Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary

(Hardback)

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The short, but remarkable, life of Frantz Fanon has attracted several biographers, all of whom have relied on Fanons older brother, Joby, for information on Fanons early life. Dissatisfied with these portrayals, Joby decided to tell the story of his brother in his own words with a richness of detail not found in any other work. Translated into English by Daniel Nethery, this is an intimate, passionate, and very human account of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Frantz Fanon stands as one of the most uncompromising critics of racism and colonialism. His experience growing up as French colonial subject taught him to be fearless in the defense of his ideals. At the age of seventeen he left his home island of Martinique to fight in Europe against Nazi Germany. After the war he studied medicine and wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. He practiced as a psychiatrist in Algeria and put his medical skills and literary talent in the service of the struggle for Algerian independence and African liberation. He died in 1961, one week after the publication of his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. He was thirty-six years old.

Reviews

Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary is an engaging and personal volume, which brings Fanon alive as a thinker, a humanist, and a man of action and constant movement. Written forty years after Fanons death, the emotion that comes through the book is one of deep love. As Fanons closest brother, Joby is an essential interlocutor and has been a source for all of Fanons biographers, but here he also wants to set the record straight. As well as a portrait of Joby and Frantz Fanons family life in Martinique, the biography includes illuminating and important family letters and summaries of Frantz Fanons plays. This is a book that everyone interested in Frantz Fanon should have in their library. -- Nigel C. Gibson, Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College

Author Bio

Joby Fanon, born in Martinique in 1923, studied law in Paris and worked as a customs officer in Paris, Moroni, and Strasbourg. For his support of a short-lived Martinican independence movement in the early 1960s, he was banned from his home island for over a decade. He later retired to Martinique, where he wrote this biography of his younger brother, Frantz. Joby Fanon died in 2004.