"Intellectual portraiture is also self portraiture,” Adam Shatz confesses in the introduction of his first essay collection, Writers and Missionaries. To step into his apartment, then, is to step into something like a house of mirrors. I was reminded, as I removed my shoes and made my way further inside, of the young Sontag, “hearing the siren call of the first private library [she] had ever seen” on her pilgrimage to Thomas Mann’s. I was trying not to make the wanderings of my glance too obvious to my host. Yet, in the corner of my eye, whispers: BARTHES DERRIDA FOUCAULT.
Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books. He is known as a writer of textured portraits of such esteemed men of letters as Edward Said, Orhan Pamuk, Jean-Paul Sartre, and now, Frantz Fanon, with his newly published The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. In the tradition of many of the writers he has profiled and known, Shatz has made a practice of the essay, chiefly in the pages of the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
Although he has called himself a patriot of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, he has spent a fair bit of time away from his homeland, reporting from the Middle East for roughly two decades. He is back home now, when his book tour doesn’t take him away, and it is in the comfort of his Brooklyn apartment that we spoke, over ginger tea, made, I must say, with a certain chef’s touch.
I'm curious how you went from the ensemble cast of characters in Writers and Missionaries to focusing singularly on Fanon.
It wasn't really a choice between a large cast of characters on the one hand and Fanon on the other. I’ve been interested in Fanon for such a long time — more than 30 years. I first learned of his work when I was in my teens, then I read him when I was a student at Columbia University in the 90s and became aware of his broader political significance at the time. I kept encountering his work — or his influence — as a reporter in Algeria, in Palestine, in France, and in other places as well. And I guess after publishing a long piece on Fanon in the London Review of Books in January 2017, I felt I had unfinished business. I had more to say. It was a natural progression. I suppose the pieces in Writers and Missionaries are more like a kind of chamber music; with Fanon, I thought that I could do something more symphonic. I could incorporate these chamber pieces — these portraits of a variety of figures, with whom he was either in actual dialogue or in a kind of virtual dialogue — and use these figures as counterpoints, to throw into bold relief what Fanon's ideas were.
Of course, the book comes as a timely intervention — Fanon has been summoned quite frequently lately. It seems to me, though, that Writers and Missionaries has taken on a timeliness too — in that the question of the committed writer has re-emerged.
I don’t think it's ever gone away. Certainly, that was one of the attractions that Fanon held for me from the moment I learned of him. He was a practitioner of psychiatry who had been steeped in existentialism, phenomenology, and in various schools of anti-colonial and black thought — Négritude and so forth. And he threw himself into action: he became a kind of exemplary engagé intellectual. In a sense, he was the realization of the dreams of people like Jean-Paul Sartre, who admired him and even arguably envied him.
I’d found myself articulating the question of the engagé writer in my own reading — I love Cortázar, Sontag, Berger, many others, each of whom dealt with this question of the writing and the politics. Then I discovered Writers and Missionaries and found that someone had already asked the question.
You still can! There are so many ways to take it as a topic. In the 50s and 60s, the era in which committed writing was a particularly popular subject, there were hundreds, probably thousands of dissertations written on the idea of commitment. And there's still more to be said, especially in an era in which the kind of writing that I do does not occupy center stage in our culture. Back in the 60s, there were writers who could publish a piece and it was an event. You know, Mary McCarthy or Dwight MacDonald or James Baldwin. If Norman Mailer published an original piece of reporting, people talked about it. Today, I think, less so. Now and then, something really does provoke a discussion.
I’m thinking of Pankaj Mishra’s The Shoah After Gaza in the latest issue of the LRB.
I was one of the editors. We’ve very close. I thought it was an outstanding — and very important — piece. It happens, certainly. The piece that I wrote on October 7th made the rounds, even if — as is inevitable — it was widely misunderstood. That intensity of response happens sometimes. But it’s a different moment. Social media has had a very distorting impact, not to mention television and all the other ways we have of preoccupying ourselves. I'm not sure we're living in the prime era of the committed intellectual. But there are people who are trying to occupy that role, which is great.
Do you fight for the preservation of the intellectual as a figure in society?
I don't get up in the morning to, no…
Your aims and your objectives change depending on the moment in time. I think that there were certainly moments early in my “career” where I wanted to explore and present truths that seemed to me obscured or actively suppressed. But I think my desires as a writer shifted. Not because I ceased to be interested in changing the terms of the debate — I was and I am. But I think as a writer, I found myself more excited by a different kind of writing. Writing that would explore what I see as the complexities of the world without, however, renouncing some vision of change or an ethical outlook. Maybe I'm more of an ethical writer than a political one. There's always a strong perspective when I write, even when I appear to be focusing on the ambiguities of the situation. I feel that I have a strong point of view. But I'm less interested in hammering away at it. As a reader, that's not what I want to read.
