Black Skin, White Masks

Let us examine a young man on the Antillean isle of Martinique. There is something special about him. A sparkling nimbus hangs over his head, and everyone can see it. He is more real than the things around him. He feels again like a child on the cusp of adulthood. Something is about to immanentize around him. What is the cause? Only this: he is bound for Paris. All of Fort-de-France crowds at the port to see him off on his journey to the motherland. He sets sail towards the dawn, and waves goodbye to this little island home, which is already growing smaller and less important as Paris nears.

Along the way, he passes another ship on the same route. Let us examine the man on his way back. All of Fort-de-France has gathered to see him, but the dock is empty. They are hiding behind the treeline, to watch him unawares and see if it is really their old compatriot descending to earth or if he has become something else.

He has returned—in the fashion of the far-journeying protagonists of the Arabian Nights—as a merchant. How wide his stock and deep his trade! It all started very innocently. When first he landed in Le Havre, he found himself a poor man in spite of decent clothes and a full wallet. His was a poverty he could not easily describe, though he felt it first in a suddenly acute lack of R-s. He wished to go to a bar and order a beer, but found he only had the funds to go to a bah and ohdah a beeya. This would not do, he thought, and so he spent many laborious hours with his mentors, Stendhal and Proust and Flaubert, acquiring a store of R-s which he spent liberally.

By the time he returned to Fort-de-France, wise investment had garnered him a fine supply of such phonemes, and he made a good living thereafter by selling them to his countrymen on their own journeys to the motherland. Alas, the profligates who had not worked for their own R-s often spent them poorly; just think of one who, stepping into that very same bar in Le Havre, feeling himself to be a proud and well-equipped man about town, cried out ‘Waiterrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!’ and, having thus spent his entire supply, found he no longer had enough for a beer, so he turned tail and fled straight back to Martinique.

He dealt also in comic books. His most popular offering told the adventures of a French explorer penetrating into deepest, darkest Africa, encountering the dreadful Senegalese. The Martinican children devoured these stories, and throughout the streets one could hear them shouting and playing ‘Gauls and Negroes.’ Soon there was talk among the middle schoolers of mounting their own expedition to that darkest land, but it was abruptly canceled as the youngest children were struck with horrific nightmares of fangs gleaming from out of shadows.

But for all his success in matters of business, he was unlucky in love; the woman to whom he had been betrothed before he began his journey was nowhere to be found. In fact, she was there, hidden from his sight, for she knew that if she laid eyes on him she could not help but fall back into his arms. But she had to be sure. This mystical transformation obtained only by a pilgrimage to France had to be authenticated, and so the community exposed him to endless scrutiny as to the nature of his time in the motherland. Did he see the monuments and order in the cafés? Did he have authentic French slop poured on him from a third story window? Was he accosted by—could it be—a mounted police officer? Joy of joys!

But if this alchemy fails to work its magic, if he has not returned as a purified, superior being, then he must be brought to ground at once: if he tries after that to maintain his Parisianism he will be a joke to the village children forevermore, and his lover cannot bear that. Unfortunately, it was so. For a long time our man kept his perfumed European airs, and was the talk of the town. He grew so successful that he received an invitation to a party of the upper crust in Didier. They were an enlightened caste who had experienced the sublime motherland. Each one felt as though they were pushing against some spiritual membrane, on the other side of which was an imperceivable pre-conscious completion. At any moment they could burst through into that nearest heaven, so long as they remained strictly French.

The doom that came to Didier was a Frenchman: a real, honest-to-God Frenchman in the government service. What miserable fortune! The moment he stepped through the doors all of their delicate airs were blown out like candles. When they met his gaze they felt the weight of eighteen million images smothering them, an opaque molasses through which their words could not swim. They beheld like Adam and Eve the color of their skin. Had it changed? Something had changed. It had become a fact about them. They saw in that eye the Judge before whom was open the Book of Life, in whose pages their names were not written. This was the eye that beheld and fixed their sparkling souls in place, and which did not see them.

II.

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, one of eight children of a customs officer and a shopkeeper. As a teenager, he saw the abuse of locals by the Vichy regime during World War II, and when the regime was overthrown there in 1943, he enlisted in the French Liberation Army and fought in Alsace and Colmar. When the Nazis were defeated and the cameras came around, Fanon and his countrymen were nowhere to be seen; they had been sent away from their units to be repatriated back to Martinique.

Fanon returned to France shortly afterwards, baccalaureate in hand, to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyons. His doctoral dissertation was rejected and published as a book, Black Skin, White Masks, in 1952. He died not ten years later, after a career as an author and revolutionary in Algeria against the French, seeking treatment for leukemia in the US. It is widely believed that his death, of double pneumonia, was accelerated by the CIA.

