Contributor

Frantz Fanon

(1925 - 1961)

Born in Martinique in 1925, Frantz Fanon worked at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria from 1953 to 1956 but quit to join the National Liberation Front. In 1960 he was appointed by Algeria’s provisional liberation government to be ambassador to Ghana; later that year he was diagnosed with leukemia. After visiting the USSR for treatment, he returned to Tunisia to write The Wretched of the Earth. With the assistance of the CIA, he then traveled in October 1961 to Maryland for more treatment. Fanon died there eight weeks later.

All Writing

Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of Man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.

—Frantz Fanon, 1961

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

—Frantz Fanon, 1952

The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms.

—Frantz Fanon, 1961

Issues Contributed

Cover of Freedom, the Spring 2023 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly

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