And you write what you want to read?
Well, I try to do that. Because you figure if you want to read it, maybe others will, too. That is the hope.
In ‘Palestinianism,’ your essay on Edward Said in Writers and Missionaries, you quote him saying “‘Solidarity before criticism’ means the end of criticism.”
I completely agree. I knew Said of course, and I think I offer a faithful portrait of him — people who knew him better than me have said so. There's no question, though, that I'm also using him to advance certain arguments and to raise questions about the contemporary situation, where, in some cases, 'solidarity before criticism’ is a requirement. You have to present your identification papers and affirm your loyalties before you write a word. I just don't see the point of writing if you do that. You might as well become a publicist, or run a political campaign.
Do you see, then, didacticism as an erosion of the literary or artistic endeavor?
For me, it is. I don't read or listen to music or watch films to be taught something. I think that once the elements of play and non-coercive persuasion are taken out, you end up with a kind of dour instruction. For me, that really isn't art.
Why, then, do you read?
To be edified. To be inspired. To be provoked. To experience the world from the vantage point of another consciousness. To learn about the world. There are so many reasons to read.
What did you study at Columbia?
I was a history student. Although, I studied Fanon in a French class first – I read Black Skin, White Masks. It might have been my first year of college. And I knew of the book already because my father had a copy. And I was very familiar with the Grove Press edition cover, with the picture of him on the jacket and the description of his itinerary. And I was intrigued. He had an aura.
What's interesting about Fanon is that you think at first that you're going to be reading someone who's very bluntly political and didactic – and there is that side of his work – but if you really plunge into it, it's much richer than you might imagine, and more difficult.
You spoke with Judith Butler about Black Skin, White Masks recently, for the LRB. And you brought up that Walter Benjamin quote: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”
And Black Skin, White Masks does both.
Do you have a firm idea of what the aspiring writer’s intellectual training should be?
[Laughs] I don’t! I’m a pluralist. I really think that you can train in a variety of disciplines. I mean, there are people who come from anthropology, from literature, and so on. I probably have a preference for history because I think historical knowledge is so crucial, and that we're often in danger of losing it. And I do believe in supplying a rich sense of context for the production of knowledge and the creation of ideas and concepts. So I probably tend towards historicism, not in the sense of the linear conception of history, but the idea that we have to really look at historical context in thinking about intellectual history.
That was probably one of the reasons why I wanted to do this book on Fanon. Not because I understood him necessarily, but because I wanted to understand him better. For me, it could be a project of discovery, not just of conveying what I already knew.
And is that what writing is for you: a chance to figure out what you think about something? To endeavor to understand?
Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. I don't really figure out what I know until I figure it out on the page. Often my thoughts are quite inchoate. I mean, they're not exactly shapeless; I have certain intuitions. But it's really only when I write that my thoughts reveal themselves to me fully, and thus acquire form.
The idea that writing is just execution, that you have all the ideas in your head and you're simply putting them on the page – I think it's a false conception of writing.
At the beginning of Writers and Missionaries, you write that you “arrived in New York City to attend Columbia University, with a vague and yet passionately held idea of becoming a writer.” When was that ambition decided in you?
Probably when I was a teenager, sometime when I was in high school. But I had a moment in college where I assumed that I was going to end up becoming an academic. And I actually went to grad school briefly and dropped out after less than a year, from a history programme at Columbia. I realized that I didn't want to become an academic historian. I had wanted writing to be a part of my life from the time I was probably 14, 15 years old. A long time.
Was it always in the essay form? Did you ever write fiction or poetry?
I definitely wrote some bad poetry when I was in high school. We had a literary magazine at our high school called Impressions, my sister and I referred to it as Depressions. And I think I wrote one or two depressive poems for Impressions. And I flirted with fiction. I'm not saying that I never would [write fiction], because I read a lot of fiction, and I think I learn from fictional models. I think most writers are influenced by the fiction they read. But, for whatever reason, I realized that I preferred to tell stories about the world as I found it, rather than to invent. But you never know, life is long. It could happen.
I sure hope so. You note in Writers and Missionaries that a number of the figures you discuss — Said, Barthes, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss — were novelists manqués.
Yes — novelist manqués because they all wanted to become novelists and never managed to do it. And I think that in the case of Barthes and Said there was a feeling not only of dissatisfaction but of being a bit of a poser, if not a faker, because they hadn't done it.
One of the reasons I underline that is because I think that the lines between fiction and nonfiction are more porous than we think. Even if these writers were writing theory, or philosophy, not fiction, they're imaginative writers.
What you say is true of Sontag. Of course, she’s known for her essays. After publishing In America, though, she talks to Charlie Rose and she declares–
“I’m a novelist.” I remember that. Sontag's fiction was mostly terrible, aside from a few of her short stories.
