ü Topic:- A Critical Analysis of Black Skin White
Masks by Frantz Fanon
ü Sub:- The Postcolonial Literature
ü Paper:- 11
ü Name: - Vajani Bhumi N.
ü M.A:2 SEM:- 3
ü Roll No:- 04
ü Year: 2013-14
ü Submitted To:-Department
Of English;
· Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji
· Bhavnagar University.
· Dr. Dilip Barad.
ü
v “A Critical Analysis of
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon”
Ø Post-Colonialism, actually
is an academic discipline featuring the methods of intellectual discourse that
analyze, explain and respond to the
cultural legacies of colonialism and of imperialism, to the human consequences
of controlling a country and establishing settlers far the economic
exploitation of the native people and their
land. The post-colonialism questions and reinvents the modes of cultural
perception the way of viewing and of being viewed
Ø As a critical theory, post
– colonialism presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology and the praxis
of neo-colonialism, with examples drawn from the humanities history and
political science, philosophy and Marxist theory, sociology, anthropology, and
human geography, the cinema, religion, and theology; feminism, linguistics’ and
post colonial literature of which the anti- conquest narrative garners presents
the stories of colonial subjugation of the subaltern man and woman
Ø
Salman Rushdie,
Ø
Ngugi wa Thiong,
Ø
Frantz Fanon,
Ø
Toni Morrison,
Ø
Amei Cesire,
Ø
Tagore,
Ø
Edward Said,
Ø
Homi Bhaba,
Ø
Gyatri Spivah Chakraborty
And many more writers exploded the
Post- Colonialism. I am going to discus Frantz Fanon’s work, “The Black Skin White
Masks”
Ø
“O my body makes of me always a man who
questions!”
o The author
of ‘Black Skin White Masks’ is Frantz fanon. He was born on July 20, 1925, at Fort-de-France,
Martinique, France. He died at the age of 36, on 6th December 1961
at Bethesda, Maryland. He was revolutionary, philosopher, psychiatrist and
writer whose writing influenced post colonial studies, Marxism and critical
theory. He was an intellectual fellow political radical, existentialist humanist;
he dealt with social, cultural, political problems. He supported the Algerian
war of independence from France, and was also a member of the Algerian national
liberation front. The life and works of Frantz fanon have inspired
anti-colonial national liberation movements in Palestine, Sir Lanka, and the U.S
.He served in the French army. He studied medicine. He was a psychiatrist.
In France in the year of 1952,
Frantz Omar fanon wrote his first book,’ Black Skin, White Masks.’ The book is
an analysis of the negative psychology-cal impact of colonial subjugation upon
black people. Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral dissertation,
submitted at Lyon. Its title was
Ø
“Essay on the Desalination of the Black”
It was rejected and fanon published
it as a book,
Ø
“Black Skin, White Masks”
Frantz Fanon was influenced by a
variety of thinkers and intellectual traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Lacan,
Negritude and Marxism. He was influenced by Aime Cesaire, a leader of the
negritude movement, was teacher and mentor to fanon on the island of Martinique.
Fanon referred to Cesaire’s writings I his own work. He quoted, for example,
his teacher at length in
Ø
“They lived experience of the Black man
“
a heavily
anthologized essay form Black Skin,
White Masks.
Fanon‘s
works influenced the
Liberation movements
of the Palestinians, the
Tamils, African
Americans and others. His works
Influenced Africans
literature.
“His revolutionary
ambitions’ cut
Short by leukemia in 1961,
psychoanalyst and
Philosopher Frantz Fanon
red by the time of
His death amassed a
body of critical work that
today establishes his
position as a leading theoretician
Of black consciousness and identify, nationalism and
Its failings, colonial rule and the inherently
“ violent” task of decolonization , language as an
Index of power, miscegenation, and the objectification of the
per formative black body. Fanon‘s
Burgeoning popularity and influence and more
recent postcolonial readings
of black liberation and
nationalism perhaps sever as an index of his
centrality to the movement for the Algerian self
determinations in
the 1950 ‘ s that was shaped his
diverse career as a political activist and critic. “
“Black Skin, White Masks “is a
Book about the mindset of psychology of racism.
