Fan

Chapter Five

THE LIVED EXPERIENCE

OF THE BLACK MAN

"Dirty nigger!" or simply "Look! A Negro!" I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning

of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body

· suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye. I lose my temper, demand an explanation . . . . Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me.

As long as the black man remains on his home territory, except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to ex­ perience his being for others . There is in fact a "being for other," as described by Hegel, but any ontology is made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society. Appar­ ently, those who have written on the subject have not taken this sufficiently into consideration. In the weltanschauung of a colonized people, there is an impurity or a flaw that

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prohibits any ontological explanation. Perhaps it could be argued that this is true for any individual, but such an ar­ gument would be concealing the basic problem. Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some people will argue that the situation has a double meaning. Not at all. The black man has no onto­ logical resistance in the eyes of the white man. From one day to the next, the Blacks have had to deal with two sys­ tems of reference. Their metaphysics, or less pretentiously their customs and the agencies to which they refer, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a new civilization that imposed its own.

In the twentieth century the black man on his home territory is oblivious of the moment when his inferiority is determined by the Other. Naturally, we have had the op­ portunity to discuss the black problem with friends and, less often, with African-Americans. Together we pro­ claimed loud and clear the equality of man in the world. In the Antilles there is also that minor tension between the cliques of white Creoles, Mulattoes, and Blacks. But we were content to intellectualize these differences. In fact, there was nothing dramatic about them. And then . . .

And then we were given the occasion to confront the white gaze. An unusual weight descended on us. The real world robbed us of our share. In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one's body is solely negating. It's an image in the third person. All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to stretch out my right arm and grab the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. As for the matches, they are in the left drawer, and I shal1

Frantz F anon I 91

have to move back a little. And I make all these moves, not out of habit, but by implicit knowledge. A slow con­ struction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema. It is not imposed on me; it is rather a definitive structuring of my self and the world-definitive because it creates a genuine dialec­ tic between my body and the world.

For some years now, certain laboratories have been re­ searching for a "denegrification" serum. In all seriousness they have been rinsing out their test tubes and adjusting their scales and have begun research on how the wretched black man could whiten himself and thus rid himself of the burden of this bodily curse. Beneath the body schema I had created a historical-racial schema. The data I used were provided not by "remnants of feelings and notions of the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature"1 but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details , anecdotes, and stories. I thought I was being asked to construct a physiological self, to balance space and localize sensations, when all the time they were clamoring for more.

"Look! A Negro!" It was a passing sting. I attempted a smile.

"Look! A Negro!" Absolutely. I was beginning to enjoy myself.

"Look! A Negro!" The circle was gradually getting smaller. I was really enjoying myself.

"Maman, look, a Negro; I'm scared!" Scared! Scared! Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question.

l. Jean Lhermitte, L'irnage de notre corps, Editions de la Nouvel1e Revue Critique, p. 17.

92 I Black Skin, White Masks

I couldn't take it any longer, for I already knew there were legends, stories, history, and especially the historic­ ity that Jaspers had taught me. As a result, the body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema. In the train, it was a ques­ tion of being aware of my body, no longer in the third person but in triple. In the train, instead of one seat, they left me two or three. I was no longer enjoying myself. I was unable to discover the feverish coordinates of the world. I existed in triple: I was taking up room. I ap­ proached the Other . . . and the Other, evasive , hostile, but not opaque, transparent and absent, vanished. Nausea.

I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors . I cast an objective gaze over my­ self, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deaf­ ened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.

Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from my self, and gave myself up as an object. What did this mean to me? Peeling, stripping my skin, causing a hemor­ rhage that left congealed black blood all over my body. Yet this reconsideration of myself, this thematization, was not my idea. I wanted quite simply to be a man among men. I would have liked to enter our world young and sleek, a world we could build together.

I refused, however, any affective tetanization. I wanted to be a man, and nothing but a man. There were some who wanted to equate me with my ancestors, enslaved and lynched: I decided that I would accept this. I considered this internal kinship from the universal level of the intel­ lect-I was the grandson of slaves the same way President

Frantz Fanon I 93

Lebrun was the grandson of peasants who had been ex­ ploited and worked to the bone.

The alert was soon over, in fact. In the United States, Blacks are segregated. In South

America, they are whipped in the streets and black strik­ ers are gunned down. In West Africa, the black man is a beast of burden. And just beside me there is this student colleague of mine from Algeria who tells me, "As long as the Arab is treated like a man, like one of us, there will be no viable answer."

"You see, my dear fellow, color prejudice is totally for­ eign to me." "But do come in, old chap, you won't find any color prejudice here." "Quite so, the Black is just as much a man as we are." "Ifs not because he's black that he's less intelligent than we are." "I had a Senegalese colleague in the regiment, very smart guy."

Where do I fit in? Or, if you like, where should I stick myself?

