In May 1954, Joby Fanon caught a flight from Paris to Algiers to visit his younger brother. Frantz Fanon had taken up a residency at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital the previous year and was now living in Algeria with his wife, Josie. In his book Frantz Fanon: My Brother (2012), Joby revisits this trip with a sweet sense of nostalgia, grateful for the time spent with Frantz after a long separation. The brothers quickly reverted to the Creole of their childhood in Martinique, a language that French-speaking Josie had not yet grasped. Frustrated by her exclusion, Josie felt as though she had been mise entre parenthèses (put in brackets). While Joby’s retelling of this story is light-hearted, full of the pointed, yet affectionate jest reserved for familial quarrels, the image of Josie trapped in brackets remains unsettling. Seventy years later, in December 2024, I flew to Algiers to visit her books—an attempt to step inside the brackets with her.
In this paper, I take direction from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay Unpacking My Library as well as Homi Bhabha’s 1995 response, Unpacking My Library Again. Benjamin reflects on the nature, methods, and pleasures of book collecting alongside “the chaos of memories” (192) that his volumes evoke, while Bhabha explores the “cosmopolitan possibilities and transdisciplinary connections” that emerge from his momentarily disordered books (16). Both essays examine the libraries of the living—books that will be unpacked, repacked, and used again. But what can we learn from examining the books of those who are no longer with us, whose libraries have become archives? If, as Alberto Manguel suggests, personal book collections form a “multi-layered autobiography,” then what can Josie Fanon’s books reveal about her Third World intellectual priorities, feminist commitments, and personal preoccupations?
