Fanon’s first foray into understanding his identity came via the writings of the poet, communist politician, and founder of Négritude, Aimé Césaire. Négritude was a framework that sought to critique Eurocentrism by insisting that black consciousness brought with it a set of intellectual and cultural standards that differed from those of the white world. Adam Shatz, a longtime contributor to the London Review of Books, argues in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon that although Fanon would ultimately distance himself from Négritude’s worldview, he remained faithful to “the emancipation of Black humanity not only from political and economic domination but also from the tyranny of assimilation to white values.”

Armed with this loose political outlook, in 1943 Fanon decided to join the Free French forces under the command of Charles de Gaulle — the conservative political genius who had found a way of unifying sections of his country’s collaborationist bourgeoisie behind the project of national liberation. Césaire, Fanon’s professor during the war years, tried to persuade him that he had no business fighting in a white man’s war. To this Fanon is said to have replied that “when freedom is at stake, it concerns everyone, whatever their color.”