<<Martinican, a native from one of our <old' colonies." Where should I hide? <<Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!" "Ssh! You'll make him angry. Don't pay attention to him,

monsieur, he doesn't realize you're just as civilized as we are."

My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro; the Negro is trembling, the Negro is trembling because he's cold, the small boy is trembling because he's afraid of the Negro, the Negro is trembling with cold, the cold that chills the bones, the lovely little boy is trembling because he thinks the Negro is trembling with rage, the little white boy runs to his mother's arms: '<Maman, the Negro's going to eat me."

94 I Black Skin, White Masks

The white man is all around me; up above the sky is tear­ ing at its navel; the earth crunches under my feet and sings white, white. All this whiteness bums me to a cinder.

I sit down next to the fire and discover my livery for the first time. It is in fact ugly. I won't go on because who can tell me what beauty is?

Where should I put myself from now on? I can feel that familiar rush of blood surge up from the numerous dis­ persions of my being. I am about to lose my temper. The fire had died a long time ago, and once again the Negro is trembling.

"Look how handsome that Negro is." "The handsome Negro says, 'Fuck you,' madame." Her face colored with shame. At last I was freed from

my rumination. I realized two things at once: I had iden­ tified the enemy and created a scandal. Overjoyed. We could now have some fun.

The battlefield had been drawn up; I could enter the lists. I don't believe it! Whereas I was prepared to forget, to

forgive, and to love, my message was flung back at me like a slap in the face. The white world, the only decent one, was preventing me from participating. It demanded that a man behave like a man. It demanded of me that I be­ have. like a black man-or at least like a Negro. I hailed the world, and the world amputated my enthusiasm. I was expected to stay in line and make myself scarce.

I'll show them! They can't say I didn't warn them. Slav­ ery? No longer a subject of discussion, just a bad memory. My so-called inferiority? A hoax that it would be better to laugh about. I was prepared to forget everything, provided the world integrated me. My incisors were ready to go into action. I could feel them, sharp. And then . . .

I don't believe it! VVhereas I had every reason to vent my hatred and loathing, they were rejecting me? Whereas

Frantz F anon I 95

I was the one they should have begged and implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I made up my mind, since it was impossible to rid myself of an innate complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.

In Anti-Semite and Jew Sartre writes: 'They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype . . . . \Ve may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the in­ side" (p. 95) .

The J ewishness of the Jew, however, can go unnoticed. He is not integrally what he is . We can but hope and wait. His acts and behavior are the determining factor. He is a white man, and apart from some debatable features, he can pass undetected. He belongs to the race that has never practiced cannibalism. What a strange idea, to eat one's father! Serves them right; they shouldn't be black Of course the Jews have been tormented-what am I saying? They have been hunted, exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history. The Jew is not liked as soon as he has been detected. But with me things take on a new face. I'm not given a second chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I am a slave not to the ''idea" others have of me, but to my appearance.

I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that it's the arrival not of a new man, but of a new type of man, a new species . A Negro, in fact!

96 I Black Skin, White Masks

I slip into corners, my long antenna encountering the various axioms on the smface of things: the N egro's clothes smell of Negro; the Negro has white teeth; the Negro has big feet; the Negro has a broad chest. I slip into comers ; I keep silent; all I want is to be anonymous, to be forgotten. Look, I'II agree to everything, on condition I go unnoticed!

"Hey, I'd like you to meet my black friend . . . Aime Cesaire, a black agrege from the Sorbonne . . . Marian Anderson, the greatest black singer . . . Dr. Cobb, who discovered white blood cells, is black . . . Hey, say hello to my friend from Martinique (be careful, he's very touchy) ."

Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When they like me, they tell me my color has nothing to do with it. When they hate me, they add that it's not because of my color. Either way, I am a prisoner of the vicious circle.

I turn away from these prophets of doom and cling to my brothers, Negroes like myself. To my horror, they re­ ject me. They are almost white. And then they'll probably marry a white woman and have slightly brown children. Who knows, gradually, perhaps . . .

I was dreaming. "You must understand that I am one of Lyon's biggest

fans of black people." The proof was there, implacable . My blackness was

there, dense and undeniable. And it tormented me, pur­ sued me, made me uneasy, and exasperated me.

Negroes are savages, morons, and illiterates . But I knew personally that in my case these assertions were wrong. There was this myth of the Negro that had to be destroyed at all costs. We were no longer Jiving in an age when people marveled at a black priest. We had doctors , teachers, and statesmen. OK, but there was always something unusual about them. "We have a Senegalese history teacher. He's very intelligent. . . . Our physician's black He's very gentle."

