Paper 11 - Post Colonial Literature

Topic: White, black and mulato are fanon’s 

justification of race 
Paper:11

Submitted to:Smt.S.B.Gardi

      Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university

Bhavnagar 

  (Gujarat-India)

 White, black and mulato are fanon’s 

justification of race

The black man and the white man are not. And yet they are, and the reality of their being is Fanons starting point: the black man trapped in his blackness, the white man in his whiteness, both trapped into their mutual and aggressive narcissism.3 What, then, brings them or calls them into being, or sentences them to non-being? Writing of his childhood and emergence from it, Fanon remarks: I am a negro [nègre], but naturally I dont know that because that is what I am.4 I am going to use nègre in French because of the ambiguity of its political semantics and because there is no single English equivalent: it is distinct from both noir (black) and the more recent homme de couleur (man of colour) and covers the whole semantic field from negroto nigger, the precise meaning being determined by context, the speakers position or even the speakers tone of voice.

Fanons comment that he had to be told what he was is at one level a fairly banal example of the bracketing out of facticity in favour of simply being: at home, he remarks (meaning, presumably, in Martinique), the black man does not, has no need to, experience his being-for-others.5 Judging by my own experience, it is, for example, perfectly possible to grow up in a uniquely white community in the north-east of England without knowing in any real sense that you are white. There is no need to know that, and it is well known that fish have no sense of wetness. I am not suggesting that there is some equivalence between a white childhood in the north- east and a black childhood in Martinique, merely that we may have to be told who and what we are, that we may not know it naturally. Perhaps being-for-others is, in ethnicity as in other domains, a precondition for self-knowledge. Fanons sense of not knowing what he is because that is what he is, is to a large degree an effect of his being Martinican, and there is considerable textual evidence to indicate that Peau noire could not have been written by anyone but a Martinican.6 It is deeply rooted in the Martinican experience, in the experience of people who were French citizens and not colonial subjects, and who occupied a curious position within the racial hierar- chy. One of the islands more peculiar exports was the French-educated black civil servant and citizen who administered black subjects in the African colonies, and who was in a sense neither black nor white. Fanon found himself in that anomalous position as a young soldier at the end of the Second World War: he was neither indigène nor toubab, neither native nor white man. Fanons black man is Martinican, or in other words a West Indian who does not think of himself as black; he thinks of himself as West Indian. Subjectively, intellectually, the West Indian behaves as a White. But he is a nègre. He will notice that once he is in Europe, and when they talk about nègres, he will know that they are talking about him as well as about the Senegalese.7 Talking about the nègre is one way of calling him into being and of giving him a position akin to that of other marginal groups. One recalls Adornos lapidary remark in Minima Moralia: Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.8 And one recalls the advice given to a very young Fanon by his philosophy teacher in Martinique: When you hear them talking about the Jews, prick up your ears. They are talking about you.

One of the agencies that lets Fanon know he is a nègre by talking about him is of course that child who, one cold day in Lyon, fixes him with its white gaze, thus reducing him to a state of complete being-for- others. The child does not in fact speak to Fanon or tell him anything. The child turns to its mother and says Tiens, .10 The form of the utterance is structurally similar to the smut described by Freud in that it requires the co-presence of three parties: In addition to the one who makes the joke … a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggression, and a third in whom the jokes aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. For the mother, the final yield of this exchange is embarrassment rather than pleasure, but verbal (and perhaps sexual) hostility or aggression is certainly involved.

Before going on to examine Fanons description of this encounter and to ask why he analyses it in phen- omenological term, it seems appropriate to look more closely at the question of why the child in fact sees a nègre and not a man with a scar on his face, or a man with the build of the footballer that Fanon was. How does the child know who and what it is seeing? One might also ask why the child sees a nègre and not a noir or a homme de couleur. What pre-understanding, what stock of knowledge to hand, is in play here? These questions are in a sense posed by Fanon when he administers word-association tests – which he wrongly describes as an exercise in free association – to white friends and colleagues and comes up with a rich crop of stereotypes. But whilst he collates his informantsʼ associations, he does not ask why the child knows he is a nègre. Where do racist ideas come from? Part of the answer may come from a geography textbook published in 1903 and cited in a recent study of racial stereotyping in France:

The authority of the textbook confirms the doxa of they say, of the rumour about the nègre. It also confirms that Fanon is, in the eyes of white France, precisely what he is not in his own eyes: a nègre from the Africa that Martinicans of his generation had been taught to despise because they were French. As Fanon

Freuds study of jokes anticipates the three-party structure of Fanons encounter with the child and its mother; a second theorist of humour supplies another element. In 1899, Henri Bergson – not, I think, a philosopher one would usually regard as racist – asks quite straightforwardly, indeed innocently: Why do we laugh at a nègre? He then answers his own rhetorical question by recounting the anecdote about the Paris- ian coachman who turned to his black passenger and called him mal lavé– not properly washed. We laugh, explains Bergson, because the nègre is a white man in disguise, because he has put on a mask: coloration may well be inherent in the skin but we regard it is as something that has been put on artificially, because it surprises us.14 The nègre is a figure of fun, not because his white masks conceal a black skin, but because his black skin is a disguise.

