He really put a lot of effort 
into trying to understand
the way people experienced 
their own illness,
and wrote a number of text on that,
which are pioneering in a way
from within what’s now known 
as ethno-psychiatry,
psychiatry that will take into account
the cultural determinations 
of mental illness.
So he put a lot of effort in that.
Fanon was someone 
who slept very little,
from all the testimonies 
that we have.
So he never stopped in fact,
he was able to go 
and spend a whole night
attending a trance ceremony 
in the mountains,
and then be back to do 
his morning visit in the hospital.
So he was really functioning 
in all directions,
reading a lot at the same time.
He subscribed to all 
the current psychiatric journals,
and read all that.
Most are of these articles are in fact
presentations that he gave 
at congresses of psychiatry
in France, Belgium, 
in Switzerland.
During the time he was operating 
like a research psychiatrist.
But very soon he was already
getting more and more involved 
with the Algerian revolution,
probably because he was already 
seeing the impact of colonialism
in terms of mental illness.
But also because a psychiatric hospital
is somewhere where 
you can hide people,
so he would have been asked 
quite early on
whether he could hide people,
like during the war
people had hidden 
in St Alban in France.
And he did the same there,
so he became much more 
knowledgeable,
and that was happening and so on.
To an extraordinary degree 
within such a short amount of time
when you think of what he was doing 
at the same time.
You can see it by all 
these interventions in
the different anti-colonial 
congresses of the time,
what he says and 
then what he writes
in The Wretched of the Earth,
that if you are given 
your independence,
therefore if there’s no revolution,
then you will not be independent.
You will all fall again,
pray to the cult of the leaders, 
etc.
And he sees in independentist 
processes
where people have been in charge 
of fighting for their own independence,
he sees in that a precondition
for the creation of a subjectivity, 
if you want,
a revolutionary subjectivity
in the sense of Sartre,
and he was a great reader 
of Sartre until the very end.
But that implies everybody.
It’s the whole population
that is going to be involved in that.
It’s not just the local fighters.
In fact we have a number 
of testimonies
where he says 
what is really important is
those who are fighting inside.
It’s not the army, the Algerian army 
which is at the border,
even though they play a role 
in this circulation between them.
But what counts is the transformation 
that’s occurring within the country.
How he envisages
the revolution or the process
of decolonisation as something 
quite holistic actually?
Yes, so what I think is really 
interesting,
when you read 
all the psychiatric texts,
and all the ethno-psychiatric texts
and all the work that he did 
during the period
that precedes his writing of 
the great anti-colonial texts.
You see that the describes 
the asylum
and the traditional ways
of treating the mad,
in the same way 
that he will describe
the colonial environment
using the same vocabulary.
So what he says is that internment,
enclosure, separated-ness,
all the limitations 
that are imposed on the body,
when he arrived in Blida he had 
all the instruments of contention,
as they were called at the time,
all the belts, the straightjackets, etc,
all that removed, 
when he was in Tunis
he had all the doors removed, 
the metal doors, etc.
So this for him produces an alienation.
