Name –
Shital D Italiya
Roll –
29
Topic –
Post colonialism in Black Skin White Mask
Paper –
Post colonial literature
Semester
– 3
Submitted
to – Smt.S.B.Gardy Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar university
Bhavnagar
Post
colonialism in Black Skin White Mask.
Introduction
In the
popular memory of the English socialism the mention of Franz Fanon stir a dim,
deceiving echo. Black skin white mask, the wretched of the earth, towards the
African revolution – these memorable titles reverberates in the self-righteous
rhetoric of résistance.
There has been no substantial work
on fanon in the history of the new left review; one piece in the new states
register; one short book by an English author of late, the memory of the Fanon
has been kept alive in the activist tradition of race and class.
Memory of Fanon tends to mythical. He is either revered as the prophetic
spirit of third world liberation or reviled as an exanimating angle, the
inspiration to violence in the black power movement. Despite his historic
participation in the Algerian revolution and the influence of his ideas on race
politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Fanon’s work will not be passed by one
political movement or moment, nor can it be easily placed in a shameless
narrative of liberationist history. Fanon refuses to be so completely claimed
by event or eventualities. It is the sustain irony of his work that his sever
commitment to the political task in hand, never restricted the restless, in
squiring movement of his thought.
“Franz Fanon does not want to be a Black man;
he wants to be a man, plain and simple”.
To read Fanon is experience
the sense of division that prefigures and fissures, the emergence of a truly
radical thought that never draws without casting an uncertain dark. His voice
is most clearly heard in the subversive turn of a familiar term. In the silence
of a sudden rapture
“The Negro is not any more than the white
man.”
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
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.
v What
is post colonialism?
According
to M.H.Abraham
The critical analysis of
history, culture, literature and modes of discourse that is specific to the
former colonies of England, Spain, France and other European powers. These
studies have focused especially on the third world countries in Africa, Asia
the Caribbean island and South Africa. Some scholar never extends the scope of
such analysis also to the discourse and cultural production of countries such
as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This achieved independence much earlier
than the third world countries. Postcolonial studies sometimes also encompass
aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
viewed through a perspective that reveals the ways in which the social and
economic life represented in that literature was tacitly underwritten by
colonial exploitation.
An important text in establishing
the theory and practice in this field of study was orientalism by the
Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, which applied a revised form of
Michel Foucault’s historicists critic of discourse to analyse what he called
‘’cultural imperialism’’. The term orientalism is now sometimes applied to
cultural imperialism by means of the control of discourse, not only in the
orient, but anywhere in the world.
One can identify several central and
recurrent issues.
The rejection of the master narrative of
western imperialism in which the colonial other is not only subordinate and
marginalized but in effect deleted as agency and its replacement by counter
narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back in to a world
history written by Europeans.
The subaltern has become
a standard way to designate the colonial subject that has been constructed by
European discourse and internalized by colonial peoples who employ this
discourse; “subaltern” is the Latin term for “under”(sub) and “ other”(alter).
A recurrent topic of debate is now, and to what extent a subaltern subject,
writing in a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resistance
against rather than of compliance with the very discourse that has created its
subordinate identity.
The major element in the
postcolonial agenda is to be disestablishing Eurocentric norms of literary and
artistic values and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and
postcolonial writers.
v Colonial
world of Fanon.
“If psychiatry is the medical technique
that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it
to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country,
lives in a state of absolute depersonalization... the social structure existing
in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he
belonged.”
The
psychiatric hospital at Blida Joinville is one such place where in the divided
world of French Algeria, Fanon discovered the impossibility of his mission as a
colonial psychiatrist”.
The extremity of this colonialization of the
person of this end of the “idea’’ of the individual produces a restless urgency
in Fanon’s search for a conceptual; form appropriate to the social antagonism
of the colonial relation. The body of his work splits between a Hegelian
Marxist dialect,a phenomenological affirmation of self and other and the
psychoanalytic ambivalence of the unconscious, its turning from love to hate,
mystery to servitude. In his desperate doomed search for a dialect of
deliverance Fanon explores the edge of their modes for thought: his Hegelianism
restores hope to history; his existentialist evocation of the “I’’
restores the presence of the marginalized and his psychoanalytic frame work
illuminates the madness of racism the pleasure of pain, the agonistic fantasy
of political power.