III.

This was supposed to be a review of Sigmund Freud’s On the Interpretation of Dreams. I got obsessed with Teach’s Sadly, Porn1 and wanted to go back to the source and see if his dream-interpretations made any sense in the Freudian tradition, and if that tradition was worth studying. Only problem is… well, Freud. While the chapters on distortion in dreams were fascinating, I couldn’t take it very seriously. It reeks of the nineteenth century, of a time and place too far away. I had consigned myself to trudge through it and write a stale review, when I got turned on to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which scratched my itch for something a little closer to home, more urgent. It too is a work of psychoanalysis. Specifically, of racial psychoanalysis. That sounds horrible. Freud with calipers. But Fanon had something I’ve been chasing down for a while: a really, genuinely human outlook, a voice which speaks platitudes about equality and brotherhood and gives them substance and muscle.

Freud asks ‘What does woman want?’ There was a time, in my spotty and insecure days, the days of the great feminist clashes of the culture war, when such a question would have interested me, but no longer. Fanon asks ‘What does a man want? What does the black man want?’ He asserts that the black man is not a man, that the two camps of color, like the Blues and the Greens of Roman antiquity, are quite fluid, and that what must be done is to set man free—from himself, if necessary.

IV.

Dr. King Schultz: Actually, I was thinking of that poor devil you fed to the dogs today, d’Artagnan. And I was wondering what Dumas would make of all this.

Calvin Candie: Come again?

KS: Alexandre Dumas, he wrote the Three Musketeers.

CC: Yes, of course, Doctor.

KS: I figured you must be an admirer, you named your slave after his novel’s lead character. If Alexandre Dumas had been there today I wonder what he would have made of it.

CC: You doubt he’d approve?

KS: Yes, his approval would be a dubious proposition at best.

CC: Soft-hearted Frenchie.

KS: Alexandre Dumas was black.

Django Unchained (2012), Quentin Tarantino

Candie, a Mississippi slaver and francophile, is caught out. He does not know that one piece of classic French literature was written by a black man, the grandchild of a Haitian slave, and the audience delights in seeing his sense of racial superiority pop like a balloon. But that moment does not linger, otherwise it would be difficult to ignore that this defiance of a slaver… comes as a result of slavers. They were not ‘soft-hearted Frenchies’ that subjugated the Antilles, that slaughtered its inhabitants and repopulated the islands with slaves from West Africa to harvest its bounty. Only after Dumas’ death, well after Django burned down Candyland, did the French Empire extend any citizenship to these islands, including Fanon’s home of Martinique.

Candie is an American, and francophilia in Americans (post-1800) is humorous. But in the Antilles, especially among black Antilleans, francophilia was mandatory.

Observe the character of Jean Veneuse, the protagonist of Martinican poet René Maran’s novel A Man Like Any Other (Un homme pareil aux autres). Veneuse was born in the West Indies and conveyed to France to study in a boarding school there. Isolated and lonely, he turns to his books. He becomes, of course, exquisitely French, so French he’d give Calvin Candie a heart attack, so French that his friends comment on how totally French he is, so French and not at all—what? Not what? Not black, and most certainly not a Negro.

Perhaps you are not altogether aware of the fact. In that case, accept the fact that you are a Frenchman from Bordeaux. Get that into your thick head. You know nothing of your compatriots of the Antilles. I should be amazed, in fact, if you could even manage to communicate with them. The ones I know, furthermore, have no resemblance to you.

In fact you are like us—you are “us.” Your thoughts are ours. You behave as we behave, as we would behave. You think of yourself—others think of you—as a Negro? Utterly mistaken! You merely look like one. As for everything else, you think as a European.

p.68

It’s enough to give a man a neurotic complex; between that and his sexual hangups, he is utterly European. For, you see, Jean Veneuse is in love with a white woman, mademoiselle Andrée Marielle, and he has tied himself in knots about it. The friend writing the letter excerpted above encourages him to declare his love and demand her hand in marriage. After all,

Andrée Marielle, whose skin is white, loves Jean Veneuse, who is extremely brown and who adores Andrée Marielle.

See! He’s just really tan, not at all like… well, the savages. Everyone knows that ‘Negros’ are backward, tom-tom toting cannibals, but that’s hardly any reason to be bigoted towards someone who merely happens to physically resemble them! Get with the times!2

My Teach-poisoned brain had no difficulty when Fanon started psychoanalyzing Jean Veneuse, whom he diagnoses as an abandonment-neurotic who…

…feeds his feeling of irreparable loss with everything that he continues to lose or that his passivity makes him lack.

