Post- colonialism in the Black skin, white Mask.
Post- colonialism in the Black skin, white Mask.
Name : Maru Riddhi
Roll No : 21
Class ; M.A.Sem.3
Year : 2016-2018
Submitted To :
M.K.Bhavnagar Universuty,
Department of English
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Topic : Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz
Fanon
Introduction by Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon was a Martinique-born Afro-Caribbeanpsychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are
influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.[1] As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with
the psychopathologyof colonization,[2] and the human, social,
and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Early
life
Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is
now a French département.
His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of African slaves and
indentured Indians and worked as a customs agent. His mother, Eléanore
Médélice, was of black Martinician and white Alsatian descent and worked as a
shopkeeper.[10] Fanon was the youngest of four sons in
a family of eight children, two of whom died in childhood. Fanon's family was
socio-economically middle-class. They could afford the fees for the Lycée
Schoelcher, then the most prestigious high school in Martinique, where Fanon
had the writer Aimé Césaire as one of
his teachers.[11] Fanon left Martinique in 1943 when he was 18 years old in
order to join the Free French forces.
What is Post colonialism ?
A study of postcolonial literature must begin with the historical contexts of colonialism, contexts that are constantly and frighteningly shot through violence. The violence of colonialism – cultural, economic, political and military - is so integral to the history of the ‘Third World’ nation that no literature or critical approach has been able to ignore it.
Postcolonial literature seeks to address the ways in which non-European (Asian, African, South American and Settler colonies) literatures and cultures have been marginalized as an effect of colonial rule, and to find if possible, modes of resistance, retrieval, and reversal of their ‘own’ pre-colonial pasts.It is a literature of resistance, anger, protest and hope. It seeks to understand history so as to plan for the future.
Three central features of colonialism:
1. The governance of non-European places by European administrators – through economic, political, and military modes.
2. The study of non-European cultures by European academics, scholars, and scientists( anthropology, literature, ‘area studies’).
3. The slow transformation of native societies (missionary work, European education system, bureaucracy)
Post colonialism in the Black skin white Mask.
The book looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the conditions of white rule and the strange effects that has, especially on black people. His book Black Skin, White Masks explore the effects upon colonialism .
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.
The book is divided in 8 chapters. In these eight chapters, Fanon talks about psychology of white colonizers and black people’s desire to be like white men. He talks about issue of language, marriage between white and black and psychology behind it, white mind set of ruling, black’s inequality and struggle for human existence.
1.The Black Man and the language
2. The woman of colour and the white Man
3.The man of colour and white woman.
4.The so called dependency complex of the colonized people.
5.The Lived experience of Black Man
6. The Black Man and Psychopathology.
7. The Black Man and Recognition.
8. “By way of conclusion
1.The Black Man 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 learn 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.
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.
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” honours. 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 woman colour wants to marry with white people because she believes that
‘Look a Negro!’ ‘Dirty nigger!’
3.The man of colour and white woman.
“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.’
I want to be recognized not
As Black but as a white (Frantz)
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.
Mannoni, a French psychoanalyst, wanted to understand the mind of the native and the white colonial based on his experience and study of Madagascar under French rule in the 1930s and 1940s. Himself a white colonial, he wrote a book about it, “The Psychology of Colonization” (1950). Frantz Fanon, himself a native (not of Madagascar but of Martinique) spends this chapter tearing it to pieces.
French rule of Madagascar was cruel.They used Senegalese soldiers to strike fear into the hearts of natives. In 1947 the French put down an uprising, killing 80,000 natives. As if that were not enough, in the footnotes Fanon tells of the French practice of torture in Madagascar.
Fanon calls the use of black soldiers to force French rule on people of colour “the racial allocation of guilt”. He quotes Francis Jeanson:
"And if, apparently, you manage not to soil your hands, it’s because others are doing the dirty work in your place. You have your henchmen, and all things considered, you are the real guilty party; for without you, without your blind indifference, such men could not undertake acts that condemn you as much as they dishonor them."
