Advertising
Supported by
Fiction
Adam Shatz’s “The Rebellious Clinic,” a new biography of psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, aims to repair the complexity of a guy who was respected and denigrated for his activism.
By Jennifer Szalai
When you purchase an independently reviewed eBook on our site, we earn an associate commission.
THE REBEL CLINIC: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, through Adam Shatz
Controversial, caustic, and ruthlessly excessive rhetoric is harsh in one sense but vulnerable in another. It captures attention and attracts acolytes; It’s memorable, and therefore memorable. But that force can also be fragile. Writers who implement it will likely be selected and caricatured. They enlist for different reasons and enroll in university programs. They are icons, whether crushed or revered.
I kept thinking about this paradox as I read “The Rebel Clinic,” Adam Shatz’s gripping new biography of black psychiatrist, writer, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. In the decades since his death in 1961, Fanon has become this double-edged figure: an “intellectual celebrity,” as Shatz puts it, whose writings were recruited for “a series of incredibly contradictory agendas” (secular and Islamist, black nationalist and cosmopolitan), each seeking to claim his power without compromise.
Despite his unwavering radicalism, he led an itinerant existence. He was born on the French Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925 and died at age 36 in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in what he had called “the land of lynchers. “, fought the Nazis in France, ran a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, and eventually became a spokesman for that country’s National Liberation Front, known as FLN, in its war against French colonial rule.
He was an activist and a doctor, someone who promoted a “belief in violence” while practicing a “commitment to healing. “An acquaintance recalls being struck by Fanon’s compassion: “He treated the executioners during the day and the tortured at night. “
Fanon’s French secretary told Shatz that she hated to see Fanon “cut into little pieces,” arguing that those who tried to isolate a component of man and his paintings “lost the indissoluble whole. “Shatz’s e-book is an attempt to repair a sense of satisfaction for Fanon, whom he admires widely, though not unconditionally.
Fanon may simply be “conceited, arrogant, and even impetuous. “In his first book, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), he mocked homosexuality and questioned “women who simply need to be raped. “In the last months of his life, while dying of leukemia, he wrote “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). He described the violence committed through colonial subjects opposed to their oppressors only as a matter of strategy, but also as a mental blessing.
We are retrieving the content of the article.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience as we determine access. If you’re in Reader mode, log out and log in to your Times account or subscribe to the full Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Advertising