She was the sort of typifier — prolific essayists or theorists who say repeatedly “the thing I really care about achieving in is the fiction.”
I think it's true for people in a lot of different fields. It's the life that they haven't lived, the career that they haven't had, that speaks to them most deeply, that expresses this unfulfilled longing, this desire for respect in the one area where they feel they were deprived of it.
I do think that Sontag will be remembered as an essayist, not a novelist. She desperately wanted to be seen as a novelist. I think she felt that she would lack legitimacy unless she were. Of course, today writing essays is considered a very respectable activity and the essay is seen as a protean form. I don't think it's dismissed the way that it was.
You’ve written about witnessing The First Intifada as a crucial moment for you, perhaps even a radicalizing one. I think that until this past year the generation that I’m in had been allowed to lull itself into some illusion of a vaguely stable world order, where history was an occurrence of the past—
When were you born?
2003.
Oh my God.
Yeah. I mean, that was two years after 9/11. I’m interested in your account of The First Intifada because we ourselves, I believe, are witnessing something of unprecedented significance in our lifetimes, something different to anything else before.
Yeah, it’s the scale. The scale is just overwhelming. In terms of the death toll, the First Intifada was nothing compared to what we're seeing right now.
The First Intifada broke out in December of 1987; I was 15. My parents were not passionate Israel supporters; in fact, they had never gone to Israel and they never have gone to Israel. My mother comes from an anti-Zionist family. My father's mother was very pro-Israel, but my father had been very skeptical about Israel since the early 1970s, in large part because of the growth of the settlement project. What's more, the contempt that Israel showed towards people who chose to stay in the diaspora, as if we were somehow disloyal to the Zionist project, as if it were our destiny were to live there. So they were both skeptical, but they also had a kind of complacent regard for Israel as a Jewish homeland, as a sanctuary from antisemitism and so on.
I had already become interested in the Latin American left and the fight against US intervention in Central America, as well as in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. And so I began asking questions about the repression of the First Intifada. The Israelis were using rubber bullets to shoot young Palestinians who were unarmed — some of them were throwing rocks, at tanks. I think over the entire course of the First Intifada from 1987 to 1991 around 2000 people were killed. Now, you're looking at a situation where more than 30,000 people have been killed, probably more, in a very short period of time.
The First Intifada was certainly an event that fundamentally called into question the way that Israel presented itself to the world. It shattered my complacent assumptions about Israel, about the relationship between Zionism and democracy. Those events led me to discover an incredible body of writing by people like Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Isaac Deutscher, Simha Flapan (who was an Israeli writer who'd been in the Mapam Party and published a book called The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities). That period, both in high school and in college, shaped my political outlook when it came to Israel. I was lucky in that [while] at Columbia, I met many students from the Middle East — Arab students in particular, from North Africa and the Middle East — and I found that with many of these students, not all obviously, I had a closer connection than I did with those who self-consciously identified as Jewish.
While Israel/Palestine is not the sole issue that I've written about — I would never want it to be — it's been one of the issues that have most affected me and that I've probably written about most passionately.
I’m thinking of that much-quoted Fanon passage: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” You write about how Fanon found himself in a position of saying to black nationals of the continent: “Algeria is your struggle.”
Not many people agreed.
Yes. In that quote — “each generation must…” — do you take him to be referring, in a narrow sense, to a regional mission, like the Algerian cause? And can we analogise that to the Palestinian cause? Or does he mean it in the sense of a broader program?
Sure, if you want, you could argue that. I'm not seeking to apply Fanon to the present in that way, though. I talk about his echoes, but I'm not saying that this is properly Fanonian, this is not. But if you want to argue that your generation has embraced Palestine as its cause – sure, why not? I see your point. There might be some truth to that. I wouldn't say it's the whole generation, but it's certainly a fraction of it. But then again, that's been true for years: there have always been people who gravitated to the Palestinian cause. In the 70s and 80s, Palestine was a great symbol of the revolutionary international left.
I think that line that you quoted also reflects Fanon's age. You know, he died when he was 36. He was writing about how young people enter politics and try to overcome the structures they've inherited from their parents and grandparents. The emphasis is not on commitment here; it's on youth. Fanon always said that the most important thing was the leap of invention. I do think there's a similarity to Hannah Arendt's view of natality. The emphasis on birthing. That's what this mission is. The mission is what you bring into being, it's what you cause to be born. And you do so in conditions when it's not entirely clear what you should be doing, because it never is. Things only become clearer much later. Usually only when you're too old or dying.
In the title essay of Writers and Missionaries, you call into question the treating of Palestine as “the question” or the central question. Do you still have that doubt?