We know nothing of the life history of the child who saw Fanon that cold day. We do know something of that of a girl nine years older than Fanon, Françoise Marrette, who would become Françoise Dolto, psycho- analytic grandmother to the nation. She was eight at the time. And her experience may teach us something about the stock of knowledge that makes a child so familiar with the paradigm: Look, a nègre.… Look at the nègre, Mum. Im frightened. On the beach at Deauville during the First World War, Françoise Marrette saw a black family; her nanny laughed at the sight. Doltos childish correspondence, preserved and published for God alone knows what reason, is, for a while, full of conflicting images of black people, and they all originate in the meeting on the beach and in an encounter with a wounded tirailleur sénégalais (a Black colonial infantryman) who was being cared for by her mother. Perhaps the young Françoise did say Tiens, un nègre.The soldier kissed the little girl because she reminded him of his own daughter. The nannys reaction was to wash her vigorously: being mal lavé is obviously a contagious condition that might be passed on to a child. There follows an exchange of letters with her uncle, who warns her not to play with the black troops she meets on the beach: they are handsome, but not as good as our mountain troops. From London, her father sends her a comic postcard of four little nègres – I assume them to be a group of street minstrels. In a letter, Françoise summarizes the school composition she wrote about a bayonet charge: it features a tirailleur called Sid Vava Ben Abdal-lah: Vava was the childs nickname, and she clearly identifies with her infantryman, whom she describes as having a black face, white teeth, a flat nose and a red turban. Finally, her mother sends her a postcard of a tirailleur smoking a cigarette. On the back she has written: Here is Bou ji mas portrait. Are you fright- ened of him? After that, there are no more mentions of black people in Doltos letters. Small wonder that a child in Lyon could move so quickly from surprise to fear. Small wonder that he or she knows she has seen a nègre, knows how to recognize one, and knows why she should be afraid of him..

The psychiatry Fanon had studied had taught him about the primitive mentality of blacks and North Africans, and his writing career begins and ends with its critique.35 Adlers individual psychology might be able to explain the inferiority complex of an indi- vidual Martinican, but not the inferiorization of an entire population. Mannonis dependency complex seeks to prove that colonialism is impossible unless it is desired by the colonized, and fails signally to see that, when 100,000 people have been shot dead after the Madagascan insurrection of 1947, the Lebel rifle in the hands of a soldier that appears in a dream is unlikely to be a symbolic penis, or phallus (as you will). Whatever the properties of the symbolic phallus may be, it is not normally a weapon of mass destruction. Jung has nothing to say to black youth. As Fanon remarks, Neither Freud, nor Adler, nor even the cosmic Jung were thinking about blacks in the course of their research.ʼ36 Without going into any great detail or any extended discussion of the claim that there are no Oedipal neurotics (and no homo- sexuals … only there are) in Martinique, it has to be said that Fanons relationship with psychoanalysis is fraught.37 He does state that an analysis of the black mans Erlebnis requires a psychoanalytic input, but he also argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular is culture-bound and has nothing to say about his experience.

Virtually every mention of psychoanalysis is hedged with the reservation Yes, but… Discussing Mannonis book on Madagascar he comments with decep- tive mildness: We must not lose sight of the real Fanon is not concerned with symbolic wounds, but with the absolute wound of colonialism.Alongside phylogenesis and ontogenesis, there is sociogenesis. The insistence that psychoanalysis loses sight of the real, and the stress on the need to keep it in sight, may explain Fanons quite extraordinary misreading of Freud. He rarely quotes Freud, and when he does so he claims that Freud proves that neuroses originate in a determinate Erlebnis. He takes his supporting evidence from the Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1909. Unfortunately for Fanons argument, Freud is in fact describing how he came to reject the so-called seduction theory which did trace the aetiology of neurosis to an actual sexual trauma. The misreading is the result of keeping the real in sight, the real being the absolute wound.

