Department Of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University
Name: Bhatt Vidhi
Rajeshkumar
Roll No.: 04
SEM: 03
Year: 2012-13
Subject: Postcolonial
Literature
Assignment Topic: Black
Skin, White Masks: An Overview
Submitted To: Dr. Dilip
Barad
Black Skin, White Masks: An Overview
Because of Frantz Fanon schooling
and cultural background, the young Fanon conceived of himself as French, and
the disorientation he felt after his initial encounter with French racism
shaped his psychological theories about race and culture. 1945 letter to
brother: “I made a mistake. Nothing can justify my sudden decision to defend
the interests of the French peasant when he himself does not give a damn.”
During this period in Lyon, a dishearten Fanon began what he believed to be his
thesis (originally called “Essay for the
Desalinations of the black”), which instead became Black Skin, White Masks.
Black
Skin, White Masks remained obscure
for decades after its initial publication. Since the 1980s, it has become well
known as an anti-colonial and anti-racist
work in English-speaking countries. However, it remains a "relatively minor work" in francophone
nations, despite its explicit connection with those countries. Modern discussions among theorists of nationalism,
anti-colonialism, and liberation have largely focused on Fanon's later, more
revolutionary works, rather than the psychoanalytic explanation of colonial
relations.
The writings of
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon had tremendous impact on the European
anti-colonialist movement. His books Black Skin
White Mask and The Wretched
of the Earth explore the effects upon colonialism on both the
conquerors and the conquered.
His first book is an analysis of the
impact of colonial subjugation on the black psyche. It is a very personal
account of Fanon's experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a
party to a French education.
Fanon believed that black’s adopting the language and the culture of the
dominate society had larger implication for one’s consciousness: Speaking the
language of the colonizers means that can accepts, or is concerned into
accepting, the collective consciousness of the person or, which identifies
blackness with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of
blackness with evil, the black man with white mask, or thinks of himself as a
universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates and
equality supposedly abstract from personal appearance.
Essentially the Negro is born into a hopeless situation. In this context,
the black man will never be normal, but always an inborn - no, a preborn- human
of abnormality. "Let me add only that in
the psychological sphere the abnormal man is he who demands, who appeals, who
begs." Fanon invokes Freud; however the Oedipus complex is a
luxury for the white man.
Incidentally,
in the middle of the 20th century a
young black intellectual by the name of Frantz Fanon emerged as a great
champion in the art of problematising the study of ‘color line’, for indeed the
issue of ‘color line’ had become a global problem. Now history tells us that
the 20th century is behind us, yet as we live in the beginning of the 21st century the problem of ‘color line’ is
still a part and parcel of our society. In this essay, I attempt to critique
one of Fanon’s essays entitled ‘The Fact of Blackness’, which deals with this
problem.
I have divided the main body
of my essay into three sections. The first one deals with the
social-psychological notion of ‘self-identity’
in relation to the so-called ‘fact of being a
black person’. The second section deals with the economical and
social-political notion of ‘self-determination’ in relation to the ‘fact of being a dominated black person’.
And the final section deals with the contradictory nature of affirming the
‘fact of being a black person’ vis-à-vis the ‘non-homogeneity
of blackness’. But before delving into these sections, it is
important to sketch a brief biographical background of Fanon in the context of
his politics and the intellectual currents of his time i.e. the time he wrote ‘The Fact of Blackness’.
THE BLACK IDENTITY
MOVEMENT
The Noble Drew Ali was one of the most influential Black Nationalist
leaders of the century. He strongly influenced the growth and development of
Black Nationalist Identity between 1913 and the 1930s. His movement combined black
Messiah feelings, Black Nationalism, and a theology of deliverance from the
white man’s world, culture and religion.
THE SEARCH FOR
BLACKNESS
From the 18th century
through the first third of the 19th century, black religious and
educational organizations used the prefix African in their names, providing a
sense of cultural integrity and a link to their African heritage. The
first black religious organization established in Savannah in 1787 was the
First African Baptist Church. The second oldest black denomination in
North America, founded in 1787, was the African Methodist Episcopal. In
1806, blacks constructed the first African Meeting House in Boston.
BLACK SLAVE OWNERS
AND THE MULLATO CLASS
The majority of black slave owners were
members of the mulatto class, and in some cases were the sons and daughters of
white slave masters. Many of the mulatto slave owners separated
themselves from the masses of black people and attempted to establish a caste
system based on color, wealth, and free status.