Frantz Fanon I 97

Here was the Negro teacher, the Negro physician; as for me, I was becoming a neiVous wreck, shaking at the slightest alert. I knew for instance that if the physician made one false move , it was over for him and for all those who came after him. What, in fact, could one ex­ pect from a Negro physician? As long as everything was going smoothly, he was praised to the heavens; but watch out-there was no room whatsoever for any mistake. The black physician will never know how close he is to being discredited. I repeat, I was walled in: neither my refined manners nor my literary knowledge nor my understand­ ing of the quantum theory could find favor.

I insisted on, I demanded an explanation. Speaking softly, as if addressing a child, they explained to me that some people have adopted a certain opinion , but, they added, "We can only hope it will soon disappear." And what was that? Color prejudice.

It [color prejudice] is nothing more than the unreasoning hatred of one race for another, the contempt of the stronger and richer peoples for those whom they consider inferior to themselves and the bitter resentment of those who are kept in subjection and are so frequently insulted. As colour is the most obvious outward manifestation of race it has been made the criterion by which men are judged, irrespective of their social or educational attainments. The light-skinned races have come to despise all those of a darker colour, and the dark-skinned peoples will no longer accept without protest the inferior position to which they have been relegated.2

I was not mistaken. It was hatred; I was hated, detested, and despised, not by my next-door neighbor or a close

2. Sir Alan Burns, Colour Prejudice, Allen and Unwin, London, 1948, p. 16.

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cousin, but by an entire race. I was up against something irrational. The psychoanalysts say that there is nothing more traumatizing for a young child than contact with the rationaL I personally would say that for a man armed solely with reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with the irrational.

I felt the knife blades sharpening within me. I made up my mind to defend myself. Like all good tacticians I wanted to rationalize the world and show the white man he was mistaken.

In the Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre says, there is

a sort of impassioned imperialism of reason: for he wishes not only to convince others that he is right; his goal is to persuade them that there is an absolute and unconditioned value to rationalism. He feels himself to be a missionary of the universal; against the universality of the Catholic religion, from which he is excluded, he asserts the "catholicity" of the rational, an instrument by which to attain to the truth and establish a spiritual bond among men. 3

And, the author adds, though there may be Jews who have made intuition the basic category of their philosophy, their intuition

has no resemblance to the Pascalian subtlety of spirit, and it is this latter-based on a thousand imperceptible perceptions-which to the Jew seems his worst enemy. As for Bergson, his philosophy offers the curious appearance of an anti-intellectualist doctrine constructed entirely by the most rational and most critical of intelligences. It is through argument that he establishes the existence of pure duration, of philosophic intuition; and that very intuition which dis­ covers duration or life, is itself universal, since anyone may

3. Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 1 12-113.

Frantz F anon I 99

practice it, and it leads toward the universal, since its objects can be named and conceived. 4

I set about enthusiastically making a checlclist and re­ searching my surroundings. As times changed, we have seen how the Catholic religion justified, then condemned slavery and discrimination. But by reducing everything to the notion ofhuman dignity, it had gutted prejudice. Sci­ entists reluctantly admitted that the Negro was a human being; in vivo and in vitro the Negro was identical to the white man: same morphology, same histology. Reason was assured of victory on every level. I reintegrated the broth­ erhood of man. But I was soon disillusioned.

Victory was playing cat and mouse; it was thumbing its nose at me. As the saying goes: now you see me, now you don't. Everyone was in agreement with the notion: the Negro is a human being-i.e. , his heart's on his left side, added those who were not too convinced. But on certain questions the white man remained uncompromising. Under no condition did he want any intimacy between the races, for we know "crossings between widely differ­ ent races can lower the physical and mental level. . . . Until we have a more definite knowledge of the effect of race-crossings we shall certainly do best to avoid crossings between widely different races.".5 .

As for me, I would know full well how to react. And in one sense, if I had to define myself I would say I am in expectation; I am investigating my surroundings; I am in­ terpreting everything on the basis of my findings. I have become a sensor.

4. Ibid., p. 115. 5. Jon Alfred Mjoen, "Harmonic and Disharmonic Race-Crossings,"

Second International Congress of Eugenics (1921), Eugenics in Race and State, vol. 2, p . 60, quoted in Burns, op. cit., p. 120.

100 I Black Skin, White Masks

At the start of my history that others have fabricated for me, the pedestal of cannibalism was given pride of place so that I wouldn't forget. They inscribed on my chromo­ somes certain genes of various thickness representing can­ nibalism. Next to the sex linked, they discovered the racial linked. 6 Science should be ashamed of itselfl

But I can understand this "psychological mechanism," for everyone knows that it is not just psychological. Two centuries ago, I was lost to humanity; I was a slave forever. And then along carne a group of men and declared that enough was enough. My tenacity did the rest; I was res­ cued from the civilizing deluge. I moved forward.

Too late. Everything had been predicted, discovered, proved, and exploited. My shaky hands grasped at noth­ ing; the resources had been exhausted. Too late! But there again I want to know why.

