Fanon's increasing popularity among postcolonial critics, together with his militant revolutionary activity and impact on subsequent anti-racist movements, have led him to be a fascinating subject for more than one biographer. Alice Cherki's Frantz Fanon: un portrait is an intimate testimony to Fanon's life from the point of view of a psychiatrist who worked with him, and was first published by Seuil in 2000, the same year as David Macey's mammoth historical study Frantz Fanon: A Life, published by Granta. These joined David Caute's summary Fanon of 1970 and Albert Memmi's self-consciously playful biographical article, ‘La Vie impossible de Frantz Fanon’ of 1971. These are perhaps just some of the best known and most explicitly biographical among a host of studies of Fanon's career and intellectual development, charted also by thinkers such as Irene Gendzier, Nigel Gibson and Patrick Ehlen to name a few. It is striking, however, how many studies imply a certain mutability in the Fanonian persona, a protean quality indicating that this is an elusive thinker who wore a series of masks. For David Caute, for example, there were two Fanons, the ‘pragmatic realist’ who wanted to force the French to realise the impact of the Algerian war on living conditions in France and Algeria, and also the more alienated Fanon ‘who wanted his French friends to share in his subjectivity’. Similarly, David Macey dwells on the amnesia surrounding Fanon's legacy in Martinique, in France and in Algeria, as if to convey his resistance to categorisation according to national frameworks, while also examining the split between the ‘Third Worldist’, revolutionary Fanon and the ‘postcolonial’ Fanon of identity politics. Moreover, Albert Memmi's ‘La Vie impossible de Frantz Fanon’ presents itself as a partially fictionalised and certainly stylised version of Fanon's life, according to which Fanon experiments with a series of identities (Martinican, French, Algerian, African), but at the end of which we find an enigmatic figure who ‘n'a jamais accepté de retourner à lui-même’. It is also perhaps telling that Cherki's personal testimony begins with the observation that, though Fanon was voluble about his political commitments, he was uncomfortable recounting particularities from his personal life, and her own reticence towards the possibility of biographical disclosure leads her to dub her study ‘a testimony once removed’.