FANON AND THE BLACK MAN’S
BURDEN
If the black is not a man, then what is the biological, psychological and cultural identity of the black? If the black is not a man, what and who is black? Fanon’s answer to this is equally enigmatic: ‘The black is a black man.’ Moreover, his answer to what a black man wants is more enigmatic: ‘The black man want to be white’
If the black is not a man, then what is the biological, psychological and cultural identity of the black? If the black is not a man, what and who is black? Fanon’s answer to this is equally enigmatic: ‘The black is a black man.’ Moreover, his answer to what a black man wants is more enigmatic: ‘The black man want to be white’
He
sarcastically describes his fragmented thought processes as follows: ‘Toward a
new humanism…Understanding among men...Our colored brothers...Mankind I believe
in you...Race prejudice...To understand and to love...From all sides dozens and
hundreds of pages assail me and try to impose their will on me. But a single
line would be enough. Supply a single answer and the color problem would be
stripped of its importance’ .A single answer was and is indeed not enough to
deal with Dubois’ old problem of color line.
BLACKNESS AND THE QUEST FOR SELF-IDENTITY
Thus, when
Fanon talks about the limits of ontology in explaining the being of the black
man, he simply means that ontology can only explain the being of the black man
if and only if it deals with his existence as a black man per se and not as
black man in relation to a white man. But this is unattainable because a
colonized black man is Manichean constructed or brought into being in relation
to an opposite, that is, a white man. Without a white man there is no black
man. As far as skin color is concerned, a black man can indeed be ontologically
brown or even posses a skin shade that can make him pass for white as history
has shown us. But a black man in Fanon’s time was not brown or white because
the white gaze had ensured that he must not only be black, but he must be black
in relation to the white man: ‘Look A Negro!’ ‘Dirty nigger!’
BLACKNESS AND THE QUEST FOR SELF-DETERMINATION
When Fanon
was writing the 'The Fact of Blackness', the champions of negritude were
prospective statesmen and major political figures of the soon-to-be-independent
colonies. For instance, in Africa there was Leopold Seder Senghor who was to
become a president of Senegal and in Martinique there was Aime Cesaire who was
to be a prominent politician in that former French colony. In their quest for
both self-identity and self-determination, the champions of negritude ‘sought
to understand and to change colonial reality by explaining the colonial
relationship in terms of a clash of fundamentally different cultures’.
BLACKNESS AND THE DILEMMA OF BLACK ESSENTIALISM
As a result
the self-consciousness and the black situation in a white world was in a
dialectic interrelationship of independence and dependence: ‘That is, Fanon
stressed that self-consciousness of blacks has been sublated by oppression; and
that the other, the white oppressors, do not regard black self-consciousness as
real, but see in the black only their own self-consciousness. As long as the
black self-consciousness is not recognized by the other, the other will remain
them of his (the black’s) actions.
This
ignorance will sooner or later make one realize, as Fanon realized, that when
he is trying to express his essence or existence, he will run the risk of
finding only the non-essence or nonexistent.
Fanon is one
of the very few non-Anglophones to be admitted to the post-colonial canon, and
alarmingly few of the theorists involved realize or admit that they read him in
very poor translations. The mistranslation obliterates Fanon’s philosophical
frame of reference, which is supplied by a phenomenological theory of
experience, but it also perverts his whole argument; for Fanon, there is no
fact of blackness, but that experience is defined in situational terms and not
by some trans-historical ‘fact’.
However, for
a long time she abandoned Fanon’s ‘Black Skin,
White Mask’ because of in its patriarchal nature it forgot about the
black woman. One of the statements that disturbed hooks had to do with
ontological resistance: ‘When Fanon declares that “the black person has no
ontological resistance to the white gaze” he denies that the interaction
between black males and black females might serve as just such a site’.
Conclusion
This work of
Fanon has ironically led some to argue that the major problem of blacks is not
racism.
When the
champions of black power such as Stokely Carmichael call Fanon their ‘patron
saint’ one needs to offer a close reading of their work to see how much the
notion of black power has drawn from the violence of the ‘Wretched of the
Earth’ and blackness of ‘Black Skin, White Mask’. All in all ‘The Fact of
Blackness’ is a work that touches all those who encountered experiences which
are more or less like the one Fanon encountered in the white world.
The ambitiousness of ‘Black Skin, White Mask’ is rooted in its attempt to deal with the ways in which
the psychical or fantastical reality of race might be more consequential than
the empirical one. Because the connotations with the color black are purely
negative, blacks share the stereotypes as much as whites, so desalination can
never mean a simple negation of what is black.
Fanon locates the historical point at which certain psychological
formations became possible, and he provides an important analysis of how
historically-bound cultural systems, such as the Orientalist discourse Edward
Said describes, can perpetuate themselves as psychology. While Fanon charts the
psychological oppression of black men, his book should not be taken as an
accurate portrait of the oppression of black women under similar conditions.
The work of feminists in postcolonial studies undercuts Fanon's simplistic and
unsympathetic portrait of the black woman's complicity in colonization.
