The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Shatz

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The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz

Frantz Fanon was a thinker and a doer. The author of Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth was a Black man born on Martinique, a psychiatrist with enlightened theories of treatment and a rebel who took arms against imperialism in French Algeria. He wrote well and wrote often; his views evolved and have been cherry picked by Black nationalists, Islamists and others since his death in 1961.

Adam Shatz’s absorbing biography, The Rebel’s Clinic, recounts Fanon’s life in terms of his work and accomplishments. The author finds that Fanon was a caring physician and an advocate of violence, a thinker who wedded himself to party lines. Fanon was on the leading edge of exposing racist assumptions in psychiatry while acknowledging the importance of each patient’s culture. Some forms of psychological suffering, he maintained, are rooted in oppressive social relations. Fanon’s work built on W.E.B. DuBois awareness of the “double consciousness” of African Americans. Shatz also draws analogies between Fanon and Black novelist Richard Wright’s explorations of racist-rooted self-loathing.

Shatz carefully outlines the complexity of Fanon’s intellectual development, which drew from Freud, Marx and Sartre as well as lesser-known exponents of Negritude, a Black cultural nationalism Fanon partially outgrew. Like the title of his influential book, Shatz insists, Fanon wore many masks: “French, West Indian, Black, Algerian, Libyan, African, not to mention soldier and doctor, poet and ideologue, dismantler of myths and creator of myths.” The Rebel’s Clinic is a compulsively readable story about an important intellectual of the last century, founded on archival research and outstanding for organizing the interesting facts and omitting the uninteresting ones. Fanon was no saint. “My admiration for him is not unconditional,” Shatz writes. And yet, in his mastery of words, Fanon remains an illuminator of the human condition and the role played by social structures, often invisible to the beneficiaries but all too real for the victims.

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