Fort-de-France

The capital of the Caribbean island of Martinique, birthplace of Frantz Fanon, who left at seventeen to fight in the French army and never returned with the same eyes.

Fort-de-France is built around a bay beneath the volcano that destroyed the island's previous capital in 1902. Fanon grew up there in a comfortable family, educated to think of himself as French, and taught for a time by Aime Cesaire. He volunteered for the Free French at seventeen and was decorated, and discovered in Europe that the uniform changed nothing about what people saw. Black Skin, White Masks came out of that gap between what he had been taught and what he met.