Simao, Secho . . .’
Nearby, a plaque in the rue des Insurrections anti-esclavagistes records the history of two centuries of slave rebellions. The French text reads: ‘Brought by force from Guinea, Senegal, Dahomey, Angola, etc., by French slavers, our Ancestors waged a fierce struggle for freedom from the very first days of their deportation and throughout the two hundred years of slavery: 1639, 1748, 1776. 1801: revolt in Le Carbet, led by Jean Kira, who raised the black and red flag. 1817: insurrection in St.-Pierre, organized by Molière. 1822: rising in Le Carbet. 1831: insurrection in St.-Pierre. 1833: revolt in Le Lorrain (formerly known as Grande Anse). May 1848: the slaves are victorious.’ It ends with an inscription in Creole: ‘Nég pété chenn’ (‘The black man broke his chains’). Slavery was abolished in the French colonies on 27 April 1848, but before the official decree reached Martinique, one final insurrection forced the governor to make a premature declaration of its abolition.32 That Fanon never mentions this insurrection, and believed that France simply granted her colonial slaves their freedom without a struggle,33 is a telling indictment of the history he was taught at school.
It is very unusual to see Creole inscribed in a public space, other than in the form of a graffitied ‘Wançais dewo’ (‘French out’). From 1946 onwards, Fort-de-France was the fief of Aimé Césaire, mayor, député, poet of negritude, former Communist and founder, in 1956, of the Parti Populaire Martiniquais; Rivière-Pilote is the stronghold of Alfred Marie-Jeanne, former teacher, mayor and founder, in 1972, of the small Mouvement Indépendentiste Martiniquais (MIM).34 In the general election of June 1997, Marie-Jeanne won the parliamentary seat of Le François and Le Robert with 64.07 per cent of the votes cast.35 It is probable that the vote reflected the popularity of an energetic mayor rather than active support for independence for Martinique, but Marie-Jeanne has been described by a political opponent as ‘the marron who slumbers in all of us’; he himself claims to be ‘one of those negroes that France despises so much’ and as ‘a great rebel before the Lord’.36 Two years later, Marie-Jeanne was elected president of the Regional Council, which made him one of the most powerful men in Martinique.37 For the MIM, Martinique is a colony, ‘politically dominated, economically exploited, culturally impoverished and militarily occupied’.38 It is Rivière-Pilote and not Fort-de-France that is home to the Bibliothèque Populaire Frantz Fanon, which houses a good collection of Fanon material. The guiding spirit behind the library project was of course Alfred Marie-Jeanne. The library and the small gallery associated with it are on the second floor of a building housing a number of community associations. The façade is decorated with a mural of an open book. The text is from Peau noire, masques blancs: ‘I do not want to sing the past at the expense of my present and my future. I want only one thing: an end to the enslavement of man by man, that is, to my enslavement by the other. May it be granted to me to discover and to will man wherever he may be.’39
Fanon seems quite at home in Rivière-Pilote but his memory remains rather marginal to Martinique as a whole. There is no ‘Fanonist’ party. The connection between Fanon and the supporters of independence is somewhat tenuous and Peau noire is not a pro-independence manifesto. His association with Martinican nationalism was at its strongest in the early 1960s, when, inspired by the Algerian Revolution and Fanon’s interpretation of it, a group of young students founded the Organisation de la Jeunesse Anticolonialiste de la Martinique (OJAM) and called on their fellows to join the struggle for the liberation of the island.40 OJAM’s leading members were arrested for ‘plotting against the State’ and put on trial in France. They were finally acquitted on appeal in April 1964.41
Neither the tiny Communist Party of Martinique nor Césaire’s much more powerful party can take full responsibility for Fanon’s Martinican eclipse, but it is true that neither has done a great deal to preserve his memory. In 1982, a ‘Mémorial International’ to honour Fanon was organized in Fort-de-France, but no political party supported or financed it. The members of the small ‘Cercle Frantz Fanon’ founded by Fanon’s childhood friend Marcel Manville had to rely upon public donations from the people of Martinique to finance it.42 A total of 200,000 francs was raised and the organizing committee brought speakers from twenty-five countries to Fort-de-France.43 Aimé Césaire did not attend the celebrations, but he did at least make municipal facilities available to the organizers.44 According to a somewhat optimistic commentator on nationalism in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the Mémorial marked the return to the people of the first heroes of a pantheon: the marron and Frantz Fanon.45 Not everyone agreed. In the course of a televised debate, members of the audience asked why so much publicity was being given to someone who had betrayed France and taken the side of the terrorists of the FLN in Algeria.46
The underlying reason for the – at best – ambivalence towards Fanon is captured by a rare Martinican review of Les Damnés de la terre:
The fact is that Fanon denounces with extreme rigour all the ugliness of old Europe’s policy of colonization, without ever taking into account what the France of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, republican and secular France, has done for the country he came from: the French West Indies, for Fanon is Martinican. It was as a result of his noble freedom as a free and independent Frenchman that he felt himself obliged to side with the FLN and to place his science and conscience at its service.47
There are still those in this Département d’Outre-Mer who regard Fanon as a traitor to the republican and secular France, of which it has been an integral part since 1946, when the former ‘old colony’ acquired the same constitutional status as Charente-Maritime or Seine-et-Marne. One of his nieces has remarked that it is ‘not easy’ to be a Fanon in Martinique,48 though it has to be said that the family is prosperous enough. When he visited Martinique for the first and last time, Olivier Fanon discovered that many Martinicans regarded his father as a pariah. When he produced his passport – he is by choice an Algerian national – he sensed a certain hostility even within his own family, and had the impression that he was in the same position as the son of a harki – an Algerian who fought on the French side in the war of independence – who had returned to Algeria.49 Others interested in Fanon have experienced more overt hostility. When his first biographer told his hotelier what he was working on, he was unceremoniously asked to find alternative accommodation. He discovered that none of Fanon’s works were on sale in Fort-de-France, and that booksellers refused to order them.50 Such hostility is now a thing of the past, and mention of an interest in Fanon provokes little more than polite indifference. Fanon’s books, or at least Peau noire, masques blancs and Les Damnés de la terre, are on sale in Fort-de-France’s few bookshops, where they are somewhat incongruously shelved alongside the ‘Creolist’ works of Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau in the ‘local interest’ section. There is no hint outside Rivière-Pilote that Fanon might possibly be regarded as a national hero.
The novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, who knew Fanon, describes the delighted reactions of the black American students who realized that he came from the same island as their hero, and then adds that years can go by without the author of Les Damnés de la terre being mentioned in even left-wing newspapers published in Martinique. He explains: ‘It is difficult for a West Indian to be Fanon’s brother or friend, or simply his comrade or “compatriot”. Because, of all the French-speaking West Indian intellectuals, he was the only one who matched action to words by espousing the Algerian cause.’51 The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar recalls with some amusement how her casual remark that she had known Fanon immediately raised her status in the eyes of black Americans.52 She would not have got the same reaction in his native Martinique. Speaking for a younger generation of Martinicans, Patrick Chamoiseau compares the memory of Fanon to that of the marrons. There were in fact relatively few marrons in Martinique, mainly because there are very few places to run to on an island with a surface area of only 1,080 square kilometres, but that does not diminish their importance for the collective memory of Martinique, as they are proof that the wretched of the earth can rise up. For Chamoiseau, who first read Fanon in his teens and at a time when he was influenced by the American black power movement,
