Frantz Fanon was born in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique. He left Martinique in 1943, when he volunteered to fight with the Free French in World War II, and he remained in France after the war to study medicine and psychiatry on scholarship in Lyon. Because of his 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 disheartened Fanon began what he believed to be his thesis (originally called “Essay for the Dis-alienation of the Black”), which instead became Black Skin, White Masks.
Why write this book? No one has asked me for it.
Especially those to whom it is directed.
Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. (7)
Therefore the book, perhaps unwittingly, becomes a (pre-consciously inborn?) hybrid of psychological analysis, conditional study, political manifesto, an exploration sexual identity and identities – and hovering at the center of this is Fanon’s own examination of himself. He posits himself as both outsider and insider, as both a student and doctor; as both a teacher of humanity and a patient of colonialism’s built-in disease. In the introduction, he states:
There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect…. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white… The analysis I am undertaking is psychological… It is apparent to me that the effect disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex it is the outcome of a double process: Primarily, economic; subsequently, the internalization of this inferiority. (10-11)
His goal with this historically unbalanced relationship: “I want to destroy it.” (12) And yet throughout Black Skin, White Masks, the reader is confronted with Fanon’s own anxiety:
The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason ther is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason. (116)
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.” (142) Fanon invokes Freud, however the Oedipus complex is a luxury for the white man. The Negro finds his destiny written in Dr. Germaine Geux’s pre-Oedipal tripod: “It is this tripod – the anguish created by every abandonment, the aggression to which it gives rise, and the devaluation of self that flows out of it – that supports the whole sympomatology of this neurosis.” Compounded with this is the Jungian collective unconscious:
In every society, in every collectivity exists – must exist – a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression can be released. This is the purposes of games in children’s institutions, of psychodramas in group therapy, and in a more general way, of illustrated magazines for children… The Tarzan stories, the sagas of twelve-year-old explorers, the adventures of Mickey Mouse, and all those comic books serve actually as a release for collective aggression. The magazines are put together by white men for little white men… In the magazines, the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, become an explorer, an adventure, a missionary “who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.” (145-6)
Yet, Fanon finds progress:
Recently, in a children’s paper, I read a caption to a picture in which a young black boy scout was a showing a Negro village to three or four white scouts: “This is the kettle where my ancestors cooked yours.” … I think the writer of that caption has done a genuine service to Negroes without knowing it. For the white child who reads it will not form a mental picture of the Negro in the act of eating the white man, but rather as having eaten him. Unquestionably this is progress. (203)
In Europe and in every country characterized as civilized or civilizing, the family is a miniature of the nation. As the child emerges from the shadow of his parents, he finds himself once more among the same laws, the same principles, the same values [of his country]… But if [the black child] goes to Europe, he will have to reappraise his lot. For the Negro in France, which is his country, will feel different from other people. Once can hear the glib remark: The Negro makes himself inferior. But the truth is that he is made inferior. (142, 149)
‘Oh, I want you to meet my black friend… Aime Cesaire, a black man and a university graduate… Marian Anderson, the finest of Negro singers… Dr. Cobb, who invented white blood, is a Negro… Here, say hello to my friend from Martinique (be careful, he’s extremely sensitive).
Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle. (116)
At this point, it is appropriate to include an abridged reading of Aimé Césaire’s Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land), which plays on the motifs of the colonizer fetishizing the African, yet draws the earth as part and parcel with that spirit which the colonizer cannot completely rewrite.
(This translation may vary)
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass
Those who never learned to conquer the steam or electricity
Those who never explored the seas or the skies
But they know the farthest corners of the land of anguish
Those who never knew any journey save that of abduction
Those who learned to kneel in docility
Those who were injected with bastardy
But those without whom the earth would not be the earth
Tumescence all the more fruitful
than
the empty land
still more the land
Storehouse to guard and ripen all
on earth that is most earth
My blackness is no stone, its deafness
hurled against the clamor of the day
My blackness is no drop of lifeless water
on the dead eye of the world
My blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral
It thrusts into the red flesh of the sun
It thrusts into the burning flesh of the sky
It hollows through the dense dismay of its own
pillar of patience.
After the poem Fanon gives an anecdote of a friend and teacher in American: “The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance.” (129) We see this trend continuing today, not only in the music that is now borrowed wholesale, but the corrupted models of business in the music industry, which is essentially a model of indentured servitude and a debt so infinitesimally unpayable that it no longer effects the pocketbook, but the bank of the black soul. To make a dent in these payments: Advertising, which furthers the death of the soul. Oh, capitalism!
All this leads to Fanon’s greatest achievement, what was once only thought, but never spoken aloud: That economics might not be the germs of racism, but a denial in the white man and white woman of the sexual desire and attraction of the black man. The denial is the racism. A Jew is killed, hunted, extinguished from civilization, Fanon says, echoing Sartre, but the black man is castrated, lynched. It is then, the stare. The genesis of racism begins with sight. One must see what one wants to despise, to fear. He begins with the stare. The stare is the very essence of the book: Every chapter, every sentence, footnote, and reference is for Fanon a recovery of the psychology of the stare, and a denial of the alienating denial of the stare (a double denial, do the algebra):
And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. (110)
The stare in which Fanon writes is akin to the stare and tail of cats. Cats will suddenly look intently in one direction when there seems to be nothing in the space where they stare. In essence, they are using they color-and-movement-oriented peripheral vision. You can tell which side a cat is looking by studying the tip of the tail: It points in the opposite direction of the side of vision. If the eyes of the white man to the black man exhibit pure hatred and disgust, a look that is directed only to the black man’s biology – this beast, this cannibal, this copulator of the jungle – it is because the tip of his tail points to the area of his own denial of attraction and desire of the black man. For Fanon the psychoanalyst, this is the unblinking beginning of racism. And it is, Fanon states, the punishment of desire:The white man desires the black man; the white woman desires the black man; the homosexual man desires the black man. The black woman does not desire the black man because she too has the pre-Oedipal devaluation of self and the coupling of the black man and black woman becomes a conscious reminder of her own alienation. Yet Fanon does not to be desired by any of these people, or at least not in their register. Whom he loves and how he loves – Fanon reclaims it as his own, with the specific terms that it is nobody’s business! Yet, the problematic nature of the book: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise. Her choosing the white man becomes, strangely, his business to deconstruct and analyze, while he claims to want freedom. Throughout there is ambiguous sexism towards woman, a kind of nuage of misunderstanding and colonizer reversal.
Fanon’s conclusion has become famous among post-colonial thinkers, perhaps because of its marked pointillism, perhaps by virtue of its simplicity of prose, its breathable anger, its shock of speakability. It is here where I will end.
No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be free.
I am my own foundation.
The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved.
The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
I, the man of color, what only this:
That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself.
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
My final prayer:
O my body, make of me always a man who questions! (230-232)