Hegel and Freud do not think about blacks, and nor was Sartre thinking about blacks when he wrote LEtre et le néant, but Fanon was not the only black writer of his generation to conclude that Sartrean phenom- enology could be an aid to his analysis of his lived experience. In his paper on The Negro Writer and his World, presented in 1956 to Présence Africaines First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, George Lamming remarks that the Negro is not simply there. He is there in a certain way.… The Negro is a man whom the Other (meaning the non-Negro) regards as a Negro Although Lamming gives no reference, this is an obvious allusion to Sartres Réflexions sur la question juive:The Jew is a man whom other men regard as a Jew.… It is the antisemite who makes the Jew. Fanon cites this text too, but immediately spells out its limitations: he is not the victim of someone elses idea of him. He is the victim of his own appearance (apparaître), of the black skin on to which white fantasies and fears are projected. Sartrean phenomenology can help Fanon analyse the mode of his being-for-others, but it too lets him down. Sartre lets him down in his preface to Senghors anthology of the poetry of negritude, where he assumes that negritude is a temporary phenomenon that will disap- pear when it is subsumed into some quasi-Hegelian universalist synthesis. Fanon was dubious about negritude – that great black mirage – but he could also invoke it to finesse Sartre by remarking It is the white man who creates the nègre. But it is the nègre who created negritude.At other times, Fanon does assume the stance of negritude, does exploit Spivaks moment of strategic essentialism – and negritude is certainly an essentialism. This is how the encounter in Lyon ends: The mother: “Look, heʼs handsome, this nègre”… Fanon: “The handsome negro says bugger you, madame.” Shame flooded across her face. Two birds with one stone. I identified my enemies and I created a scene. The same defiance reappears later: You come to terms with me, Im not coming to terms with anyone. Although Fanon does not flag it as such, this is a quotation from the great poem of negritude, Césaires Cahier dun retour au pays natal. It may be a mirage, but negritude has its strategic uses.

12

The irony is that, when he abol- ishes negritude with his vision of a future world without class, without race, Sartre falls into the very trap that he denounces in Réflexions sur la question juive, where he mocks the Democrat who can recognize the Jew as Man, but not as the creator and bearer of Jewishness, just as the humanistsʼ of La Nausée love an abstract universal man so much that they have no interest in concrete individuals. Sartres little problem may go some way to explaining why so much of the French left was lukewarm about supporting the Algerian cause and, ultimately, to explaining why certain French intellectuals appear to be convinced that the presence in a French classroom of a girl in an Islamic head- scarf (hijab) puts the entire Republic in danger. But I will leave that, and the question of why some erstwhile Third Worldists appear to be mutating into Islamophobes, for another occasion.

The theme of the threatening white gaze and the trope of visibility/invisibility are, of course, not uncommon in black writing. Almost at random, one thinks of Du Boiss veil of invisibility, of Ellisons invisible man, or, more recently, of bell hooks in Wounds of Passion: The gaze of white folks disturbs me. It is always for me the would-be colonizing look. One of the reasons why Fanon is so critical of psychoanalysis is that, As the racial drama unfolds in the open air, the black man does not have time to “unconsciousnessize” it(incon- scienciser). I suggest that there might be something very specific to Fanons experience of the gaze and use of figures of visibility, and that it might pertain to Martinique. In Aimé Césaires reworking of The Tempest, it is Prosperos gaze that forces Caliban to see himself as he is seen: You have finally imposed upon me an image of myself. An underdeveloped man, as you put it, an under-capable man. That is how you have made me see myself. Tiens, un nègre. And there is a Martinican saying: Zié Békés brilé zié Nèg (the eyes of the béké burned the eyes of the black man). The béké is not just any white man; he is the white creole, the descendent of locally born plantation owners. The béké is Martiniques answer to The Man, Mr Charlie. It is through the internalization of his gaze that the Nèg (this is the Creole for nègre) has been blinded. And it is the white gaze that burns Fanon to ashes. To speculate, which is all we can really do here: when Fanon is gazed at by that child, he is experiencing anew a traumatic moment in Martinican history and in the Martinican imaginary: he is being looked at by the béké and his eyes are burning. Is this why the schema of the gaze is not reversible, as it is for Sartre? Is this why Fanon can put up no ontological resistance, cannot look back? Speaking of Madagascar, Fanon described colonization as an absolute wound. In the case of Martinique, the wound was more absolute still, so absolute that it cannot be staunched. In a strange way, it was a settler colony, or rather a settled colony. The aboriginal population having been exterminated, it was repopulated with slaves whose eyes were burned by the békés gaze. Martinique has no pre-colonial history: it all began with the absolute wound and the eyes that were burned.

          the issues involved are as serious as your life. People will die, and the survivors will live with their deaths for a long time to come. Imagine what happens to the young women who are kidnapped by so-called Armed Islamic Groups for equally so-called marriages of pleasure. They are gang-raped for days or weeks and then killed, often by being disembowelled. Imagine what happens in the cellars used by the military and the police, where the interrogators tool of choice is a blow lamp. Imagine what will become of the eight- year-old child who sees her teacher having her throat cut before she is decapitated in front of the class, and who stares at the severed head left on the desk. Remember the wretched of the earth, and the dead of Algeria. For the moment, it is all that we can do. Their lives have been taken. Do not let their memory die, even if we do not know their names.