I still do. I'm not saying that it's never the most significant question. I mean, right now with Israel presiding over the destruction of Gaza's people, its built environment and its very ecology, pursuing a project of politicide at the risk of starvation and genocide, with the complicity of the US and other Western powers, yes, Palestine is the issue, and a stark symbol of Western double standards and the impotence of the so-called international community. And I would never deny that.
The purpose of that piece — which is sometimes overlooked, and overlooked for ideological reasons — is not to say Palestine doesn't matter. It's not to say that Palestine isn't important. It's simply to say that the Middle East and North Africa form a complicated interconnected region in which there are many disputes over land, resources, identity, etc. and that Palestine is one of them. It cannot explain all. The idea that if you solve the Palestine question, you've somehow solved the Middle East — I think it's a total delusion. Even if the current debacle led to a one state settlement – which it's not, but let's say it did – the region would still be having all sorts of problems. And so it's that metaphysical thinking that I'm contesting in that piece. And that metaphysical thinking is quite widespread, and on the left too. There are a lot of young people whose understanding of the Middle East is entirely derived from Israel/Palestine. They are often very courageous and they're willing to speak certain truths and they deserve credit. I just think that those of us who write and comment on these issues need to develop a deeper, more subtle and sophisticated understanding. I think that if you're going to write about these things, you have to achieve some elementary detachment so that you can assess not only what's going on on the ground, but also assess the somewhat fantasmic relationship that certain observers have to it.
Do you have a concept of the duty of the writer?
I could say that the only duty that really concerns me is my own. But that wouldn't really be true, because if I read something that really violates my understanding of what writers ought to do, and if I write something, by contrast, that expresses what I think writers ought to do, then clearly I have ideas about what our obligations are. I think one obligation is to refuse the Manichaean choices that are presented to us. So if you're going to tell me that the logical corollary or the only stance available if I oppose Israel's war on Gaza is to somehow defend or justify Russia's conduct in Ukraine, I'm going to say ‘No, that's blackmail.’ I'm not interested in becoming part of a binaristic political formation which asks me to align myself with a Russian bloc against the West simply because I'm against what Israel is doing in Gaza. That certainly reflects my view of the duty of intellectuals to acknowledge, assess, appraise, analyze that polarization which is real, but to refuse to be trapped by it, to be guided by one's response to human suffering that applies equally to both sides. And to try to imagine alternatives that could alleviate the situation.
I write, obviously, from a sense of ethics, from my sense of right and wrong, my sense of injustice. I'm not writing simply to observe. Maybe some people do that. But observations are seldom neutral anyway. I write because I have a stake in the issues I'm writing about. Because I feel something about them.
In the introduction to The Rebel’s Clinic, you talk about the fact that you admire Fanon. The writers you write about — are they heroes to you?
Didn’t Brecht say “pity the land that needs heroes”?
I chose Fanon not because he's a hero and not because he's an antihero. The purpose of the book is not to take him down, and it's certainly not to dismantle myths around him. I think it's admiring and critical at the same time. I'm not in search of heroes. I think it's much more interesting to evaluate how people as flawed as we are reach their conclusions about the world they live in, with consequences. Why wouldn't I be interested in mistakes and contradictions? That's the stuff of life. I'm not engaged in a religious project. It's not to embrace someone as a hero who could then be a model for us in the present because Fanon's world was so different from ours. It really was. There are certain continuities, or specters, but it is a very different world.
What I wanted to do with this book was, on the one hand, to honor Fanon’s very courageous act of solidarity with Algeria's struggle for independence. There's no question in my mind that he was audacious, courageous, and so forth. But I wanted to emphasize the tensions in his stance: the tensions between being a psychiatrist who was a healer and being an advocate of violence knowing that many forms of violence will result in new wounds, both physical and psychological. And the tensions between Fanon as rebel, whose body tells him when to question; as rebel, who is a critic of orthodoxies, of stale and calcified thinking. On the other hand, Fanon as revolutionary bureaucrat who has to stand by the decisions made by the leaders of the FLN because if he doesn't, he might end up in trouble, he might even end up dead. And so those two sets of tensions help to drive the book. I think that they protect it from being a mere celebration of Fanon.
I'm impressed by the way that he lived his life. But you also see these moments of accommodation, of cowardice, egotism. He was complicated. And I didn't want to shy away from that. It was important to even foreground that. I think he comes off as very admirable in the end.
Alice Kaplan called The Rebel’s Clinic “a What Is to Be Done? our times.” If I can ask you to embrace that — in what sense is that true?
Do you think that it is?
I think it is. At least, as a kind of answer to Arendt’s question of ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.’ I think the book says: here is how one man, in a situation, lived. Take from it.
Absolutely. Take what you will. To be faithful to Fanon's words is to find our own way, not to replicate his — to find what he called 'the leap of invention' that defines us as human.
2025