This essay is going to discuss how Fanon’s experience as a psychiatrist working
in Algeria during the war with France impacted his life which is described in The
Wretched of the Earth.
Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique which is an island of France in the
Caribbean. Fanon was stationed in Algeria during the war. Simone de Beauvoir describes
this period: "Ten thousand Algerians had been herded into the Vel' d'Hiv' like the Jews at
Drancy once before. Again I loathed it all—this country, myself, the whole world."
(Wretched of the Earth, xxxiii-xxxiv) Drancy was a place in France where Jews would be
put until they were later shipped to the German concentration camps. The reason for this
wretchedness was to colonize the Algerians. Frantz describes the colonized totalitarian
view of the uncolonized as ones that are amoral to values and therefore ignorant of
evil.(WOTE, 6) Frantz Fanon says that the colonized natives of Algeria have become
slaves to the modern ways, and that the Algerians have run out of patience and that
madness will take them from colonial oppression. (WOTE, 34) The people who were
called to fight on behalf of the native Algerian’s have been sentenced to death or wanted
by the police. (WOTE, 44)
Frantz worked as a psychologist in a hospital in Algeria. Frantz met a twenty-six
year old Algerian patient there who went underground to work on behalf of the FLN and
after two years received a message from his wife for him to forget her because she
brought shame to herself. Later the twenty-six year old found out that his wife was
captured and violently beaten for two days and then on the third day a French soldier
raped her and she was still interrogated for another week. (WOTE, 185-189) Another
person that Frantz from France met was a thirty-seven year old from Constantine, which
is a capital of Eastern Algeria. Constantine was heavily bombarded by the Algerian and
French forces during the Algerian battle for independence; and like many peasants from
time to time came in aid to the Algerian fighters. The French forces surrounded his
village when the Algerian soldiers were gone. All the members of the village were
captured and interrogated. No one said anything beneficial to the French forces so they
burned down the houses and massacred twenty-nine men at point-blank. The thirty-seven
year old got post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and arrived at Frantz’s centre with his
hands tied up. At the hospital the thirty-seven year old attacked both patients and staff
members with makeshift weapons. (WOTE 190-192) Frantz met a nineteen year old
Algerian whose life’s ambition was to make his mother and two sisters life much easier
but his mother was killed point blank by a French solder and his two sisters were
captured by the French military. (WOTE, 192-194) Frantz also was a psychiatrist for the
Europeans and one of his patients was a twenty-eight year old that was put in the hospital
by his superiors who said he had behavioral problems. The twenty-eight year old had
trouble sleeping at night because he would be hearing pseudo-screaming at night. The
twenty-eight year old worked for the anti-FLN organization and spent hours trying to
squeeze out information regarding the FLN. The twenty-eight year old said that he would
torture them and then they would scream too much. The anti-FLN would punch the
people with association to the FLN, hang them by their wrists, and electroshock them. It
was these screams that he states he was hearing especially from those that have died. At
the hospital where Frantz was working the twenty-eight year old ran into one of the
Algerians that he has tortured the twenty-eight year old started having panic attacks and
the Algerian tried to commit suicide because he did not want to be brought back to the
police headquarters where he would be tortured again. Later the twenty-eight year old
was recovering but the Algerian still had psychological issues and has a desire to beat
anyone he meets and even assaults his children including his twenty-month old baby.
(WOTE 196-199). Frantz also met two young Algerian teenage patriots which killed their
European playmate because many Europeans were killing the Algerians during the war
(WOTE, 199-201) Frantz met a twenty-one year old French women who had minor
anxiety symptoms. At her house before her father was killed she could hear loud screams
coming from the basement where they were torturing Algerians to get answers out of
them. The French woman deep down felt that the Algerians were in the right and that if
she was Algerian she too would have joined the resistance movement. She knew that ten
Algerians were killed everyday under torture and felt it was ironic that her father felt
devotion, self-sacrifice and love for his country. (WOTE, 204-206)