…Therefore, with the exception of such privileged sectors as his intellectual life or his profession, he cherishes a deep-seated feeling of worthlessness.

p.78

If this were a contemporary work we would jump to Veneuse’s (aka Maran’s) race, but Fanon intercepts us.

Well, it is clear to me that Jean Veneuse, alias René Maran, is neither more nor less than a black abandonment-neurotic. And he is put back into his place, his proper place. He is a neurotic who needs to be emancipated from his infantile fantasies. And I contend that Jean Veneuse represents not an example of black-white relations, but a certain mode of behavior in a neurotic who by coincidence is black.

p.79

And I should like to think that I have discouraged any endeavors to connect the defeats of Jean Veneuse with the greater or lesser concentration of melanin in his epidermis.

p.81

Let us not forget that at the time of writing Fanon has spent years immersed in psychiatric training, and the question at the forefront of his mind is deeply pragmatic: how do you render psychiatric treatment to colonized people? What, psychologically, is the outcome of colonization? How is the colonized psyche different from that which is not?

Fanon spends a lot of the work arguing against psychological race-essentialism. His main target is the French psychiatrist Octavio Mannoni, who is almost a caricature of racist psychiatry:

Wherever Europeans have founded colonies of the type we are considering, it can safely be said that their coming was unconsciously expected—even desired—by the future subject peoples. Everywhere there existed legends foretelling the arrival of strangers from the sea, bearing wondrous gifts with them.

p.99

Mannoni contorts himself to explain how societies like the Malagasies of Madagascar welcome European explorers honorably in terms totally disconnected from human relations: no, it cannot be that they had good will for their fellow man, it was a dependency complex lurking in the unconscious. People of color will inevitably be colonized on contact with whites, and it is impossible to colonize white people.

Fanon is having none of it. Colonization can happen to anyone, and he objects to it in all forms:

“All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied to the same “object”, man. When one tries to examine the structure of this or that form of exploitation from an abstract point of view, one simply turns one’s back to the major, basic problem which is that of restoring man to his proper place. Colonial racism is no different from any other racism.”

p.88

But at the same time, things didn’t turn out that way, and it’s very important to him to lay out why.

“In the Antilles, as in Brittany, there is a dialect and there is the French language. But this is false, for the Bretons do not consider themselves inferior to the French people. The Bretons have not been civilized by the white man.”

p.28

There is a psychic process that accompanies colonization, one which is distinct (perhaps that which distinguishes colonization) from sundry other forms of conquest and violence. It is the matter of the collective unconscious. If only Jung were right and it was transmitted through inherited brain matter, then colonization would be impossible and this book would be unnecessary! But Fanon locates the collective unconscious in the social canon, in that store of sayings and stories which inform one’s cognitive development, the training data of the human mind.

Hear him describe it.

Through the collective unconscious the Antillean has taken over all the archetypes belonging to the European. The anima of the Antillean Negro is almost always a white woman. In the same way, the animus of the Antilleans is always a white man. That is because in the works of Anatole France, Balzac, Bazin, or any of the rest of “our” novelists, there is never a word about an ethereal yet ever present black woman or about a dark Apollo with sparkling eyes … But I too am guilty, here I am talking of Apollo! There is no help for it: I am a white man. For unconsciously I distrust what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being.

p.191

The Antillean partakes of the same collective unconscious as the European: the same value structures, the same fantasies. No wonder Martinican children devour the same comic books about proudly Gallic explorers descending into deepest, darkest Africa, no wonder they are shocked when they realize others perceive them as savages and not explorers. “You think as a European.” How true that turned out to be! Jean Veneuse can rest easy. Like the Buddhist doctrine of tathagatagarbha, it was already present and available to him, closer to him than the veins in his forehead, only needing to be grasped. The whiteness was inside him all along.

Hooray?

But what would Jean Veneuse say to this? Could he accept it? I may speculate idly about sending Veneuse on pilgrimage to a postcolonial guru in the wild heart of Lyons who would teach him to recognize the nonduality of form and emptiness and show him new ways to interact with his value system, but this is too fanciful for Fanon. His colonial subject suffers under a malaise that cannot be named, and antidotes are scarce.

Fanon does not endorse dependence and surrender, as the novelist Mayotte Capécia does. In her book I Am a Martinician Woman (Je suis martiniquaise), Fanon reads a straightforward desire to become white: she loves a man for no other reason than that he is what she wants to be, and having him can bring a bit of it into her life.

It is in fact customary in Martinique to dream of a form of salvation that consists in magically turning white. A house in Didier, acceptance into that high society (Didier is on a hill that dominates the city), and there you have Hegels’ subjective certainty made flesh.

p.44

Neither is he enthused by the trend (perhaps more prevalent today than ever before) of locating a black identity in some distant land, which becomes a fantasy, a reservoir of that which was already empty.

