Paper No. - 11 - Critique on Black Skin, White Mask - With the justification of Race

Critique on Black Skin, White Mask -  With the justification of Race

Introduction

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 6^th 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 “Essay on the Desalination of the Black” It was rejected and fanon published it as a book.

Frantz Fanon was influenced by many thinkers and 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 his own work. He quoted, for example, his teacher at length in “They lived experience of the Black man “ a heavily anthologized essay form Black Skin, White Masks.

  

“A Critique on Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon”

As a critical theory, post – colonialism presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology 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

·       Salman Rushdie,

·       Ngugi wa Thiong,

·       Frantz Fanon,

·       Toni Morrison,

·       Amei Cesire,

·       Tagore,

·       Edward Said,

·       Homi Bhaba,

·       Gyatri Chakraborty Spivak

Post-Colonialism, it is an academic branch 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 and many more writers exploded the Post- Colonialism. I am going to discus Frantz Fanon’s work, “The 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.

“Black Skin, White Masks”

Fanon‘s growing 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.

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.

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, but naturally I don’t know that because that is what I am. I am going to use nègre in French because of the ambiguity of its political semantics and because there is no single English  quivalent: 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.

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.

Here, we can intemperate that how this White and Black are portrayed in literature in different ways. Novel ‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens’ In this novel we can find the controversy of Black and White. Here Christianity – Whiteness portrays as goodness, while Jew – Black portrayed as Evil. Here reader can find conflict between Christian v/s Jew. The novel has an idea of Christianity and Jewish. At some extent writer has described Christianity as a superior and dark side of Christianity has been presented. He portrayed Jew in a negative connotation.

Let’s analyze the book of Fanon ‘Black skin, White Mask’ - This book divided in many chapters. Each chapter has its own importance. They deal with the psychological aspect. It includes the condition of Black people and their mentality. It also gives reflection of white people towards black people. Let’s have a brief look on chapters of this book.

 

1.    The Negro and Language ;-

This chapter deals with the language of white people. It shows that language of White people is in power position and Language of Black people has lesser importance. The Language of White people is in centre, and Language of Black people is in periphery. 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 learn it perfectly, he has washed his brain in the world of racial ideology. Thus the language of White people in centre and the Black people don’t learn it they do not get enough values in society of that time. So, Black people have to learn the language of White people.

2.    The Woman of Color and the White Man ,

The effect of white people also touched to the society. Black Woman also wished the White Skin which White woman has. So they wanted to be as white as White woman Here one can find that how desire of “WHITENESS’ is more in the Black woman. Because of that many ‘FAIRNESS CREAM’ and their industries grow faster and faster. As reader can understand that how Whiteness is showed as something goodness and Blackness is showed something like a dark side. Because of getting White Skin the colonized women look down on their own. Race and deep down want to be white.

 Here, an individual can give an example from literary work that how Black women wished to have White Skin of Bluest Eye just like White people have.

“The Bluest Eye” by ‘Toni Morrison’ ‘we find a black girl Pecola Breedlove desires to have the blue eyes of white men and woman.

3.    The Man of Color and the White Woman ; -

In this chapter, writer deals with the mental condition of Black man and their desire to be white. Here we can understand that Why Whiteness is something goodness? Just because White people have rules over Black people and they have shaped that idea that whiteness is symbol of Goodness. The author in this chapter talks about the condition of Black men. He says that these men want to be white too. These are equal to whites. The Black man also wished to get white and fair skin. So Whiteness is spread as a something goodness and they believe that whiteness gives them higher position in Society.

If reader can see in the literature, he can also find an example where Black man wished to have white skin.

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 oppose it to do not have a secure sense of self that they have a chip on their shoulder. From this chapter I came to understand that the stereotypes of Happy Darkies, Uppity Negroes and White Saviors all come from the need of white people to feel that their power in society is good and not racist.

5.    The fact of Blackness (Fanon: The Lived Experience of the Black Man)

This chapter deals with the condition of Black people. Though they are highly educated, spiritual and knowledgeable, but their color of skin giving feeling of embarrassment. Here the sad condition of those people narrated. 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. They felt they are just like isolated creature from the world.

6.    The Negro (The Black Man) and Psychopathology:

Here writer ask question to reader that, Why should people fear black?  Question asked here. Part it has to do with white men’s repressed homosexuality and their strange hang-ups about black men’s penises. More generally, black men are viewed as a body, 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.    Way of conclusion:

            This final chapter discuses the escaping the prison of one’s past and one’s race.

“The negro is not: Any more than the White Man”.  In Fanon’s words, his writing

“Exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”

Fanon’s agonizing self- images performance spell-bound us-----

“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, 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 existentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific:

“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.

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.

§  The idea of Blackness

§  The idea of identity

§  Notion of desire

§  The idea of Negritude

§  The idea of Darkness

§  O- Other,

§  Hate # Other

§  Self-ego

§  Self (play) (desire) ego ideal

§  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.

ü 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.”

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.

·       “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.’

·       “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”

“They lived experience of the black man” The author’s experience are heart rendering

“He is seen not as Dr. Fanon but as a black man who is a doctor”

“White people do not see him, they see his body”

The author was - “Always seen a negro, never a man”

Fanon felt - “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.

“Black man and psychopathology” is related with some wrong beliefs that whit had for natives”

“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.”

“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.

“He writes--- “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.

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.

Conclusion

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!”

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 Mask”.

Here, in Black Skin, White Mask the writer Frantz Fanon highlights his ideas about Justification n of race.