Assignment: Paper E-C-305,
Topic: “The Black man wants to be White”…Why
Student's Name - Pooja N. Trivedi,
Roll No - 18
M. A. Part II, Semester - III,
Submitted To - Dr. Dilip Barad,
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University,
Bhavnagar.
“The Black man wants to be White”…Why?
After reading this single line from Frantz Fanon ‘Black Skin White Mask’ the immediate aspect occurs in the mind is ‘how much psychological damage the nature of colonialism and racism have caused’ in colonial peoples and the colonizer. The term 'post-colonial' is used to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. It is also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted. In this sense this book is concerned with three intertwined themes:
Ø A critique of ethno psychiatry: - which aimed to provide an account of the mantle life, in sickness and in health of colonized peoples.
Ø A critique of Euro centrism of psychoanalysis: - a dialogue with Negritude.
Ø A critique on the dominant system of thought among Black francophone intellectuals: - in which he challenges its account of the mental life of the black people, the development of a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with psychological harm that colonialism had produced.
As painful as to it is to have to say: THERE IS BUT ONE DESTINY FOR THE BLACK MAN, AND IT IS WHITE. To start with the very title of the book ‘BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK’ this seemingly refers to the aim of Fanon by the color-adjectives he employs in the title. The former, i.e., “ BLACK” is connected with “SKIN” which is INBORN and NATURAL that one should learn to accept and respect rather than strive to replace it. The later one refers to “WHITE”, even though it has connection in the same way as black of skin color, when it becomes a kind of attraction mark and unavoidable desire for black man to achieve, under the impression of colonial mindset and psychological effects of racism, it transforms into a mere, ARTIFICIAL “MASK” and symbol of domination both geographically and psychologically.
As mentioned earlier also Fanon’s approach in Black Skin White Mask focuses on the problems of identity created for the colonial subject by colonial racism. At the very outset of the Introduction of the book he mentions,
“I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.”
—Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le Colonialisme
He argues that the prevailing colonial culture identifies the black skin with inferiority and impurity. In fact, Fanon is hard on the “black man.” He is supposed to be a good nigger who even lacks the. But Fanon’s anger is directed not towards the “black man” but the proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must be black in relation to the white man. It is the internalization, or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this inferiority that concerns him.
When the black man comes into contact with the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego subsides. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his behavior is to emulate the white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a man. Black children raised in this system can be captured between the conflict of contempt of their blackness and to think of themselves, in some sense, as white. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon; and which ultimately he wishes to eliminate. This is the declared intention of his study: to enable the man of color to understand … the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro.
Further, the idea of overcoming from this “blackness” and “whiteness” can be resolved ideally through the process of Humanism and Fanon proposes this idea in answer to the two basic questions raised by him “WHAT A MAN WANT?” and “WHAT A BLACKMAN WANT?” . Fanon’s pursuit is to reply the issue, “what does a black man want?” and he suggests that “at the risk of arousing resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that black is not a man” Additionally, He elucidates that “there is a zone of non-being, an ordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. Fanon goes on to give explanation that “the black man is a black man; that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.” He therefore contends that if the black man is going to attain freedom from himself, he should be, “uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another. He has to give up the projecting onto the world antinomy that coexists with him”. Fanon recognizes a connection between black and white and states, “we shall go very slowly, for there are two camps: the white and the black. Stubbornly we shall investigate both metaphysics and we shall find they are often quite fluid.” Fanon contends that “there is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men.” And how this problem takes place, is explained by him in various chapters of the book.
The first chapter is captioned ''The Negro and Language'' and looks at the ''colonialist subjugation'' of the Negro. Fanon employs language as a principal pattern of how oppressive, dominant cultures often alienate minority cultures from themselves and each other through reinforcing the values and beliefs of the dominant culture as "superior" to those of the minority culture. Fanon seems to acquiesce to the dominant linguistic philosophy of his day when he boldly declares that ''a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language''. Language is a construction that has the strength of outlining reality.
He considers the most powerful method for achieving this is to adopt the language of the oppressive culture, but one is not only adopting a different tongue in doing so, they are also adopting the culture and ideological norms of it,
"To speak means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (Fanon 17),
Being colonized by a language has larger implications for one's consciousness. Speaking French means that one accepts, or is compelled into accepting, the perception of the French, which recognizes blackness with evil and sin. Fanon advances the godlike quality of this dictum through Paul Valéry’s observation that language is “the god gone astray in the flesh.” To transform language, then, is the godlike project of transforming reality.
Language is, however, embodied. Flesh and language are, in other words, symbiotic. Fanon is here referring to the phenomenological view of body and flesh; they refer, as well, to consciousness. Consciousness is always embodied consciousness of things; including of inter subjective consciousness or the social world. That language invests meaning in those who embody it means, then, that the transformation of language entails the transformation of language-users. Here Fanon shares his experience of how he felt in the midst of “French speaking” Black men.
