Francophone tradition that goes back to the publication by an earlier group of students of Légitime défense, or in other words to the Caribbean version of surrealism that so influenced Aimé Césaire and the poets of negritude.78 In Martinique itself, the tradition of Legitime défense was of course continued by Tropiques. The circle in which Fanon was moving in Lyon thus reproduces the cultural programme of the forefathers of the negritude of the 1940s and 1950s. It would in fact have been extremely difficult for them to have known the work of their predecessors in any detail. It is improbable that Légitime défense circulated widely outside Paris, or even outside the Latin Quarter, and the war and occupation must have destroyed any continuity between 1932 and 1949. Jazz, surrealism, existentialism and the poetry of negritude were all part of a young, modern culture and whilst Lyon was not the bohemian Paris where Miles Davis was pursuing an affair with Juliette Greco in 194979 and whilst the Students’ Union building was no cave in St-Germain des prés, Fanon was nevertheless deeply involved with the modernism of his day. He enjoyed discussing surrealism, and it is apparent from his degree dissertation that he was familiar with Henri Ey’s article on psychiatry and surrealism.80 As will be argued later, the cultural politics of Peau noire can be read in terms of his ambivalent relationship with both negritude and existentialism.
The student circles in which Fanon was moving were racially mixed, but the racial mix was not reflected in the sexual mix: there were few or no black women. Whilst mixed race couples were far from uncommon in Paris, Lyon was a deeply conservative town and Fanon’s first relationship with a younger white woman cannot have been an easy one. Michelle B. was a fellow medical student and a daughter of the middle classes – her father was an engineer who had worked on the Rhine’s dams – though not of the formidable bourgeoisie of Lyon. The relationship was not long-lasting, but it was one-sided and her commitment was much greater than Fanon’s. It ended in disaster for the young woman. In 1948, Michelle B. gave birth to Fanon’s daughter. The scandal was devastating. Pre-marital sex was bad enough, but having a black baby was worse still. Abortion was of course both illegal and unacceptable. Fanon was unwilling to marry her, having fallen for someone else, and had probably never taken the relationship as seriously as her. After some considerable persuasion from friends and family, and although he was under no legal obligation to do so, Fanon did recognize the child as his own, which allowed her to use the name Fanon in later life. Although there is a striking family resemblance, Mireille Fanon never knew her father and it was only as a young adult, and on Joby Fanon’s initiative, that she became part of the extended Fanon family. Inevitably, the brief affair with Fanon put an end to Michelle B.’s hopes of a medical career; she failed her exams and never qualified as a doctor. She did, however, marry a psychiatrist and eventually pursued a successful administrative career in that sector.81
Fanon had refused to marry the mother of his first child because he was now involved with Marie-Josephe Dublé (known to all as Josie), whom he met in 1949 when she was still at her lycée. She was a strikingly good-looking eighteen-year-old classicist, slim, dark-haired and with a contralto voice and the eyes of a gypsy: according to family memory, she was of mixed Corsican-gypsy descent, and had the temperament – and the temper – to match. Her family was from the Lyon region, and her parents were trade unionists working in the postal service. Their leftist politics meant that there was no parental disapproval of the relationship and no opposition to the marriage that followed.82 Josie Fanon, who committed suicide in Algiers in 1989, was always very reluctant to talk about her private life, and especially her life with Fanon, and their relationship has never really been described. The couple married in 1952 and it is clear that she played an important role in the composition of Peau noire. Fanon never learned to use a typewriter and dictated his text to Josie as he strode up and down the room like an actor declaiming his lines. Traces of the oral origins of the text are visible in the sudden breaks and changes of direction, as Fanon suddenly recalls or thinks of something. If there is an element of free association here, it is Fanon and not his informants who is free associating. When he writes, or rather says, ‘When my ubiquitary [ubiquitaire] hands caress these white breasts, I am making white civilization and dignity mine,’83 he is speaking to the young woman he will marry. Commenting on the mythical size of the black man’s genitals, he adds: ‘One can easily imagine what such descriptions could provoke in a young Lyonnaise’, but then hesitates: ‘Horror? Desire? Not indifference, in any case.’84 But he does not ask the young Lyonnaise who is with him and taking down his words.
As he pursued his studies, Fanon began to turn away from general medicine and to develop an interest in psychiatry. The reasons for this new change of direction were probably subjective. It is not unusual for psychiatrists in the making to take up the specialism in an attempt to understand their own behaviour, even their own problems. Peau noire is many things, and it can be read as a self-exploration or even as a wild self-analysis; to the extent that it is a socio-diagnostic or an analysis of the social origins of psychological phenomena,85 Fanon is his own case-material: the écorché vif encountered by Glissant and others. The overlap between psychiatry, psychology and philosophy also allows Fanon to pursue his interests in ways that would not have been possible in other areas of medicine. He has no difficulty in introducing elements of Sartrean phenomenology into his socio-diagnostics, but would have found it difficult indeed to produce a Sartrean theory of dentistry. He had found his subject. Although Fanon is often described as a ‘psychoanalyst’, he was not and his relationship with psychoanalysis was always fraught.86 His references to psychoanalysis are grafted on to his phenomenology and his knowledge of psychiatry.
Psychiatry was not a prestigious specialism at the time, and the training was not particularly rigorous. Nor was it particularly well developed. Only the universities of Paris, Strasbourg and Algiers had chairs in psychiatry. The discipline was marginalized in medical schools in general and Lyon in particular was a ‘psychiatric desert’, according to one who traversed it at much the same time as Fanon.87 The city’s Vinatier psychiatric hospital would have provided a better training but, being both unsure of his career direction and ill-informed as to the possibilities open to him, Fanon followed only one year of a basic course there and opted to study at the university’s medical school. The teaching of psychiatry there was dominated by Professor Dechaume, who was interested solely in psychosurgery, neuropsychiatry and neurology. The fact that Dechaume had lost an arm in the First World War, and therefore could not operate himself, did nothing to deter him: every morning he could be seen in theatre, directing his surgical assistant by prodding him with his stump.88 He presided over a large psychosurgical ward and the basement of his clinic housed an impressive ECG unit, but the child psychiatry unit was crammed into a room with a total surface area of forty square metres. Witnesses like Guillet, Berthelier and Postel do not recall that patients received particularly progressive treatment, or that they were given anything to do other than lie in their beds all day. The Lyon faculty was dominated by an organicist and neuropsychiatric approach to both diagnosis and treatment: patients suffering from anxiety were treated with ECT, which is more normally used to treat depression.89 Social psychology was unknown, and so was psychoanalysis. There were no psychoanalysts in Lyon at this time, and therefore no means of having any practical training in analysis. An enthusiastic novice could have gone to Paris or Geneva to hear lectures, but Fanon could obviously not have gone into a personal analysis requiring daily sessions of an hour, and still less a subsequent training analysis. The references to psychoanalysis in Peau noire are evidence of Fanon’s wide reading, and not of his official studies. His knowledge of the subject – and it is far less sophisticated than some recent readings would suggest – was textually based, and it was only from 1952 onwards that he began to acquire some rudimentary analysis-based clinical experience.
As his initial clinical training was coming to an end in 1951, Fanon took a temporary post as a houseman in the Saint-Ylié hospital in Dôle, a small town in the Jura 150 kilometres north of Lyon, but with a rail connection that allowed him to go back for Saturday ward rounds with Dechaume. He may now have regretted his decision not to study in Paris; the salaries of junior doctors working in the psychiatric hospitals of the Seine département were 20 per cent higher than those of their provincial colleagues.90 Financial considerations aside, Fanon’s stay in Dôle was not
