Stephen McCloskey
Adam Shatz (2024) The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, London: Head of Zeus.
A welcome new biography of Frantz Fanon revisits his life and work, and considers his enduring influence as a clinician, revolutionary, and perceptive analyst of the psychological impact of colonisation and racism on both the coloniser and colonised. His biographer, Adam Shatz, argues that ‘Few writers have captured so vividly the lived experience of racism and colonial domination, the fury it creates in the minds of the oppressed – or the sense of alienation and powerlessness that it engenders’. In his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that ‘the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice’ (emphasis in original). Fanon’s books have added currency today in supporting analysis of Israel’s settler-colonialism of Palestine. While he did not address Israel’s occupation of Palestine directly, Fanon wrote with great insight on the lived experience and violence of colonisation, both physical and mental. The Palestinian psychiatrist, Samah Jabr, said about Fanon that his ‘prophetic insights are a source of inspiration to Palestinians’, citing his ‘quest for justice in the face of oppressive control of one population by another’ and ‘his understanding that this subjugation is not only political, economic or military, it is also profoundly and inherently psychological’. It is remarkable that Fanon continues to enjoy such recognition and influence having lived a truncated life that was taken by leukemia in 1961 when he was only 36.