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.