Ever since someone complained that he had arrived too late and everything had already been said, there seems to be nostalgia for the past. Could it be that para­ dise lost described by Otto Rank? How many of those, apparently focused on the worn b of the world, have de­ voted their lives to the intellection of the Delphic oracle or have endeavored to rediscover the voyages of Ulysses! The pan-spiritualists, seeking to prove the existence of a soul in animals, argue as follows: a dog lies down on its master's grave and starves to death. It was left to Janet to demonstrate that said dog, unlike man, was quite simply incapable of eliminating the past. We speak of the glory that was Greece, says Artaud; but, he adds, if people to­ day can no longer understand the Choephoroi by Aeschylus, it's Aeschylus who is at fault. It's in the name of

6. Translator's note: In English in the original.

Frantz .Fanon I 101

tradition that the anti-Semites base their "point of view." Ifs in the name of tradition, the long, historical past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told: you will never belong here. Recently, one of these good French folks declared on a train where I was sitting: "May the truly French values live on and the race will be safeguarded! At the present time we need a national union. No more internal strife ! A united front against the foreign­ ers [and turning to me] whoever they may be."

It should be said in his defense that he stank of cheap red wine. If he could, he would have told me that as a freed slave my blood was incapable of being inflamed by the names of Villon or Taine.

Disgraceful! The Jew and I: not satisfied with racializing myself, by

a happy stroke of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing closer to the Jew, my brother in misfortune.

Disgraceful! At first glance it might seem strange that the attitude of

the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who re­ minded me one day: "When you hear someone insulting the Jews , pay attention; he is talking about you." And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevita­ bly a negrophobe.

"You have come too late, much too late . There will al­ ways be a world-a white world-between you and us: that impossibility on either side to obliterate the past once and for all ." Understandably, confronted with this affective ankylosis of the white man, I finally made up my mind to shout my blackness. Gradually, putting out pseudopodia

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in all directions, I secreted a race. And this race staggered under the weight of one basic element. Rhythm! Listen to Senghor, our bard:

It is the most sensory and least material of things . It is the vital element par excellence. It is the essential condition and the hallmark of Art, as breathing is to life; breathing that accelerates or slows, becomes regular or spasmodic ac­ cording to the tension of the individual and the degree and nature of his emotion. Such is rhythm pri mordial in its purity; such it is in the masterpieces of Negro art, especially sculpture. The composition of a theme of sculptural form in opposition to a sister theme, like breathing in to breath­ ing out, is repeated over and over again . Hhythm is not symmetry that produces monotony but is alive and free . . . . That is how the tyranny of rhythm affects what is least in­ tellectual in us , allowing us to penetrate the spirituality of the object; and that lack of constraint which is ours is itself rhythmic.7

Have I read it correctly? I give it an even closer read­ ing. On the other side of the white world there lies a magi­ cal black culture. Negro sculpture! I began to blush with pride. Was this our salvation?

I had rationalized the world, and the world had rejected me in the name of color prejudice. Since there was no way we could agree on the basis of reason, I resorted to irra­ tionality. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I . For the sake of the cause, I had adopted the pro­ cess of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Irrational up to my neck. And now let my voice ring out:

7. Senghor, "Ce que l'homme noir apporte," L'Homme de couleur, pp. 309-310.

Frantz Fanon I 103

Those who have invented neither gunpowder nor compass Those who have never known how to subdue either steam

or electricity Those who have explored neither the seas nor the sky But those who know all the nooks and crannies of the coun-

try of suffering Those whose voyages have been uprootings Those who have become flexible to kneeling Those who were domesticated and christianized Those who were inoculated with bastardization . . .

Yes, all those are my brothers-a "bitter brotherhood" grabs us alike. After having stated the minor premise, I hail something else overboard:

But those without whom the earth would not be the earth Gibbosity all the more beneficial as the earth more and

more Abandons the earth Silo where is stored and ripens what is earthiest about the

earth My negritude .i s not a stone, its deafness hurled against

the clamor of day My negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water over

the dead of the earth My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral It reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil It reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky It pierces opaque prostration with its straight patience.8

Eia! The drums jabber out the cosmic message. Only the black man is capable of conveying it, of deciphering its meaning and impact. Astride the world, my heels dig­ ging into its flanks, I rub the neck of the world like the

8. Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Rosello and Pritchard, pp. 1 10--114.

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high priest rubbing between the eyes of his sacrificial victim .

