The Nature of Blackness is within the Mind with the reference of Black Skin And White Mask

The Nature of Blackness is within the Mind with the reference of Black Skin And White Mask

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The Nature of Blackness is within the Mind with the reference of Black Skin And White Mask

Name:  Pritiba B. Gohil

Roll No. :  21

Course No. 11: The Postcolonial Literature

Topic : The Nature of Blackness is within the Mind with the reference of Black Skin And White Mask

M.A. English Semester - 3

Batch: 2014 - 2016

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Submitted  to :

Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad,

Head of the Department,

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction :-

                                     This book ‘Black Skin White Masks’ is written by 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 psychological 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.

                  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.

‘I am black: I am in total fusion with the world, sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos-and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or Songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of Sun under the earth.

                                                                     The book is about the mindset or psychology of racism by Frantz fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist and black, post colonialist thinker. The book looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the conditions of white rule and strange effects that has especially on black people.

                                     The book contains eight chapters. All the chapters deal with discrimination. Now, let’s have a very brief note of all the chapters:

1.                Chapter One :-

The Negro and Language

2.                Chapter Two :-

The Woman of Color and the White Man

3.                Chapter Three :-

The Man of Color and the White Woman

4.                Chapter Four :-

The So-Called Dependency Complex of

Colonized Peoples

5.                Chapter Five :-

The Fact of Blackness

6.                Chapter Six :-

The Negro and Psychopathology

7.                Chapter Seven :-

The Negro and Recognition

8.                Chapter Eight :-

By Way of Conclusion

Let’s have a look on each and every chapter one by one.

Ø      Chapter One :- The Negro and Language :-

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” - Black Skin, White Masks

“What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment.”

                          

                            In this chapter, Fanon shares his thoughts on how language choice reveals some of the effects oppression has had on the black psyche. He points out that, for black people, "to speak is to exist absolutely for the other" meaning that the language one chooses to communicate with requires that he or she "assume a culture, support the weight of a civilization" (17). Key to this theory is the notion that, in the oppressed black mind, there is the tendency to equate European culture and whiteness with humanity. Thus, "the Negro will become whiter--become more human--as he masters the white man's language" (18).

Ø      Chapter Two :-  The Woman of Color and the White Man

"Me? a Negress? Can't you see I'm practically white? I despise Negroes. Niggers stink. They're dirty and lazy. Don't ever mention niggers to me"
~Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

                                 And now we move to one of the more exciting chapters in Fanon's book, "The Woman of Color and the White Man". Fanon's analysis, as we have seen, is based primarily on the Martinican relationship to France during his time. As such, he decides to analyze a book written in 1948 by a black woman--Mayotte Capecia--in which she divulges her reasons for being exclusively attracted to white men.

                                For Fanon, the acts of love and admiration are directly tied to who and what we value. He says, "authentic love...entails the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts" (41). In other words, I cannot seek to love unless I have rid myself, in this case, of my inferiority complex. For black people, this becomes a humongous hindrance because, as Fanon believes, the inferiority complex is what the black world view is mainly comprised of.

Ø      Chapter Three :- The Man of Color and the White Woman

                                 Fanon argues that the nature of this relationship is also rooted in the latent desire to become white. On page 63 he writes,

"By loving me [a white woman] proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man."

                                As in the previous chapter, Fanon uses a work of literature to illustrate the psychological character of a black man who finds himself in love with a white woman. In the novel Un homme pareil aux autres (A Man Like Any Other) by René Maran, the protagonist, Jean Veneuse, was born in the Caribbean but has lived in Bordeaux, France since he was a child. Fanon notes, "he is a European. But he is Black; so he is a Negro. There is the conflict. He does not understand his own race, and the whites do not understand him" (64). We also find that because of these circumstances, Veneuse feels lonely and has developed into what many would call an introverted bookworm. While we might be led to think that Veneuse's desire is to prove to his white counterparts that he is their equal, Fanon believes that Veneuse himself is the man that has to be convinced.

Ø      Chapter Four :- The So-Called Dependency Complex of 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.

Ø      Chapter Five :- The Fact of Blackness

                               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.

Ø      Chapter Six :- The Negro 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.

Ø      Chapter Seven :- The Negro and Recognition

                         This chapter deals with how different styles of white rule shaped black people in America and Martinique.

                        The Martinican is not a Neurotic. If we were strict in applying the conclusions of the Adlerian school, we should say that the Negro is seeking to protest against the inferiority that he feels historically. Since in all periods the Negro has been an inferior, he attempts to react with superiority complex.

                        The writer talks about the recognition the Negroes have started getting in later years. He talks about Adlerian - If I were an Adlerian, then , having established the fact that my fr5iend had fulfilled in a dream his wish to become white- that is, to be a man-I would show him that his neurosis, his psychic instability, the rupture of his ego arouse out of this governing fiction, and I would say to him:

“Mannoni has very ably described this phenomenon in the Malagasy. Look here: I think you simply have to resign yourself to remaining in the place that has been assigned to you”.

Ø      Chapter Eight :- By Way of Conclusion

                            According to Fanon, it was not easy for Black to forget their past and to free themselves from their past condition. The relations of Black with white were that of the slaves with their masters. French asked the writer to reply for an article that he wrote as he was a Negro who wanted niggers to live with Pride. The writer criticizes their way of running behind whites and thus doing injustice to their country, their culture, their natives.

Fanon quotes- I was committed to myself and to my neighbor to fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would people on the earth be subjugated. It was not the black world that laid down my course of conduct. My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values. It is a long time since the starry sky that away Kant’s breath revealed the last of its secrets to us. And the moral law is not certain of itself.

Fanon further stresses :-

“There is no white world, there is no white ethnic any more than there is a white intelligence”.

Conclusion :-

                 So, at the end we can say that this Book deals with innumerable example of the Black and white problems, the coloured’s inferiority complex. Their inner feeling is revealed throughout the book. It seems that the coloured people themselves did not want to raise high. They were not ready to think high of themselves instead they ran after mirage which was not possible. Skin can’t be changed but mentality can be changed so we can say- 

“The Nature of Blackness is within the Mind.”    

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