The book looks at what goes through the minds of
Blacks and the strange impacts that has, especially
on the black people.
1. The Negro and Language ;-
In this chapter the author
Discusses
that if a black person does not learn the white man’s language perfectly, he is
unintelligent
Yet if he does tern it
perfectly, he has
washed
his brain in the world of racial ideology.
2. The
Woman of Color and the White Man ,
The colonized women look
Down
on their own. Race and deep down
Want
to be white. In “The Bluest Eye “of
‘Toni
Morrison ‘we find a black girls desire
Fun
the blue eyes of white men and woman.
3. The
Man of Color and the White Woman ; -
The author in this chapter talks about the
condition of Block men
He
says that these men want to be white too. These are equal to whites.
Gwendolyn
Brooke’s poem “we Real Cool” deals with the same theme.
4. The
So-called Dependency Complex of the colonized peoples:-
Here, the
writer argues against Fanon’s view that people of color have a deep desire for
white rule, that those who appose it to do not have a secure sense of self that
they have a chip on their shoulder.
5. The
fact of Blackness:-
This chapter
deals with the pathetic conditions of blacks. They thought that being always
black is as if they are never fully human. No matter how much education you
have or how well you act.
6. The Negro and Psychopathology:
Why should
people fear black is a question asked here. Part it has to do with white men’s
repressed homosexcouality and their strange hang-ups about black men’s penises
more generally, black men are viewed as
bodies which makes them seem like mindless, violent sexual, animal beings. Add
to that all the bad meanings that the word “black” had even before Europeans
set foot in black Africa
7.
The Negro and Recognition:-
This chapter
deals with how different styles of white rule shaped black people in America
and Martinique.
8. By way of conclusion:
This final
chapter discuses the escaping the prison of one’s past and one’s race.
Ø Fanon’s
titles emptily echo a poetical spirit. His memory has been kept alive in the
activist tradition of race and class A Sivanandan, Edward Said, Stephan Feuchtwang
mentioned him in their works despite fanon’s historic participation in the
Algerian revolution and the influence of his ideas on the race politics of the
1960s and 1970s, Fanon’s work will not be possessed by one political moment, or
movement, nor can it be easily placed in a seamless narrative of liberation
history. Fanon is the purveyor of the transgressive and transitional truth. He
speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical change
from the area of ambivalence between race and sexuality, out of an unresolved
contradiction between culture and class. His voice is most clearly heard in the
subversive turn of a familiar term, in the silence of a sudden rapture-
Ø
“The negro is not:
Any more than the White
Man”. In Fanon’s words, his writing-
Ø
“exposes an utterly naked declivity
where an authentic upheaval can be born”
Fanon’s agonizing self- images performance spell-bound us-----
Ø “I had to meet the white
man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of
color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema….I was
battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency deficiency,
racial defects…I took myself for off from my own presence…what else could it be
for me but an amputation, an excision a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body
with black bleed?”
“Black Skin, White Masks “That it rarely historicizes the colonial
experience. There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a
background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of
the individual or collective psyche. Such a traditional sociological alignment
of self and society or history and psyche is rendered questionable in fanon’s
identification of the colonial subject who is historicized as it comes to be heterogeneously
inscribed in the texts of history literature science, myth, the colonial
subject is ‘always’ over determined from without.”
Fanon radically questions
the formation of both individual and social authority as they come to be
developed in the discourse of social sovereignty.
“Look a
negro…mama, see the negro! I’m frightened…I could no longer laugh, because I
already know there were legends, stories, history and above all
historicity…then arrived at various points, the corporal schema crumbled its
place taken y a racial epidermal schema….it was no longer a question of being
aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person…..i was responsible
for my body, far my race, for my ancestors.”
Turning to the
return of the subject of colonial desire, at the end of Black Shin, White Masks
to way for an escistentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific:
Ø
“Why not the quite simple attempt to
touch to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?.. At the conclusion of
this stud I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness’.”
Such a deep
hunger for humanism, despite fanon’s insight into the dark side of man, must be
an overcompensation for the closed consciousness a ‘dual narcissism ‘for Fanon,
in Black Skin, White Masks, there is the intricate irony of turning the
European existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions to face the negro which
they had never contemplated, to face the reality of fanon himself.