Those who open themselves up, enraptured, to the essence of all things

Ignorant of surfaces but enraptured by the movement of all things

Indifferent to subduing but playing the game of the world Truly the eldest sons of the world Porous to all the breaths of the world Brotherly zone of all the breaths of the world Undrained bed of all the waters of the world Spark of the sacred fire of the world Flesh of the flesh of the world palpitating with the

movement of the worldl9

Blood! Blood! . . . Birth! Vertigo of tomorrow! Three­ quarters foundering in the stupefaction of daylight, I feel myself flushed with blood. The arteries of the world, shaken, pulled up and uprooted, have turned toward me and enriched me. "Blood! Blood! All our blood moved by the male heart of the sun. ''lO

Sacrifice s erved as an intermediary between creation and me-it wasn't the origins I rediscovered, but the Ori­ gin. Nevertheless, beware of rhythm, the Mother E arth bond, and that mystic, carnal marriage between man and the cosmos .

In La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire, a book with a wealth of observations, De Pedrals implies that in Africa, what­ ever the field, there is always a certain magical social struc­ ture. And, he adds, "all these elements can be found on a greater scale in secret societies. Insofar as the circumcised

9. Ibid., p. 115. 10. Ibid.

Frantz Fanon I 105

adolescents of either sex are bound under pain of death not to divulge to the uninitiated what they have undergone, and insofar as the initiation into a secret society always calls for acts of sacred love, there are grounds for considering circumcision and excision and their rites as constituting minor secret societies."11

I am walking on hot coals. Sheets of water threaten my soul on fire. These make me think twice. Black magicl Orgies , Sabbaths, pagan ceremonies, gris-gris. Coitus is an occasion to invoke the family gods . It is a sacred act, pure and absolute, bringing invisible forces into action. What is one to think of all these manifestations, of all these ini­ tiations, and of all these workings? From every direction I am assaulted by the obscenity of the dances and proposi­ tions . Close by, a song rings out:

Our hearts once burned hot Now they are cold All we think of is Love On our return to the village When we meet a huge phallus Oh! Then we shall make love For our sex will be dry and clean.l2

The ground, up till now a bridled steed, begins to rock with laughter. Are these nymphomaniacs virgins? Black magic, primitive mentality, animism and animal eroticism-all this surges toward me. All this typifies people who have not kept pace with the evolution of humanity. Or, if you prefer, they constitute third-rate humanity. Having reached this point, I was long reluctant

1 1 . De Pedrals, La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire, Payot, p. 83. 12. A. M. Vergiat, Les rites secrets des primitift de l'Oubangui, Payot,

Paris, 1951, p. 113.

106 I Black Skin, White Masks

to commit myself. Then even the stars became aggressive. I had to choose. What am I saying? I had no choice.

Yes, we niggers are backward, naive, and free. For us the body is not in opposition to what you call the soul. We are in the world. And long live the bond between Man and the Earth! Moreover, our writers have helped me to con­ vince you that your white civilization lacks a wealth of subtleness and sensitivity. Listen:

Emotive sensitivity. Emotion is Negro as reason is Greek. 13 Water wrinkled by every breeze? Soul exposed beaten by the winds whose fruit often drops before maturity? Yes, in one sense, the black man today is richer in gifts than in works. 14 But the tree thrusts its roots into the earth. The river runs deep, churning precious specks of gold. And the African­ American poet, Langston Hughes, sings:

I have known rivers Ancient dark rivers My soul has grown deep Like the deep rivers .

The very nature of the black man's emotion and sensitiv­ ity, moreover, explains his attitude confronted with objects perceived with such an essential violence . It's a need for uninhibitedness, an active attitude of communion, indeed identification, provided the action, I was about to say the personality of the object, is powerful. Rhythmic attitude: remember the word. 15

So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, "standing at the helm," governing the world with his intuition, redis­ covered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and it's not

13. My italics. 14. My italics. 15. Senghor, op. cit . , p. 205.

Frantz Fanon I 107

a Negro, oh, no, but the Negro, alerting the prolific an­ tennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power, "porous to every breath in the world." I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical �ubstitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a "certain world," lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identifY, being unused to such reactions . The reason was that above the objective world of planta­ tions and banana and rubber trees, I had subtly established the real world. The essence of the world was my property. Between the world and me there was a relation of coexis­ tence. I had rediscovered the primordial One. My "speak­ ing hands" tore at the hysterical throat of the world. The white man had the uncomfortable feeling that I was slip­ ping away and taking something with me. He searched my pockets, probed the least delineated of my convolutions . There was nothing new. Obviously I must have a secret. They interrogated me; turning away with an air of mys­ tery, I murmured:

Tokowaly, uncle, do you remember the nights gone by When my head weighed heavy on the back of your pa­

tience or Holding my hand your hand led me by shadows and signs The fields are flowers of glowworms, stars hang on the

grass and the trees Silence is everywhere Only the scents of the bush hum, swarms of reddish bees

that drown the crickets' shrill sounds,

108 I Black Skin, White Masks

And muffled drums, the distant breathing of the night, You Tokowaly, you listen to what cannot be heard, and

you explain to me what the ancestors are saying in the sea-like serenity of the constellations,

The familiar bull, the scorpion, the leopard, the elephant and the fish,

And the milky brilliance of the Spirits in the shell of ce­ lestial infinity,

But here comes the complicity of the goddess Moon and dte veils of the shadows fall,

Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and shining.16

So here I was poet of the world. The white man had discovered poetry that had nothing poetic about it. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and as a friend who taught in the United States told me: "The Blacks repre­ sent a kind of insurance for humanity in the eyes of the Whites. When the Whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the Coloreds and request a little human sustenance ." At last I had been recognized; I was no longer a nonentity.

