paper : 11 The Postcolonial Litreture

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Name : Mori Utsavi bharatbhai

Roll no :  33

Enrollment no : 2069108420180037

M.A. Sem - 3

Year : - 2017 - 2019

Email- id - utsavibarajput18@gmail.com

Paper no  : 11

Submitted to : Department of English Bhavnagar

Topic : Black Skin a white mask-A general view.

Introduction :

The author of ‘Black Skin White Masks’ is Frantz fanon. He was born on July 20, 1925, at Fort-de-France, Martinique, France. He died at the age of 36, on 6th December 1961 at Bethesda, Maryland.  He was revolutionary, philosopher, psychiatrist and writer whose writing influenced post colonial studies, Marxism and critical theory. He was an intellectual fellow political radical, existentialist humanist; he dealt with social, cultural, political problems. He supported the Algerian war of independence from France, and was also a member of the Algerian national liberation front. The life and works of Frantz fanon have inspired anti-colonial national liberation movements in Palestine, Sir Lanka, and the U.S .He served in the French army. He studied Medicine. He was a psychiatrist.

                                        In France in the year of 1952, Frantz Omar fanon wrote his first book,’ Black Skin, White Masks.’ The book is an analysis of the negative psychology-cal impact of colonial subjugation upon black people. Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral dissertation, submitted at Lyon. Its title was “Essay on the Desalination of the Black” It was rejected and fanon published it as a book.

Frantz Fanon was influenced by many thinkers and traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Lacan, Negritude and Marxism. He was influenced by Aime Cesaire, a leader of the negritude movement, was teacher and mentor to fanon on the island of Martinique. Fanon referred to Cesaire’s writings his own work. He quoted, for example, his teacher at length in “They lived experience of the Black man “ a heavily anthologized essay form Black Skin, White Masks.

HIS CONTRIBUTION IN LITERATURE AND CRITICISM ARE,-

1)    Black skin white mask - 1952

2)    A dying colonialism - 1959

3)    Wretched of the earth - 1961

4)    Towards the African revolution – 1964

INTRODUCTION OF “BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK”:-

The story “Black skin white mask” is from is from Frantz Fanon’s “Black skin white mask” Fanon analysis how the black person feel in a white world they lose the originality of their native culture and embrace imperial culture. Marechera’s story is about the controversy between two students who are caught between local and imperial cultures.

“Black Skin, White Masks” :~

Fanon‘s growing popularity and influence and more recent postcolonial readings of black liberation and nationalism perhaps sever as an index of his centrality to the movement for the Algerian self determinations in the 1950‘s that was shaped his diverse career as a political activist and critic.  “Black Skin, White Masks” is a Book about the mindset of psychology of racism. The book looks at what goes through the minds of Blacks and the strange impacts that has, especially on the black people.

The black man and the white man are not. And yet they are, and the reality of their being is Fanons starting point: the black man trapped in his blackness, the white man in his whiteness, both trapped into their mutual and aggressive narcissism.

What, then, brings them or calls them into being, or sentences them to non-being? Writing of his childhood and emergence from it, Fanon remarks: I am a negro, but naturally I don’t know that because that is what I am. I am going to use nègre in French because of the ambiguity of its political semantics and because there is no single English  quivalent: it is distinct from both noir (black) and the more recent homme de couleur (man of colour) and covers the whole semantic field from negroto nigger, the precise meaning being determined by context, the speakers position or even the speakers tone of voice. Fanons comment that he had to be told what he was is at one level a fairly banal  example of the bracketing out of facticity in favour of simply being: at home, he remarks (meaning, presumably, in Martinique), the black man does not, has no need to, experience his being-for-others.

Judging by my own experience, it is, for example, perfectly possible to grow up in a uniquely white community in the north-east of England without knowing in any real sense that you are white. There is no need to know that, and it is well known that fish have no sense of wetness.

Here, we can intemperate that how this White and Black are portrayed in literature in different ways. Novel ‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens’ In this novel we can find the controversy of Black and White. Here Christianity – Whiteness portrays as goodness, while Jew – Black portrayed as Evil. Here reader can find conflict between Christian v/s Jew. The novel has an idea of Christianity and Jewish. At some extent writer has described Christianity as a superior and dark side of Christianity has been presented. He portrayed Jew in a negative connotation.

Let’s analyze the book of Fanon ‘Black skin, White Mask’ - This book divided in many chapters. Each chapter has its own importance. They deal with the psychological aspect. It includes the condition of Black people and their mentality. It also gives reflection of white people towards black people. Let’s have a brief look on chapters of this book.

 1 “The Black man and Language”

This chapter deals with the language of white people. The Language of White people is in centre, and Language of Black people is in periphery. Black people have to learn the language of White people.

Language construct the idea of Civilized or uncivilized. If you do not learn the white man’s language perfectly, you are unintelligent. Yet if you do learn it perfectly, you have washed your brain in their universe of racist ideas. That if a black person does not learn the white man’s language perfectly, he is unintelligent. Yet if he does tern it perfectly, he has washed his brain in the world of racial Ideology.  It shows that language of White people is in power position and Language of Black people has lesser importance

Thus, the language of White people in centre and the Black people don’t learn it they do not get enough values in society of that time. So, Black people have to learn the language of White people.