Segou, Djenne, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran). All of that, exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historic place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.

p.130

The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on me. Like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment.

P.225

And, as devoted as he is to Aimé Césaire, he doesn’t seem optimistic about turning the tables and valorizing a mystic blackness.

I am white: that is to say I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of the daylight… I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but because I have offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth…

p.45

This is, in part, because psychiatry has always aimed itself at the middle class, and Fanon locates colonial alienation primarily in them. The unknowable and wordless magic, the oneness with a natural world, is something his patients are looking at from the outside; it remains a totem, a fetish, regardless of how you flip the value structure.

As much as Fanon is an ancestor of contemporary postcolonial thought and as much as many of his ideas would be at home at the radical end of contemporary race politics (his desire for magazines, songs, and history books made specifically for black children stands out) he already rejected in 1951 many stances and methods in present use.

Am I going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every possible means to cause Guilt to be born in minds? … I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.

p.230

Fanon got famous in France, and especially in the United States, for his rhetoric of resistance and violence. That rhetoric finds its context in the colonial massacres in Africa and Asia still being perpetrated by the European powers in the latter half of the twentieth century. In that context, he says, there is no option but to fight. He does not extend the same recommendation to black people in France or the Antilles.

VI.

When I first mentioned I was reading Fanon to a friend of mine, he was quite surprised, and mentioned a quote from Fanon, about how ‘killing a European is killing two birds with one stone’ because it both kills an oppressor and frees an oppressed. It turns out that quote is not Fanon’s but Sartre’s, from the foreword to another work by Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

There is a great deal I have left out of this review. Fanon’s extensive discussion of sexuality with regards to race, the more openly psychoanalytic parts, his discussion of Hegel, and many other sections which verge on the impressionistic and mystical. I have been chasing down this question with such a narrow view that I have cut Fanon into a more convenient shape. I hope that he would forgive me.

I have let him speak for himself, perhaps at the cost of my own voice. Just a few years ago, I could not have tolerated Fanon’s method. I would have called it unfocused and pseudo-scientific, and emphasized how we replicate our own biases in the forking maze of psychoanalysis. Something hides behind the text, inside of its structure. Today it calls to me. Beauty arises here, not in spite of these hidden things, but because of them, in a way that the rationalist language I had grown too comfortable using does not adequately describe. Is there a place where these two things can meet?

I had gone into this book expecting a great deal more rage. I would have found it there, if Fanon had written it a few years earlier, but as he says in the introduction,

This book should have been written three years ago … But these truths were a fire in me then. Now, I can tell them without being burned. These truths do not have to be hurled in men's faces. They are not intended to ignite fervor. I do not trust fervor.

p.11

Neither do I trust fervor. Fanon will not shy away from violence, but neither will he give into bloodthirst, nor will he entertain the fantasy that there need be just one more spasm of racial violence to even the scores, and then all the teams can just go home. There is only one solution I find here, and he repeats it from the beginning to the end.3

In the absolute, the black is no more to be loved than the Czech, and truly what is to be done is to set man free.

p.11

Have I no other purpose on earth, then, but to avenge the Negro of the seventeenth century?

In this world, which is already trying to disappear, do I have to pose the problem of black truth? Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial conformation?

I as a man of color do not have the right to seek to know in what respect my race is superior or inferior to another race.

I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race.

I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master.

I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of my ancestors.

There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden.

I find myself suddenly in a world in which things do evil; a world in which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph.

p.228

Once the active, ruinous violence has stopped (no mean feat that) there shall be neither shame nor guilt nor reparations nor repatriations nor revenges. There can be only the declaration that humanity begins here.

What platitudes! A child could have told me that! And yet, dare I hope? A prophet tells you only what you already know, and demands your adherence.

Fanon asked “What does the black man want?” Now let his answer play us out.

I, the man of color, want only this:

That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.

p.231

Endnotes

1. If you don’t know what this is, don’t look it up, nothing good may come of it.

2. Un homme pareil aux autres is an autobiographical novel, and Jean Veneuse is a stand-in for the author, René Maran, which Fanon ensures you will not forget. As much as Black Skin, White Masks, is a deeply personal work, Fanon neglects to provide his own biographical details here, and so the audience would be ignorant of the fact that by this point Fanon has had two relationships with French women, one of whom he left pregnant, another whom he married around the time this book was published.

3. For the incorrigible Teachites in the room, this is a full-throated rejection of the dynamics of rage and envy. To arrest the motion of these giants it is necessary to bring the full force of humanity to bear. I’m tempted to call it ‘Christ-like’ but I haven’t done enough Biblical interpretation to do so confidently.