“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” he exclaims in the “final prayer” of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon was an atheist; praying to a higher authority would have struck him as ludicrous. And why pray to his body? Did Fanon have some sort of mystical belief in the wisdom of the flesh? Not at all. He was asking his body not to show him the path of enlightenment but rather to rebel against any inclination toward complacency or resignation. The body, in his view, is a site of unconscious knowledge, of truths about the self that the mind shies away from uttering, a repository of desire and resistance. Fanon’s relationship to reality is fundamentally one of interrogation: “Anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything other than a perpetual questioning won’t see a thing—neither gratitude nor hatred.
Yet Fanon’s manner of interrogation was not that of a skeptic. “Man,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, is not simply a “no,” but “a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” His work is a celebration of freedom, and of what he called “disalienation”: the careful dismantling of psychological obstacles to an unfettered experience of selfhood that opens onto a broader project for the mental well-being of oppressed communities.
—Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic – The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
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