BSWM II

Having just completed chapter 3, I find that each chapter is richer than the preceding one.  So far, Fanon has drawn from the fictional work of popular Martinique authors to illustrate and analyze the relationships between colonized Martinicans and colonizing French people.  He speaks about the woman of color and the white man in chapter 2, who longs to enter the white world (thereby escaping her own race) through romance and marriage to a white man.  The black woman ("Mayotte Capecia") not only wants to save herself, but to save her race by whitening her race.  With this being the goal, Fanon writes that "we know a lot of girls from Martinique, students in France, who confess in lily-white innocence that they would never marry a black man," (30).  I was surprised to find that in this chapter a substantial portion addressed the negative effects that this woman-of-color/white-man dynamic had upon the black man (the appropriate correlate cannot be found in chapter 3--possibly a sign of the book's male-centered bias.)  In chapter 3, a similar behavior is found by the black man ("Jean Veneuse") who encounters a white woman.  Fanon describes Veneuse as introverted, anxious, and lacking self-esteem.  As a student in France, he struggles to believe that he is equal to his white peers or worthy of the love of a white woman.  And his peers, trying to guarantee him of his acceptance, happily proclaim that Veneuse is not a real Negro.  "[In France] there is a general refusal to consider [students of color] as authentic 'Negroes.' The 'Negro' is the savage, whereas the student is civilized," (50-1).  In both cases, the black and colonized Martinican desire white skin, society, and acceptance.  Blackness and Martinican culture are chains from which to seek deliverance and stains from which to be washed clean.  In positioning themselves in relation to the civilizing culture (see my previous post), Fanon is presenting blackness, in the colonized mind, as the repulsive deprivation of whiteness--lacking in beauty and civility.  Blackness is a region of non-being.  "It is commonplace in Martique to dream of whitening oneself magically as a way of salvation," (27).  However, these dreams bear devastating results since both black and white are trapped in their own particularity and hopelessly fighting to escape (the black man to whiteness and the white man to universal manhood).