on July 20 in the capital of Martinique. During World War II, he fought in North Africa as a soldier in the French army, and by the age of twenty, he had already been decorated as a war veteran. In 1945, he returned to Martinique and collaborated in the campaign of Aimé Césaire, his friend and intellectual mentor, for the mayoralty of Fort-de-France.

After graduating in medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry, he returned to his island once again in 1951. In 1952, he married a French woman in Paris and then went to Algeria, taking the position of head of the Psychiatry Department at the Blida-Joinville hospital. He began to fight against colonialism as a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN).

In 1960, he discovered he had leukemia but continued his intellectual and political activities. He died one year before Algeria achieved its independence, on December 6, 1961, in Washington, D.C., United States.

A passionate reader of the works of Karl Marx, Fanon sought to formulate a synthesis of Marxism with Sartre’s existentialism, psychoanalysis, and the theoretical movement known as “Negritude,” of which Aimé Césaire is one of the exponents. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, a theoretical landmark of anticolonialism published in 1961 with a preface by Sartre, Fanon states that the colonizer extracts his “truth,” or rather, his goods, from the colonial system. According to him, social marginalization is inherent to the colonial system, and the liberating revolution cannot depend solely on the working class and the industrial proletariat but must also involve alliances with other sectors of society, especially the marginalized.

Among his works, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), published in 1952, stands out as his first book. As a psychiatrist, he studied racism and how it is internalized by its victims.