I was soon to become disillusioned. Momentarily taken aback, the white man explained to me that genetically I represented a phase. 'Your distinctive qualities have been exhausted by us. We have had our back-to-nature mystics such as you will never have. Take a closer look at our his­ tory and you'll understand how far this fusion has gone." I then had the feeling things were repeating themselves. My originality had been snatched from me. I wept for a long time, and then I began to live again. But I was haunted by a series of corrosive stereotypes: the Negro's sui generis

16. Senghor, Chants d'ombre, Editions du Seuil, 1945.

Frantz Fanon I 109

smell . . . the Negro's sui generis good nature . . . the Negro's sui generis naivete.

I tried to escape without being seen, but the Whites fell on me and hamstrung me on the left leg. I gauged the lim­ its of my essence; as you can guess, it was fairly meager. It was here I made my most remarkable discovery, which in actual fact was a rediscovery.

In a frenzy I excavated black antiquity. What I discov­ ered left me speechless . In his book on the abolition of s lavery Schoelcher presented us with some compel­ ling arguments. Since then, Frobenius, Westermann, and Delafosse, all white men, have voiced their agreement: Segu, Djenne, cities with over 100,000 inhabitants ; ac­ counts oflearned black men (doctors of theology who trav­ eled to Mecca to discuss the Koran) . Once this had been dug up, displayed, and exposed to the elements, it allowed me to regain a valid historic category. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive or a subhuman; I belonged to a race that had already been working silver and gold 2, 000 years ago. And then there was something else, something the white man could not understand. Listen:

\Vhat sort of people were these, then, who had been torn away from their families, their country, and their gods with a savagery unparalleled in history?

Gentle people, polite, considerate, unquestionably supe­ rior tb those who tortured them, that pack of adventurers who smashed, raped, and insulted Africa the better to loot her.

They knew how to erect houses, administer empires, build cities, cultivate the land, smelt iron ore, weave cotton, and forge steel.

Their religion had a beauty of its own, based on mysteri­ ous contacts with the city's founder. Their customs were agreeable, built on solidarity, goodwill, and respect for age.

110 I Black Skin, White Masks

No coercion, but mutual aid, the joy of living, and freely consented discipline.

Order-strength-poetry and liberty. From the untroubled private citizen to the almost mythi­

cal leader there was an unbroken chain of understanding and trust. No science? Yes of course there was, but they had magnificent myths to protect them from fear where the keenest of observations and the boldest of imagination har­ monized and fused. No art? They had their magnificent sculpture where human emotion exploded so violently that it set in motion, according to the haunting laws of rhythm, the elements invoked to capture and redistribute the most secret forces of the universeP

Monuments in the very heart of Africa? Schools? Hospi­ tals? Not a single bourgeois in the twentieth century, no Durand, no Smith or Brown even suspects that such things existed in Africa before the Europeans came . . . .

But Schoelcher signals their presence as recorded by Caille, Mollien, and the Cander brothers . And although he mentions nowhere that when the Portuguese landed on the shores of the Congo in 1498, they discovered a rich and flourishing state and that the elders at the court of Ambasse were dressed in silks and brocade, at least he knows that Africa raised itself to a legal notion of state, and midway through this century of imperialism he hints that all European civilization is but one among many-and not the most mercifuL 18

I put the white man back in his place; emboldened, I j ostled him and hurled in his face : accommodate me as I am; I'm not accommodating anyone. I snickered to my heart's delight. The white man was visibly growl-

17. Aime Cesaire, Introduction to Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation, p. 7.

18. Ibid., p. 8.

Frantz Fanon I 1 1 1

ing. His reaction was a long time coming. I had won. I was overjoyed.

"Lay aside your history, your research into the past, and try to get in step with our rhythm. In a society such as ours, industrialized to the extreme, dominated by science, there is no longer room for your sensitivity. You have to be tough to be able to It is no longer enough to play ball with the world; you have to master it with integrals and atoms. Of course, they will tell me, from time to time when we are tired of all that concrete, we will turn to you as our children, our naive, ingenuous, and spontaneous children. We will turn to you as the childhood of the world. You are so authentic in your life, so playful. Let us forget for a few moments our formal, polite civil­ ization and bend down over those heads, those adorable expressive faces. In a sense, you reconcile us with ourselves."

