{"id":96894,"date":"2024-01-09T10:16:33","date_gmt":"2024-01-09T09:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/?p=96894"},"modified":"2024-01-09T10:16:33","modified_gmt":"2024-01-09T09:16:33","slug":"what-frantz-fanon-and-ian-fleming-agreed-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/en\/what-frantz-fanon-and-ian-fleming-agreed-on\/","title":{"rendered":"What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential\u2014psychologically and strategically\u2014to solving the crisis of colonialism.<\/h4>\n
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More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, \u201csummer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.\u201d Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.<\/p>\n

Looking back, Drif felt little regret about the three who died and the twelve\u2014including children\u2014who lost limbs from her bomb and from a second that detonated in another caf\u00e9 minutes later. The European caf\u00e9goers weren\u2019t civilians, in her view, but colonizers. Their \u201coffensive carefree attitudes\u201d made a painful contrast to those of the eighty thousand Muslims, herself included, penned by barbed wire and checkpoints within what she described as the \u201copen-air prison\u201d of Algiers\u2019s Casbah. The month before, European settlers had bombed an apartment building in the Casbah, killing seventy.<\/p>\n

Algerians had been waging an independence war for nearly two years, and the French had been fighting back fiercely, including with widespread torture and indiscriminate killings. The September\u00a030th bombings, however, marked what Drif called a \u201cturning point,\u201d bringing the war \u201cto the heart of the enemy districts.\u201d Yet even the Communist who had built the rebels\u2019 explosives laboratory balked at bombing crowded public places. The philosopher\u00a0Albert Camus<\/a>, an Algerian-born Frenchman, sympathized with the Algerians but could no longer support them. Their attacks, he noted, might kill his mother: \u201cIf\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0is justice, then I prefer my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly the only French writer to defend the bombs was the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who directed a hospital near Algiers. Attacks on civilians were the \u201clogical consequence\u201d of France\u2019s \u201csystematic dehumanization\u201d of Algerians, he argued. Fanon had already been secretly aiding the rebels, but shortly after the Milk Bar bombing he resigned his post and joined them. The authorities raided his hospital, killed one of his co-workers, and threw the battered body of another into a pigsty for the hogs to devour. (That man survived, barely.)<\/p>\n

Fanon did not back down. He became, his biographer David Macey wrote, the \u201cmost famous spokesman\u201d of Third Worldism and a staunch defender of anticolonial violence. \u201cEvery Frenchman in Algeria is at the present time an enemy soldier,\u201d Fanon insisted. Killing French people wasn\u2019t only tactically necessary and morally justified; it was therapeutic. In his view, violence was a \u201ccleansing force\u201d (\u201cla violence d\u00e9sintoxique<\/em>\u201d) that \u201crids the colonized of their inferiority complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Perhaps it could even induce one in the colonizers. A month after the Milk Bar bombing, France joined Britain and Israel in an invasion of Egypt. The aim was to reverse Egypt\u2019s nationalization of the Suez Canal but also, Fanon wrote, \u201cto strike the Algerian revolution,\u201d given Egypt\u2019s support for the rebels. Either way, it was a fiasco. The United States made the invaders retreat\u2014a shattering humiliation for the formerly supreme British Empire. The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, already frazzled and taking amphetamines, had a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

Eden fled to Jamaica, a calmer corner of the Empire, where he could sunbathe, swim, and paddle a rubber boat around a reef. \u201cI do not think there is any other place anywhere that could have given me the rest I had to have,\u201d Eden wrote to his host. That host, the author\u00a0Ian Fleming<\/a>, knew Jamaica\u2019s restorative power, too. It was at his estate there, Goldeneye, that he wrote all of his James Bond novels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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