Teddy Larkin Philosophy 100 Osman Nemli 12/14/12 The Colonizer and the Colonized According to Frantz Fanon Frantz Fanon described the colonialist system as a Manichean world built by the colonist, where all that is white is good and all that is black is bad, and the colonized is helpless to battle this lack of reason with a reason ed argument in return. Fanon‟s ideas can be categorized into three main areas: the mind of the colonizer, the condition of the colonized and the discourse on violence. For Fanon, there is the complex irony of turning the European existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions to face the history of the black man that they had never contemplated. It examines how colonialism is internalized the colonized, how an inferiority complex is inculcated, how, through the mechanism of racism, black people emulate their colonizers and ultimately lash out at these oppressors. Instead, to throw off the shackles of colonialism, Fanon argued that colonized peoples have no other choice but to meet colonists‟ physical and emotional acts of violence with a violence of the same magnitude. Fanon outlined the cure to colonialism, which he believed induced mental illness in the colonized and colonizers alike and that cure was “pure violence.” Fanon violence.” Fanon further believed that this violent rebellion had the capacity to cure the ailments of the colonized while unifying a people as a basis for a new nation. Psychiatrist Fanon studied the neuroses colonialism induces in colonized peoples in his first significant publication, Black publication, Black Skin, White Masks. Masks. Colonialism, he contends, can produce all manner of o f problems: including an inferiority complex that can lead to a
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desire to be white, a desire to marry a white person, passivity in the face of whites, extreme self-hatred, and a host of other debilitating mental states. The black man is in fact “phobogenic”, inheriting phobias from generation to generation (154). Fanon recalls how he dealt with one black patient who was suffering from an inferiority complex. Ultimately, he concludes, the source of the illness was exterior to the man, and so to reassure the patient, to encourage him to be content with his life as it was, would be equivalent to the colonizer‟s message of “keep your place.” Fanon writes, “If he is overwhelmed to such a degree b y the wish to be white, it is because he lives in a society that makes his inferiority complex possible, in a society that de rives its stability from the perpetuation of this complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race”. Because “that society creates difficulties for him,” the patient, if he wants t o be cur ed, must stand up in opposition to it (100). Fanon‟s approach in “Black Skin White Mask ” focuses on the problems of identity created for the colonial subject by colonial racism. In the introduction to this extremely popular criticism and analysis of black ps ychology Fanon maps out the layers to his examination of black inferiority in relation to white colonialism. The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience. At the very outset of the book, he highlights some aspects regarding the mindset or psycholog y of racism. Such as: “What does man want? What does a black man want? The black man wants to be white. There is but one destiny for the black man, and it is white…” and “I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.”
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To commence with the very title of the book „Black Skin White Mask‟ it indicates the idea that Fanon strives to apply in the book. He employs in the title the two certainly very contradictory words, “Black ” and “White”. At the same time the two other words that are conjoined with both of them simultaneously are “Skin” and “Mask ”. Fanon, in writing about these two ideas of the natural and artificial, attempts to reveal the true identity of the black man and his psychology, which is covered with the mask of whiteness. He also desires to bring humanism into practice, completel y removing the idea of blackness and whiteness. As he says: “Toward a new humanism… Understanding among men… Our colored brothers… Mankind, I believe in you… To understand and to love…” (). In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon attempts to describe, as vividl y as possible, the lived experience of the black subject. In attempting to achieve this, Fanon draws on a rich tapestry of different sources, including psychoanalysis, literary texts, medical terminology, existential philosophy and Négritude. Importantly, in attempting to describe lived experience, Fanon is not looking at experience in the banal sense of the term. He is considering a domain of experience that is deeply enmeshed in the world of which it is part, a profound sense of living through the social conditions, which define a particular time and place. One way of understanding how Fanon means „lived experience‟ here is through the idea of a political consciousness, that is, an acute awareness both o f how one is crucially a part of the world and its conditions and of how one can and should attempt to change that world on the basis of a carefully considered political project. Put differently, one might understand a political consciousness as an awareness of the powerrelations underscoring virtually all facets of day-to-day life. The term political
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consciousness helps us to understand the field of p sychological phenomena always deserves a political level of analysis for Fanon b ecause all aspects of day-to-day life are conditioned, by power-relationships such as that of racism.
Fanon argues that the prevailing colonial culture identifies the black skin with inferiority and impurity. His anger is directed not towards the “black man” but the proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must be black in relation to the white man. Fanon writes: To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidginnigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry. It is the internalization, or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this inferiority that concerns him. When the black man comes into contact with the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego subsides. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his behavior is to emulate the white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a man. Black children raised in this system can be captured between the conflict of contempt of their blackness and to think of themselves, in some sense, as white. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon; and which ultimately he wishes to eliminate. This is the declared intention of his study: to enable the man of color to understand the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro.
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While Fanon‟s ideas can be applied outside the context that incubated them, at least one scholar has warned that “when speaking of violence, Fanon was very context specific” (129) Therefore it is necessary to closely examine Fanon‟s use of language to accurately understand his revolutionary message. Frantz understood the importance of language in attempting to get his point across, he wrote: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture”, that “Mastery of language affords remarkable power ”, and that “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.” Frantz‟s message had such a large wake because of his deep knowledge and skillful writing ability. Frantz again reflects on the power of language when he writes, “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards”. In order for his message to reach the ears of many, Fanon ironically took on the French establishment using a French education and the French language. One of the factors leading to violence was the fact that the native despaired of the colonialist‟s “values,” especially because of the inconsistency between the values claimed by the colonizer and the reality of his oppressive tactics. Aside from simply elucidating the reasons behind the violent path that the native chooses to pursue against the colonizer, Fanon posits a more radical proposition, “When we revolt it‟s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe” (). He suggests that violence is not only justified, but is in fact vital. One of Fanon‟s most well-known quotes explains that: Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social
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truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there‟s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of the trumpets. In essence, the very process of decolonization necessitates violence in order to actually be successful. In the first instance, since colonialism is “violence in its natural state” it is not going to yield until it is “confronted with greater violence.” Essentially violence is necessary because militarily there is no victory over colonialism unless significant force is used to counter force. The argument remains that there are nonviolent methods of opposition: political action or peaceful opposition in the realm of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Fanon argues, even before his final call to violent rebellion, that these approaches do not work within the French colonialist structure, nor do they add ress the needs specific to African colonies. French colonial society is at its core Manich ean, characterizing all that is white and European as good and all that is black, non-Christian, or African as evil, conflicted, and an unintelligent system of thought that shuts down every attempt at reason from the very beginning. Fanon describes his own struggle with this Manichean outlook at length in the chapter “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks. His attempts to argue against racism were futile because racism as an institution or a mode of thought had no basis in reason: “I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason” (123). Poets of the Negritude movement such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire urged the black, colonized person to overcome his inferiority complex and assert
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his place in the world of men. Black Skin, White Masks consolidated the words of these revolutionaries into a single manifesto, and left it to the revolutionaries of 1952 to decide how they might attain their goal: “I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices” (229). The “them or us” mentality is already at play: even choosing not to act is an act of siding against not only one‟s own freedom, but the freedom of one‟s entire nation. Fanon writes nine years later in The Wretched of the Earth: the stage is set for rebellion: the oppressed long ago ceased being ignorant of their own oppression, and now they have become the masters of their own dialectic. They know who o ppresses them, they know the means by which they are oppressed, and they know why. “For once the colonized are in tune with their time”. Once they are fully acquainted with their situation, independence seems the only option, and violence, Fanon believes, is the only viable means to attain it.
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Wretched of the Earth Black Skin, White Masks
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