So they were countering my irrationality with rational­ ity, my rationality with the "true rationality." I couldn't hope to win. I tested my heredity. I did a complete checkup of my sickness. I wanted to be typically black-that was out of the question. I wanted to be white-that was a joke. And when I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me. They proved to me that my reasoning was nothing but a phase in the dialectic:

But there is something more serious. The Negro, as we have said, creates an anti-racist racism. He does not at all wish to dominate the world; he wishes the abolition of racial privi­ leges wherever they are found; he affirms his solidarity with the oppressed of all colors. At a blow the subjective, exis­ tential, ethnic notion of Negritude "passes," as Hegel would say, into the objective, positive, exact notion of the prole­ tariat. "For Cesaire," Senghor, "the 'White' symbolizes

112 I Black Skin, White Masks

capital as the Negro, labor. . . . Among the black men of his race, it is the struggle of the world proletariat which he sings."

This is easier to say than work out. And without doubt it is not by hazard that the most ardent of apostles of Negritude are at the same time militant Marxists.

But nevertheless the notion of race does not intersect with the notion of class: the one is concrete and particular, the other is universal and abstract; one resorts to that which Jas­ pers names comprehension and the other to intellection; the first is the product of a psycho-biological syncretism and the other is a methodical construction emerging from experi­ ence. In fact, Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dia­ lectical progression: the theoretical and practical afiirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the Blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to pave the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without race. Thus N eg1itude is dedicated to its own destruc­ tion, it is transition and not result, a means and not the ulti­ mate goal.19

When I read this page, I felt they had robbed me of my last chance. I told my friends: "The generation of young black poets has just been dealt a fatal blow." We had appealed to a friend of the colored peoples , and this friend had found nothing better to do than demonstrate the relativity of their action. For once this friend, this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness. 'To counter rationalism he

19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphee Nair, preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache, translated by S. W. Allen as Black Orpheus, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1976, pp. 59-60.

Frantz Fanon I 1 13

recalled the negative side, but he forgot that this negativ­ ity draws its value from a virtually substantial absoluity. Consciousness committed to experience knows nothing, has to know nothing, of the essence and determination of its being.

Black Orpheus marks a date in the intellectualization ofblack existence. And Sartre's mistake was not only to seek the source of the spring, but in a certain way to drain the spring dry.

Will the source of Poetry silence itself? Or indeed will the great black river, despite all, color the sea into which it flows? No matter; to each epoch its poetry, for each epoch the cir­ cumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class, to seize again the torch, by creating situations which can express or surpass themselves only through Poetry. At times the poetic elan coincides with the revolutionary elan and at times they diverge. Let us salute today the historic chance which will permit the Blacks to "raise the great Negro shout with a force that \vill shake the foundations of the world" ( Cesaire) .20

And there you have it; I did not create a meaning for myself; the meaning was already there, waiting. It is not as the wretched nigger, it is not with my nigger's teeth, it is not as the hungry nigger that I fashion a torch to set the world alight; the torch was already there, waiting for this historic chance.

In terms of consciousness , black consciousness claims to be an absolute density, full of itself, a stage pre­ existent to any opening, to any abolition of the self by desire. In his essay Jean-Paul Sartre has destroyed black impulsiveness. He should have opposed the unforesee­ able to historical destiny. I needed to lose myself totally

20. Ibid., p. 65.

114 I Black Skin, White Masks

in negritude. Perhaps one day, deep in this wretched romanticism . . .

In any case I needed not to know. This struggle, this descent once more, should be seen as a completed aspect. There is nothing more disagreeable than to hear: "You'll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young . . . . You'll see, you'll get over it."

The dialectic that introduces necessity as a support for my freedom expels me from myself. It shatters my impul­ sive position. Still regarding consciousness, black con­ sciousness is immanent in itself. I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am . I do not have to look for the universal. There's no room for probability inside me. My black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with itself.

But, they will argue, your assertions do not take into consideration the historical process. Listen, then:

Africa I have kept your memory Africa You are inside me Like the splinter in the wound Like a guardian fetish in the center of the village Make me the stone in your sling M ake my mouth the lips of your wound M ake my knees the broken pillars of your abasement AND YET I want to be of your race alone Workers peasants of every land . . . . . . . white worker in Detroit black peon in Alabama Countless people in capitalist slavery Destiny ranges us shoulder to shoulder Repudiating the ancient maledictions of blood taboos We trample the ruins of our solitudes. If the flood is a frontier We will strip the gully of its inexhaustible flowing locks If the Sierra is a frontier

Frantz F anon I 115

We will smash the jaws of the volcanoes Establishing the Cordilleras And the plain will be the playground of the dawn Where we regroup our forces sundered By the deceits of our masters As the contradiction of the features Creates the harmony of the face We proclaim the unity of suffering And revolt Of all the peoples over the face of the earth And we mix the mortar of the age of brotherhood In the dust of idols.21

Precisely, we will reply; the black experience is ambigu­ ous , for there is not one Negro-there are many black men. What a difference, for example, in this other poem:

The white man killed my father Because my father was proud The white man raped my mother Because my mother was beautiful The white man wore out my brother in the hot sun of the

roads Because my brother was strong Then the white man turned to me His hands red with blood Spat black his contempt into my face And in his master's voice: "Hey boy, a pastis, a towel, some water."22

And this one:

My brother with teeth that glisten at the compliments of hypocrites

My brother with gold-rimmed spectacles

21 . Jacques Roumain, Bois d'ebene, "Prelude." 22. David Diop, Trois Poemes, "Le temps du martyre."