Fanon grew up in Martinque, an island in the Caribbean ruled by France. The capital of France, Paris, was the metropole, the centre of the empire. Martinique was the bush, the outback, the hinterland, a nowhere kind of place. All the top people in Martinique either came from France or received their university education there. They all spoke in perfect French. But most black people in Martinique did not: they spoke Creole, a dialect of French noted for its swallowed r’s. Its closest counterpart in America is Ebonics. Everyone is taught to look down on it at school. The middle-class tries not to speak it at all – except to servants – and shame their children out of using it.
People in Martinique found Creole wanting and saw French as better. That comes not from scholarly opinion but from being colonized, from being under French rule. Fanon noticed that when people came back from France after receiving their university education they would speak in painfully perfect French and act as if they no longer knew Creole. Why was that?
Fanon found out first-hand: in France white people talk down to you if you are black. Either they speak in fake pidgin French – “Why you left big savanna?” – or they would act too familiar, calling you old fellow and so on. French doctors, for example, would talk to their white patients with impersonal respect but to blacks and Arabs like they were their old friend or something.
The whites say that they are just trying to make blacks feel comfortable. Fanon says no, they are scumbags trying to keep blacks in their place – as perpetual children, as beings of a lesser mind. He noticed they talked to blacks the same way he talked to retarded patients.
So under such circumstances students from Martinique make it a point to speak perfect French, complete with all the r’s. Not because they want to be white or because they think white people are better or something – but to prove they are the equal of any white Frenchman, to deny whites the satisfaction of looking down on them because of their French.
And yet even if you speak perfect French the racism does not stop: white people will then say stuff like, “You speak such perfect French!” – Something they never say to a white person with the same university education. Or they will say of one of your country’s writers, “Here is a black man who handles the French language unlike any white man today.” As if that is a surprise or something. Through learning to speak perfect French, they have unwittingly become culturally whiter.
Fanon recounts admonitions from his childhood against speaking Creole and advocacy of speaking “real French,” “French French,” that is, “white” French. The phenomenon is familiar in the Spanish- and English-speaking Caribbean. In the Anglo Caribbean, one is admonished against speaking patois and encouraged to speak the “Queen’s English.” Such French, Spanish, and English—and in other areas, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Italian—offer words of whiteness. As he puts in the instance from childhood experience,
My mother wanting a son to keep in mind
if you do not know your history lesson
you will not go to mass on Sunday in
your Sunday clothes
that child will be a disgrace to the family
that child will be our curse
shut up I told you you must speak French
the French of France
the Frenchman’s French
French French4
A critic may be quick to respond that there is an important class dimension to this observation, for certain ways of speaking the dominant language offer, as well, economic mobility. Fanon, however, has a powerful response.
The black’s effort at transformative linguistic performance is a comedy of errors; instead of being a transformer of words, the black is considered to be, as we have seen, a “predator” of words, and even where the black has “mastered” the language, the black discovers in those cases that he or she becomes linguistically dangerous. Against the class critique, Fanon observes that the black never speaks whiteness as even working-class whites speak whiteness. Such whites speak whiteness “bookishly,” whereas people of color speak whiteness “whitely” or “white-like.” Speaking whiteness whitelike means that the black does not achieve the normative escape that he or she seeks but the limitation of what some theorists call “semiotic play.” Semiotic play refers to the activity of taking seriousness out of the use of signs and symbols of a language. Seriousness is absolute; it leaves no option. It collapses the world into “material values,” where there is supposedly no ambiguity. “White-like” and “whitely” signify imitation. The black, thus, becomes a masquerade, a black wearing a white linguistic mask. The tragedy, in this tragicomedy, is that such a mask signifies a monstrosity, a danger:
Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world. I have had occasion to talk with students of foreign origin. They speak French badly: Little Crusoe, alias Prospero, is at ease then. He explains, informs, interprets, helps them with their studies (Pn 30 / BS 36).
In reference to Charles Dickens’ novels and his intention in his novels the critic G.K.Chesterton has pointed out a remarkable aspect and he puts in that idea as below:
“He (Dickens) was truly a Victorian and get he is for all ages. His revolt was simply and solely the eternal revolt it was the revolt of the weak against the strong…. he did not dislike this or that agreement for oppression: he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of man when he looks down on another man.”
The equivalent idea a French writer Frantz Fanon would have in his mind when he wrote the book ‘Black Skin White Mask’ with the perspective of “Reject the Concept of Race”. To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and white is good; Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being. This utopian desire is presented in his words as:
“Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication is possible. Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at desalination. At the beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child.
It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?
Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?”
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.”
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