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).

BSWM

My friends and I recently formed a book club (I know...geeky, nerdy, whatever).  We're starting off with Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon.  I expect that this will be both a challenge for me and a joy.  A challenge because even though I am familiar with critical theory, I've had little experience with post-colonialism and psychoanalysis.  If approach well, I expect that this will be a growing experience.  A joy because I hope that this highly praised and important work will provide me more tools for thinking through current realities of racism and of contemporary forms of colonization.  Additionally, even as I read through the first chapter, I could identify some of his analyses in my own life, in my family, and in my work with the low income, black communities here in Washington, D.C.  I'll end this post with a terrific excerpt from his first chapter:

"All colonized people--in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave--position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture.  The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will escape the bush.  The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become.  In the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of Senegalese soldiers, the 'native' officers are mainly interpreters.  They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master's orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status."

-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2-3.