2. ‘The Woman of color and The ‘Whiteman’.

The idea of blackness, the mind set of people is like this “I loved him because he had blue eyes, blond hair, and a light skin”.  The Mulato, Mulato is a kind of a race which is not black and white.

I want to be recognize not as black, but as white

The effect of white people also touched to the society. Black Woman also wished the White Skin which White woman has.  How desire of “WHITENESS’ is more in the Black woman. Because of that many ‘FAIRNESS CREAM’ and their industries grow faster and faster. 

“The person I will love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my

manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a

Value making super structure on my whole vision of the world.”

The colonized women look down on their own. Race and deep down want to be white. In “The Bluest Eye” of ‘Toni Morrison’ ‘we find a black girls desire Fun the blue eyes of white men and woman’.

Thus here Fanon presents a psychoanalytical study of a black woman.

 3. The Man of Color and the White Woman

The author in this chapter talks about the condition of Block men. He says that these men want to be white too. That people of color have a deep desire for white rule, that those who oppose it to do not have a secure sense of self that they have a chip on their shoulder.

Why Whiteness is something goodness?

White people have rules over Black people and they have shaped that idea that whiteness is symbol of Goodness

‘Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white.’

A white female just because he was raised around whites so he seemed less black .They go with them not out of love but to deal with their own race .Men want to be white too-or at least prove they are equal to whites .Here black men wants to join white women .Prejudices that make him not want to join a white man’s world. As a proud and black skin .Whites represent wealth, beauty, intelligence and virtue.

In literature we can also find an example where Black man wished to have white skin. Gwendolyn Brooke’s poem “We Real Cool” deals with the same theme.

4. The So-called Dependency Complex of the colonized peoples:

In this chapter writer argues against Fanon’s view that people of color have a deep desire for white rule, that those who oppose it to do not have a secure sense of self that they have a chip on their shoulder. From this chapter I came to understand that the stereotypes of Happy Darkies, Uppity Negroes and White Saviors all come from the need of white people to feel that their power in society is good and not racist.

5. The fact of Blackness

( Fanon: The Lived Experience of the Black Man )

In this chapter Fanon argues about his own fact of Blackness and his struggle he endured such the psychologically alientaly effects of colonialism and racism. Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist but in the White society, “He is seen not as Dr. Fanon but as Black man”. In this racist society, Fanon argues, Black people “experience being through others”.

  “Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!”

Fanon’s experience as Black man in the white society feels inferiority and says “Always a Negro, never a man”. And also he describe as a “real dialect between my body and the world”. There is same idea expresses his feeling of inferiority and says, “Sin is Black as Virtue is White”. In the White world he himself considered as he is Wretch. And this chapter also deals with the pathetic conditions of blacks. They thought that being always black is as if they are never fully human. No matter how much Education you have or how well you act. They felt they are just like isolated creature from the world.

6. The Negro and Psychopathology

 In this chapter writer ask question to reader that, Why should people fear black? Question asked here. Part it has to do with white men’s repressed homosexuality and their strange hang-ups about black men’s penises. More generally, black men are viewed as a body, which makes them seem like mindless, violent sexual, animal beings. Add to that all the bad meanings that the word “black” had even before Europeans set foot in black Africa.

7. The Negro and Recognition

Section-A “The Negro and Adler”

In this section fanon applies Adler’s personality theory to the ‘Antillean Negro’, How Antillean Negro act towards each other. Fanon says, that “The question is always whether he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respectable than I”. The “question of value” that plagues the neurotic Antillean Negro is historically constructed and has arisen out of colonialism.

In this chapter Fanon also talks about the role colonial education. “It is because the Negro belongs to an “inferior” race that he seeks to be like the superior race”. The pattern of the white man.

Section –B “The Negro and the Hegel”

              In the second section Fanon applies Hegel’s Master- Slave dialectic. The ‘Hegelian dialectic’ offers, Fanon argues, an explanation of what distinguishes “human reality” from “natural reality”.

“Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him”

 Black men fight for an equal place in society, The White man considers Black men as “machine-animal-men”.Fanon says, “There is always resentment in a reaction”. Nietzsche points out that in the latter Fanon remind us there is always a great deal of “resentment”.

The unequal power relations between the slave and the Master means that even if the Master had to confer upon the slave its recognition the power balance would not have shifted. Fanon says that “it is in the degree to which I go beyond my own immediate being that I apprehend the existence of the other as a natural and more than natural reality”.

Thus, in these both chapters, “Fanons describe the marginalization of Black people and colonizer White world”.

Conclusion:~

At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. My final prayer:

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

Frantz work present hybridists, syncretistic, creolizaion, national and religious

peculiarity, abrogation, appropriation, rewriting of history and much more many Indian novelist work like Tagore’s “Gora” can be compared with this book as far as social moral and political issues are considered. Own Dalit literature also can be kept in mind while referring “The Black Skin White Mask”.

Here, in Black Skin, White Mask the writer Frantz Fanon highlights his ideas about Justification n of race.