He didn’t actually write that much directly about the Haitian Revolution, but you can see the impact of it throughout his work, implicitly at the very least - and also by negative example. It was under the impact of his experience of World War II. But Fanon only became radicalized once he left Martinique. Of course, there was resistance among the black populace to the discrimination that was meted out against them. After all, Martinique and Guadeloupe were part of metropolitan France. Before that, he thought of himself as a part of France - to the point that as a teenager he volunteered to fight on the side of the Free French during World War II. That was something that began to change when he was a teenager, in response to developments occurring on the island, especially surrounding the outbreak of World War II. As Fanon often stated, when he grew up, to a large extent, he and his friends and family didn’t particularly define themselves in terms of an African identity. That was an important phenomenon, because in the French colonial system, blacks in the Caribbean were seen as being on a somewhat higher level than blacks in sub-Saharan Africa, and even on a somewhat higher level than Arabs in North Africa, because of their connection to the French language. He was fluent in French from an early age and became quite proficient in it. His family, especially his mother, took great pains to encourage that development in him. If you spoke and wrote in “good” French instead of creole, this was a marker of potential upward mobility. The mark of status in a colonial situation like the French Caribbean was language. They dominated the entire life of the society, economically and politically - certainly in the period that Fanon was growing up - while representing, however, no more than a few percentage points of the population.įanon himself grew up in a somewhat sheltered environment, in a middle-class or, you might say, lower-middle-class family. This was a situation where historically, the vast majority of people who constituted the population of Martinique were blacks from Africa, with a small ruling elite which consisted of either French settlers or Creoles. It was a deeply racist society in which there was profound racial segregation. It was similar, in a certain sense, to some of the African colonies of France. Martinique, like other French, English, Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish-speaking areas in the Caribbean over the years, was a colonial settler state.
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