Ø Fanon throughout the book deals with the
inner struggle of black when they were colony ‘the black man and language’
deals with language. Here we saw the ideal of blackness, notion of desire, idea
of identity, what is humanism?, 0-Other, self ego, civil rights, human rights,
self desire, the idea of Negritude, idea of darkness. For him- Black is
attitude, attitude comes from culture.
Ø
The idea of Blackness
Ø
The idea of identity
Ø
Notion of desire
Ø
The idea of Negritude
Ø
The idea of Darkness
Ø
O- Other,
Ø
Hate
# Other
Ø
Self-ego
Ø
Self (play) (desire) ego ideal
Ø
Black-Mulatto-White
There are two such women: the Negros and the mulatto. The first has only
one possibility and one concern: to turn white. The second wants not only to
turn white but also to avoid slipping back. What indeed could be more illogical
then a mulatto woman’s acceptance of a Negro husbands? For the understood once
and for all that it is a question of saving the race.
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 it speak in fake pidgin French-“why
you left big savanna?”
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 for writer they French would
say-“here is a black man who handles the French language unlike any white man today.”
Ø Further fanon talks about three women,
Mayotte, Nini and Dedee. Those entire woman are part white. A blackman proposed
Nini. Police was called because he is black and she is half white he has
offended her “white girl’s” honors. Dedee was proposed by a man with a good
government job. She was eager to enter the white world where Mayotte, the third
woman had an affair with a married white man. She goes to white side of town
with him where the white woman made her feel unworthy of him.
Ø “The man of color and the white woman”
reveals a boy, team venues that grow up in France and desired white woman. As a
civil servant, he just is a bad as the whites.’
Ø “The so-called dependency complex of the
colonized’ brings out the brutality of whites the whites used black natives to enslave
Madagascar. They used Senegalese soldier to strike fear into the earths of
natives. Far this the author writes, “I will force the white man to acknowledge
my humanity. But monsieur Mannoni will tell us you can’t because deep down
inside you there is a dependency complex”
Ø “They lived experience of the black man” The
author’s experience are heart rendering-
ü
“He is seen not as Dr.Fanon but as a
black man who is a doctor”
o “White
people do not see him, they see his body”
o The
author was-
ü
Always seen a negro, never a man”
ü
Fanon felt-
ü
“sin is black as virtue is white”
In India we
had untouchability. There (Africa) they had color problem. Black felt inferior
as did our untouchables. Example ‘Urmila Powar’s book”
The Weave of my Life” deals with such problems.
Ø “Black man
and psychopathology” is related with some wrong beliefs that whit had for
natives”
Ø
“The black man
and Recognition” draws our attention as the author writers- “I am narcissus, and I want to see reflected in the eyes
of the other an image of myself that satisfied me.”
Ø “By way of
conclusion” is the final chapter, Frantz fanon does not want to be a black man,
and he wants to be amen plain and simple. Black and white could not live in
present as they can’t separate themselves from their past, says fanon.
ü
“He writes---
ü
“I will not make myself the man of any
past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and y
future.
§
Let the dead bury the dead:
§
I am my own foundation.”
Fanon says he has only one rights and one duty.
1) The rights to demand human behavior from the
other.
2) The duty to never let his decisions renounces
his freedom.
Black Skin,
White Masks is a unique work of art. It deals with much aspect like a man’s
search of identity race prejudice that prevails all over the world and in our
century too. The whites addressed the third world people as others they wanted
to civilize to others them humiliated others. They treated us as if we were ignorant
ant and animal’s non white means not human but savage-this is what they
believed.
Black always
tried to be white they did not respect their culture but ram madly after white
culture they were made o believe themselves to be inferior to the colonizers.
The colonizers believed to be far.
Ø
Conclusion:-
Frantz work present hybridists, syncretistic, creolizaion, national and
religious peculiarity, abrogation, appropriation, rewriting of history and much
more many Indian novelist work like Tagore’s “Gora” can be compared with this
book as far as social moral and political issues are considered. Own Dalit
literature also can be kept in mind while referring “The Black Skin White Masks.”
