On Psycho-Sexual Racism & Pan-African Revolt: Fanon & Chester Himes

The "expatriate" Chester Himes once boasted in an interview with John A. Williams that Frantz Fanon had written a long, unpublished essay concerning the use of violence in his novels (Himes 1995, 78). This interest in Himes should not surprise close readers of Fanon. His first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), makes repeated and significant references to Himes's first book, or novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). The psycho-social assault of racism is battering if not crippling in both. What's more, when one reads Himes's final novel, Plan B (1983), one can remark a striking kinship between it and Fanon's own final offering, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The response to Western empire in both is an emancipatory explosion of violence. U.S. Blacks rise up in the final Himes and struggle to overthrow white "America," quite like Fanon predicted on his death-bed, just outside Washington, D.C. Their texts frequently and profoundly converge in the most identical of terms. This all gives great substance to the idea or praxis of Pan-Africanism, what C.L.R. James champions in The History of Pan-African Revolt (1938/1969). Fanon's struggles would take him from Martinique or the Caribbean to France, Algeria and Africa at large; Himes's struggles would take him from various states in North America to Paris and Spain or Europe at large. Fanon was a practicing psychiatrist who wrote social criticism ultimately as a politico or militant; Himes was an ex-prisoner who came to produce literature as social protest, narrating the psychology of repression and riot, oppression and revolution, calling for revolutionary change all along. Their textual ties may be seen to zig-zag across genres, places, back and forth across time, and certainly with regard to specific themes or thematics. Some of their most salient themes pivot around matters of psycho-sexual racism and Pan-African revolt. This erotic or sexual thematic is explored alike and apace up to The Wretched of the Earth and Plan B, not to mention Fanon's Toward the African Revolution (1964), with their embodiment of rebellion; their expose of colonial sadism, and fascism; and their emphasis on the ecstasy of anti-colonial uprising against the West and its "humanism" of white-supremacy. If this connection has gone largely unrecognized by scholars, a couple of biographers of Fanon have attested to his abiding critical focus on Himes, the depicter of Black life among the masses of Black folk in a white-dominated world. Evidently, Fanon carried his Himes books with him to Africa. In the middle of the Algerian revolution, Fanon was invited to teach at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tunis from 1959 to 1960, after his expulsion from Algeria by France on January 1, 1957. He offered a course entitled "The Social Psychology of the Black World" as he continued his participation in the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in Tunisia. This is according to Irene L. Gendzier's Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1973): "He would come carrying books by Chester Himes in the French Serie Noire edition, and his citations suggested that he knew the material well" (99). La Serie noire was a division of Gallimard publishers founded by Marcel Duhamel, who had translated If He Hollers Let Him Go into French in 1949. It was at Duhamel's invitation that Himes began work in Paris on those romans policiers or hardboiled thrillers which he always dubbed his "domestic novels," a nine-part series set in Harlem and starring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Often published in French translation before he was published in the U.S. and Britain, Himes became the first non-French speaking winner of the prestigious Grand prixde la litterature policiere. Several of these books would be available by the time Fanon taught "The Social Psychology of the Black World" in Tunis, such as Ilpleut des coups durs in 1958 (The Real Cool Killers, 1959); Couche dans le pain in 1959 (The Crazy Kill, 1959); and Tout pour plaire in 1959 (The BigGold Dream, 1960). …