On Thursday July 17th to Sunday July 20th, I had the pleasure of attending the 23rd Annual Caribbean Philosophical Association Conference in Dumaine, Martinique, organized on the centennial of the birth of revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon.
Days leading up to my paper presentation which was scheduled on Friday July 18th, I made sure I posted photos of Fanon and his work with the hashtag which you can read on my IG and X accounts.
It was an AMAZING experience in another French speaking island, witnessing the plants and animals different from Florida, and hearing the Martinican creole. I appreciated the numerous papers I heard at this conference. Several papers in particular spoke to me at this conference, however two in particular stuck out.
One was delivered in French which is Fanon’s mother tongue. This first one by Adama Outtara-Sanz was titled “Frantz Fanon, la violence et la Révolution haïtienne,” and what I remember most about this paper which revived my dormant comprehension of French, was that Fanon underestimated its importance. He referred to it as a “revolt” and not the “revolution” it was that would influence the entire island it took place on; a “revolution” that prompted the Louisiana Purchase and the Bolivarian revolution.
The second paper that stuck out to me was by Michael Reyes Salas and his paper was titled “Colonial Healthcare As A Rationale For Genocide in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs.“
I was pleasantly surprised seeing this paper title because I was very compelled reading this 1970 play and I saw an incomplete production of it in Philly, but immediately my mind rushed to the similarities between Frantz Fanon’s work in the French clinic in Algeria from 1953 to 1961, and the setting of Hansberry’s 1970 play which she set in an English missionary clinic in an African nation. Michael pointed these similarities between Fanon’s real life experience and Hansberry’s play setting in his paper.
In his book Her Majesty’s Other Children, Gordon analyzes Hansberry’s 1970 play and writes that in that play she “addressed a topic she was struggling with at a time when her contemporary Frantz Fanon was fully steeped in the actual practice of its reality: the question of violence in the liberation struggle” (153).
This was the topic of my paper that I presented on at this “Fanon at 100” conference: “Frantz Fanon, Tony Martin, the Grenada Revolution and the Question of Violence.”
In my talk I elaborated on a point I made in my third book, pages 12 and13 excerpted here where according to the logic of Fanon, the social change that took place from my birth year 1979 to 1983 was not a revolution.
So in my paper I discussed how Fanon wrote about violence and its role in social change, quoting from his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, and in the second part of my paper I discussed how those elements within the military of the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada betrayed revolutionary principles because they were influenced by imperialist forces. These elements were eventually behaving like the class that Fanon wrote about in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, a class called the “colonized bourgeoisie.”
Before this book was published, Fanon was working diligently towards a united Africa, which is something some of his narrators or biographers cannot appreciate.
In an unforgettable article translated to English by Steven Corcoran in a book called Alienation and Freedom, Fanon wrote that “an Algerian cannot really be Algerian if he does not feel in his innermost self the indescribably horrible drama that is unfolding in Rhodesia or in Angola” (634).
My paper ends by quoting Fanon pointing out those “stooges” of Western imperialism in Africa and he details why they are stooges.
After I finished presenting my paper, I sold copies of my latest book To A More Positive Purpose and got a positive and uplifting reception from the listening audience.
I had an awesome experience at the plaque revealing ceremony outside the Bibliothéque Municipale du François where, we were told, Fanon spent part of his childhood in a family home converted to a library.
I want to thank the organizers of this conference, Jackie Martinez and Hanétha Vété-Congolo, who is the namesake of the school that hosted the conference.
I want to thank Lewis Gordon for his talk on Fanon’s birthday as well as our brief conversation about Her Majesty’s Other Children. And I am grateful for my conversation with Professor Nigel Hatton about James Baldwin. I am finally grateful filmmaker Rico Speight whose 2024 film Rediscovering Fanon was screened at this conference.
In my paper, I discuss Fanon in the context of Speight’s film and David Macey’s 2001 biography. You can hear my entire paper on my Patreon here. -RF.
P.S. Thanks to Jennifer for interviewing me here on Saturday the 19th.