So with all that in mind, here is the picture that Mannoni paints:
- Most natives are content to put whites above them and be dependent on them because it fulfils a deep need in their hearts, one that was there long before whites showed up. Mannoni calls this a dependency complex.
- A few natives are unhappy because they suffer from an inferiority complex, which makes them want to be the equal of whites.
- Not all peoples can be colonized: only those who experience the need.
- European civilization and its agents of the highest calibre are not responsible for colonial racism. It comes from lower-level whites who blame their unhappy lives on the natives.
- When black men with guns appear in children’s dreams at night it is not because of the terror of French rule: no, the guns stand for penises.
The only part that Fanon feels Mannoni got at least part right:
- White colonials suffer from a Prospero complex. Just like the Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, they want to lord it over the natives. The colonies draw those whites who cannot accept others as they are, who do not want to have to take other men seriously but instead want to lord it over them.
Fanon:
"I start suffering from not being a white man insofar as the white man discriminates against me; turns me into a colonized subject; … tells me I am a parasite in the world … So I will try quite simply to make myself white; in other words, 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."
5.The Lived experience of Black Man
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.
After that Fanon categorises this chapter …
§ He is seen not as Dr Fanon ,But as a Black Man who is a Doctor.
§ Being Seen as a Negro , never a man .
§ White people do not see him , they see his body .
§
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 Black Man and Psychopathology.
Why white people are so afraid of black men:
- Black men are seen as being way less moral.
- White men fear they will take white women from them.
Take the last one first:
White men think that black men have bigger penises. They think that once a white woman sleeps with a black man she will never want a white man again: if it is not for their size then it is because black men are so much better in bed.
None of this is based on fact. According to science the African penis and the European penis are the same size on average. There is no proof whatsoever that “Once you go black you never come back”. And prostitutes will tell you that black men and white men are pretty much the same in bed.
Fanon finds it a bit odd that any man should be thinking that much about other men’s penises and sex appeal, that they should be saying stuff like black men have an “aura of sensuality”, etc. He says it comes from repressed homosexuality.
But white women too are afraid of black men. Fanon saw it for himself when he fought in Europe in the Second World War: he was in three or four countries and every time white women would shrink back in fear if he asked them for a dance – even though he was hardly in a position to do them harm.
Black men are seen as little better than animals. Therefore they are feared for what their bodies can do, which means they are feared for their penises, which accordingly become large in the white imagination. Thus: “whoever says rape says black man”.
In Europe Jews were feared too but no one feared Jewish rapists. When violence was turned on them no one thought to castrate them. Because they were feared for their minds, not their bodies.
But the sex thing is not all of it. Blacks are also seen as morally dark, as sinful and evil – as if blacks were born with original sin but whites were born pure.
Even in Martinique where Fanon grew up and where nearly everyone was black, his mother would tell him to “stop acting like a nigger” if he did something wrong. And if his conscience was clear he would say he was “white as snow”.
This comes from the colour black being seen as evil, bad, dark and dirty and the colour white as pure, innocent and clean. Whites thought that way long before they ever took blacks as slaves, but it did help to support the idea of black people as morally bad and whites as morally pure.
Whites also use blacks as scapegoats: it is easier for them to imagine blacks as the screwed-up ones instead of facing up to their own morally broken nature.
7. The Black Man and Recognition.
“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.”
In this chapter he writes that how different style of white rule shaped black people in America and Martinique.
Even we can also prove the post colonialism through these points
· The idea of Blackness
· The idea of identity
· Notion of desire
· The idea of Negritude
· The idea of darkness
· O-Other
· Black Mulatto White.
In India we had un touch ability. 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.
8. “By way of conclusion
“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 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 behaviour from the other.
2) The duty to never let his decisions renounces his freedom.
TO wind up
The 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 vision 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.”
Works Cited
Frantz, Fanon. "Black Skin , White Masks." Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press , imprint of Grove/ Atlantic , Inc, 2008. 45.
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