THe Postcolonial Lterature

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 18^th century through the first third of the 19^th 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’

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.