As fanon attempts such
audacious, often impossible, transformation of truth and values, the jagged
testimony of colonial dislocation its displacement of time and person, its
defilement of culture and territory, refuse the ambition of any total theory of
colonial oppression.
v
Fanon as a colonial thinker.
1) Geographical
circumstances.
There are many geographical circumstances
influence on Fanon’s writing as a colonial. The first chapter of this book
“Black Skin White Mask’’ open with the black man and the language. Here it is
mentioned that Fanon grew up in Martinique, an island in the Caribbean ruled by
France. The capital of France, Paris was the Metro pole, 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
the4ir university education there.
In chapter first Fanon writes that...
“Every colonized people in other words,
every people in whose soul an inferiors complex has been created by the death
and burial of its local cultural originality find its self face to face with
the language of the civilizing nations that is , with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is
elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother
country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness,
his jungle. In the French colonial army and particularly in the Senegalese
regiments the black offers serve first of all as interpreters. They are used to
convey the master’s order to their follows, and they too enjoy a certain
position of honour.”
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 becomes whiter as he renounces
his blackness, his jungle in the French colonial army. The words Paris,
Marseille, Sorbonne become the keys to the vault. He leaves for the pier, and
the amputation. He added that we are the chosen people look at the colour of
our skins. The others are black or yellow: that is because their sins. He also
made fun of Bible:
It is laid down in the Bible that the
separation of the white and black races will be continued in heaven as on
earth, and those blacks who are admitted into the kingdom of heaven will find
themselves separately lodged in certain of those many mentions of our
father………”
1) The
Negro and the language
In
this chapter the author discusses that if a black person does not learn the
white man’s language perfectly, he is unintelligent yes if he does tern it
perfectly, he has washed his brain in the world of racial ideology.
According to Fanon,
“The Negro enslaved by his
inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behaves in accordance
with a neurotic orientation.”
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.
2) The woman of colour and the white
Man
The colonized women look
down on their own. Race and deep down won’t to be white. In “The Bluest eye” of “Tony Morrison” we find a black desire of white
woman.
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 colour is concerned, a black man can
indeed be ontologically brown or even possess 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!’
3) The man of colour and white woman.
In
this chapter Fanon talks about the condition of man as a Black. He says that
these men wants to become white, they are also equal to whites. Gwendolyn
Brook’s poem “We real cool’’ deals with the same theme.
4)
The so called dependency complex of the
colonized people.
In this
chapter Fanon argues that a people of colour may have deep desire for white
rule. Those who opposite to it they don’t have secure sense of self that they
have very chip sense on their shoulder.
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’.
In this book he said that...
“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 colour problem would be stripped of its importance’ .A single answer was and is indeed not enough to deal with Dubois’ old problem of colour line.”
5) The fact of Black
This chapter
deals with them pathetic situation of black people. Here it is shown that being
always black as if they are never fully human being. No matter however
education or intelligence you have or no matter how well you perform in to the
society. Even we have to mention here the black historical movement to support
this argument.
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.
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 colour, wealth, and free status.
6) The Negro and Psychopathology.
Why should people fear of
being as a black? Here the white man repressed the Homosexuality and their
strange hang ups about black man’s penises more generally, black man are viewed
as a bodies which makes them seems like mindless, violence, sexual, animal
beings. All the bad meaning that the word “Black” had even before Europeans set
foot in black Africa.
Here he writes
that
“As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the
symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am
a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no
attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find
value for what is bad--since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is
the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I
am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies,
hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd
drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are
equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the
universal.
When the Negro dives--in other words, goes under--something remarkable occurs”.
7)
Negro and Recognition.
In this chapter he writes that how different style of white rule shaped
black people in America and Martinique.
v
Post colonialism in the Black skin white Mask.
ü Superiority
and inferiority
ü Race
and states of mind.
ü Psychological
dimension of race.
ü Colour
hegemony over the other.
Thus the reflection of post colonialism
is shown through the above points. The white man portraits as superior class
and have the power of rule over the other country and the society. On the other
sides the Black man or the people always live under the rule of white people.
Even he doesn’t have any power to rule over the other people. Even we can also
prove the post colonialism through these points
ü The
idea of Blackness
ü The
idea of identity
ü Notion
of desire
ü The
idea of Negritude
ü The
idea of darkness
ü O-
Other
ü Black-Mulatto-White.
v
Conclusion.
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 colour black are purely negative, blacks share the
stereotypes as much as whites, so desalination can never mean a simple negation
of what is black.
good work
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