Inspired by “The Rebel’s Clinic,” Adam Shatz’s new work on Frantz Fanon, the journalist Robert Dreyfuss recalls an early visit to Algeria and discusses some of the titles he has turned to, including Shatz’s influential book, for a deeper understanding of one of the central and most brutal narratives of modern colonialism.

Five decades ago, hitchhiking and taking the train, I spent a couple of weeks traveling west to east across Algeria. The bloody revolution that freed the country of French control was still a recent memory for people I met, who remembered fighting the occupation in the hills outside Algiers and Constantine. The country seemed vibrant and seething with energy.

That visit has stuck with me all these years, and so when I heard that Adam Shatz, a writer with whom I’ve crossed paths at The Nation, had penned a new biography of Frantz Fanon, the learned activist and psychiatrist who was deeply enmeshed with the FLN during the Algerian revolution (1954-1962), I decided to take a dive into Algerian history and literature. It’s worth the plunge; each of these books is a great read, and if you’re not well-versed in Algeria, you’ll have taken a tour through a vital chapter of modern colonial history.

I started with a classic: Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace (1977), a brilliant and comprehensive history of the revolution, from its earliest roots through the, yes, savage battles that pitted the FLN’s guerrillas against a brutal French occupation that tortured, murdered and disappeared countless thousands of fighters and civilians. A million or more Algerians died, and millions more were relocated to concentration camps, before Charles de Gaulle began cautiously to extricate France from the war. Horne exquisitely details not only the tumultuous rise and eventual success of the revolution, but he provides an in-depth look at how ultra-rightwing settlers and their allies in the French occupation army violently contested de Gaulle’s willingness to accept Algerian independence. The leaders of this movement, often based in Generalissimo Franco’s Madrid, tried numerous times to assassinate or topple de Gaulle and raised the specter of a military coup d’état. Horne’s epic is highly recommended.

Then I took a detour into two masterworks of fiction, and The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), by Albert Camus, who was born to pied-noir parents in Oran, Algeria, in 1913. Variously a communist, an existentialist, and an absurdist, Camus was troubled by the poverty of most Algerians, saw their plight as oppressive and intolerable, and as a journalist often wrote sympathetically about their struggles. During the revolution he authored a series of peace proposals, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to support outright independence. Edward Said, author of Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism, disparages Camus for having a “colonial sensibility.” Perhaps that’s why Camus’ two novels pretty much erase the Arabs and Berbers who made up the vast bulk of the country’s population during the occupation. In The Stranger, famously about a random and almost casual murder of an Arab by Meursault, a morose French settler, there is virtually no mention of the native population in the novella, except for the victim – whose name is never even given. And in The Plague, about the (fictionalized) emergence of the bubonic plague in Oran in which thousands die, the reader is hard-pressed to find even a single mention of an Arab anywhere in the entire book, even though the vast majority of those who die of the plague must be Arabs and Berbers. It’s a tragic omission in the career of one of France’s literary titans, who died in a car crash in 1960, two years before the rebels succeeded in winning freedom for Algeria. For me, the proximity of the Covid crisis made The Plague an all the more chilling read.

Before starting Shatz’s book, I turned to The Meursault Investigation, a clever sequel-of-sorts to The Stranger, written in 2014 by Kamel Daoud, an Algerian journalist, who turns the tables on Camus. Daoud’s award-winning novel, as brief as Camus’, is the story of the same murder, written from the perspective of the victim’s brother, Harun, who in this book has a name: Musa. “There’s something I find stunning,” Daoud writes, “and it’s that nobody – not even after Independence – nobody at all ever tried to find out what the victim’s name was, or where he lived, or what family he came from, or whether he had children.” Reading The Stranger and The Meursault Investigation back-to-back – it’s easy to do, in a couple of days – neatly bookends Algeria’s struggle to find itself since World War II and the revolution.

Finally, in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Shatz leads us through the mesmerizing life of Fanon. Best known for Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon was born in Martinique and traveled widely through France, Algeria, and much of Africa while working to define and explain race, racism, Black identity, white supremacy, colonialism, and the uses and misuses of revolutionary violence. Having initially come into contact with Algerians in France while treating them for issues related to mental health, Shatz tells us, Fanon developed strong sympathies for the rebels and moved to take over a mental health clinic in a town south of Algiers, where he worked secretly with the FLN.

Shatz is an engrossing writer, and in a few hundred pages he manages to weave together not only Fanon’s life and legacy but (his own) deep dives into colonialism, racism and psychology. He paints a nuanced portrait of a man struggling to communicate his evolving understanding of both Blackness and the worldwide anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement through the lens of psychiatry, philosophy, and “lived experience,” all at once. His book is highly recommended as a tour de force not only of Fanon himself but of the panoply of philosophers, social scientists, writers, and political figures that shaped Fanon’s thinking over decades, and he approaches this saga with rigor and intellectual discipline.

Like Camus, Fanon died an untimely death in 1960. But he was was an inspiration to decolonization and national liberation movements of that era, and later gained huge popularity in the United States and elsewhere. Shatz’s book is an absorbing read and a worthy companion to the celebrated titles referenced in this list.

Bob Dreyfuss is an award-winning investigative journalist living in northern New Jersey.