116 I Black Skin, White Masks

Over your eyes turned blue by the Master's voice My poor brother in a dinner jacket with silk lapels Cheeping and whispering and swaggering through the

drawing rooms of Condescension How pathetic you are The sun of your native country is nothing more than a

shadow On your serene, civilized face And your grandmother's hut Brings blushes to a face whitened by years of humiliation

and mea culpa But when gorged with empty, lofty words Like the box on top of your shoulders You step on the bitter red earth of Africa These of anguish will heat rhythm to your uneasy

walk I feel so alone, so alone here!23

From time to time you feel like giving up. Expressing the real is an arduous job. But when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent. What is certain is that at the very moment when I endeavored to grasp my being, Sartre, who remains "the Other," by naming me shattered my last illusion. While I was telling him:

My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral It reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil It deep into the blazing flesh of the sky Tt pierces opaque prostration with its pa.•��'-''''"''-"

While I, in a paroxysm of experience and was pro- claiming this, he reminded me that my negritude was � nothing but a weak stage. Truthfully, I'm telling you, I

23. David Diop, Le Renegat.

Frantz Fanon I 117

sensed my shoulders slipping from this world, and my feet no longer felt the caress of the ground. Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white , no longer completely black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man. 24

Between the white man and me there is irremediably a relationship of transcendence .25

But we have forgotten my constancy in love. I define myself as absolutely and sustainedly open-minded. And I take this negritude and with tears in my eyes I piece to­ gether the mechanism. That which had been shattered is rebuilt and constructed by the intuitive Hanas of my hands.

My shout rings out more violently: I am a nigger, I am a nigger, I am a nigger.

And it's my poor brother living his neurosis to the ex­ rr.o·rn.o who finds himself paralyzed:

The Negro: I can't ma'am. Lizzie: Why not? The Negro: I can't shoot white folks. Lizzie: Really! They have no qualms doing it! The Negro: They're white folks, ma'am. Lizzie: So what? Maybe they got a right to bleed you like

a pig just because they're white? The Negro: But they're white folks."

24. Though Sartre's speculations on the existence of "the Other" remain correct (insofar as, we may recall, Being and Nothingness de­ scribes an alienated consciousness), their application to a black con­ sciousness proves fallacious because the white man is not only "the Other," but also the master, whether or imaginary.

In the sense meant by Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendance, "Being and Thinking."

1 18 I Black Skin, White Masks

A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of not existing. Sin is black as virtue is white. All those white men, fingering their guns, can't be wrong. I am guilty. I don't know what of: but I know I'm a wretch.

The Negro: That's how it goes, ma'am. That's how it always goes with white folks.

Uzzie: You too? You feel guilty? The Negro: Yes, ma'am.26

It's Bigger Thomas who is afraid, terribly afraid. But afraid of what? Of himself. We don't yet know who he is, but he knows that fear will haunt the world once the world finds out. And when the world finds out, the world always expects something from the black man. He is afraid that the world will find out; he is afraid of the fear in the world if the world knew. Like this old woman who begs us on her knees to tie her to the bed:

"I just know, Doctor. Any minute that thing will take hold of , me.

"What thing?" "Wanting to kill myself. Tie me down, I'm scared."

In the end, Bigger Thomas acts. He acts to put an end to the tension, he answers the world's expectations.27

It's the character in If He Hollers Let Him Go28 who does precisely what he did not want to do. That voluptuous blonde who is always in his path, succumbing, sensual, sexually available, fearing (desiring) to be raped, in the end becomes his mistress.

26. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Respectful Prostitute. See also Home of the Brave, film by Mark Robson.

27. Richard Wright, Native Son. 28. Chester Himes.

Frantz Fanon I 1 19

The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes. I can't go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself. Those in front of me look at me, spy on me, wait for me. A black bellhop is going to appear. My aching heart makes my head spin.

The crippled soldier from the Pacific war tells my brother: ,.Get used to your color the way I got used to my stump. We are both casualties ."29

Yet, with all my being, I refuse to accept this amputa­ tion. I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple. When I opened my eyes yes­ terday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings . Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads be­ tween Nothingness and Infrnity, I began to weep.

29. Home of the Brave.