“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!”
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragment have been put together again by another self.
As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem.
Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critic will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.
The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely, with American Negroes. Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world. In the Antilles there was also that little gulf that exists among the almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic. And then. …
And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table.
The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all of these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world— definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.
For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for “denegrification”; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction.
Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, visual character,”1 but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. “Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. “Look, a Negro!” The circle was a drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” |
Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other … and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. …
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”
On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together.
But I rejected all immunization of the emotions. I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man. Some identified me with ancestors of mine who had been enslaved or lynched: I decided to accept this. It was on the universal level of the intellect that I understood this inner kinship—I was the grandson of slaves in exactly the same way in which President Lebrun was the grandson of tax-paying, hard-working peasants. In the main, the panic soon vanished.
In America, Negroes are segregated. In South America, Negroes are whipped in the streets, and Negro strikers are cut down by machine-guns. In West Africa, the Negro is an animal. And there beside me, my neighbor in the university, who was born in Algeria, told me: “As long as the Arab is treated like a man, no solution is possible.”
“Understand, my dear boy, color prejudice is something I find utterly foreign. … But of course, come in, sir, there is no color prejudice among us. … Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves. … It is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we are. … I had a Senegalese buddy in the army who was really clever. …”
Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?
“A Martinican, a native of ‘our’ old colonies.”
Where shall I hide?
“Look at the nigger! … Mama, a Negro! … Hell, he’s getting mad. … Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we. …”
My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.
All round me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me. …
I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?
Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of my being. I was about to be angry. The fire was long since out, and once more the nigger was trembling.
“Look how handsome that Negro is! …
“Kiss the handsome Negro’s ass, madame!”
Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free from my rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh.
The field of battle having been marked out, I entered the lists.
What? While I was forgetting, forgiving, and wanting only to love, my message was flung back in my face like a slap. The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man—or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged.
They would see then! I had warned them, anyway. Slavery? It was no longer even mentioned, that unpleasant memory. My supposed inferiority? A hoax that it was better to laugh at. I forgot it all, but only on condition that the world not protect itself against me any longer. I had incisors to test. I was sure they were strong. And besides. …
What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I was resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.
In Anti-Semite and Jew (p. 95), Sartre says: “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. . . . We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside.”
All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits. His actions, his behavior are the final determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed. He belongs to the race of those who since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough, one has only not to be a nigger. Granted, the Jews are harassed—what am I thinking of? They are hunted down, exterminated, cremated. But these are little family quarrels. The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” that the others have of me but of my own appearance.
I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!
I slip into corners, and my long antennae pick up the catch-phrases strewn over the surface of things—nigger underwear smells of nigger—nigger teeth are white—nigger feet are big—the nigger’s barrel chest—I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility. Look, I will accept the lot, as long as no one notices me!
“Oh, I want you to meet my black friend. … Aimé Césaire, a black man and a university graduate. … Marian Anderson, the finest of Negro singers. … Dr. Cobb, who invented white blood, is a Negro. . . . Here, say hello to my friend from Martinique (be careful, he’s extremely sensitive). …”
Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.
I turn away from these inspectors of the Ark before the Flood and I attach myself to my brothers, Negroes like myself. To my horror, they too reject me. They are almost white. And besides they about to marry white women. They will have children faintly tinged with brown. Who knows, perhaps little by little. . . .
I had been dreaming.
“I want you to understand, sir, I am one of the best friends the Negro has in Lyon.”
The evidence was there, unalterable. My blackness was there, dark and unarguable. And it tormented me, pursued me, disturbed me, angered me.
Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these statements were false. There was a myth of the Negro that had to be destroyed at all costs. The time had long since passed when a Negro priest was an occasion for wonder. We had physicians, professors, statesmen. Yes, but something out of the ordinary still clung to such cases. “We have a Senegalese history teacher. He is quite bright. … Our doctor is colored. He is very gentle.”
It was always the Negro teacher, the Negro doctor; brittle as I was becoming, I shivered at the slightest pretext. I knew, for instance, that if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and of all those who came after him. What could one expect, after all, from a Negro physician? As long as everything went well, he was praised to the skies, but look out, no nonsense, under any conditions! The black physician can never be sure how close he is to disgrace. I tell you, I was walled in: No exception was made for my refined manners, or my knowledge of literature, or my understanding of the quantum theory.
I requested, I demanded explanations. Gently, in the tone that one uses with a child, they introduced me to the existence of a certain view that was held by certain people, but, I was always told, “We must hope that it will very soon disappear.” What was it? 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 themselves and the bitter resentment of those who are kept in subjection and are so frequently insulted. As colour is the 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 had read it rightly. It was hate; I was hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother’s side, but by an entire race. I was up against something unreasoned. The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.
I felt knife blades open within me. I resolved to defend myself. As a good tactician, I intended to rationalize the world and to show the white man that he was mistaken.
In the Anti-Semite and 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 or life, is itself universal, since anyone may practice it, and leads toward the universal, since its objects can be named and conceived.4 |
With enthusiasm I set to cataloguing and probing my surroundings. As time changed, one had seen the Catholic religion at first justify and then condemn slavery and prejudices. But by referring everything to the idea of the dignity of man, one had ripped prejudice to shreds. After much reluctance, the scientists had conceded that the Negro was a human being; in vivo and in vitro the Negro had been proved analogous to the white man: the same morphology, the same histology. Reason was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts back together. But I had to change my tune.
That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer. In the abstract there was agreement: The Negro is a human being. That is to say, amended the less firmly convinced, that likes us he has his heart on the left side. But on certain points the white man remained intractable. Under no conditions did he wish any intimacy between the races, for it is a truism that “crossings between widely different 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
For my part, I would certainly know how to react. And in one sense, if I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive.
In the first chapter of the history that the others have compiled for me, the foundation of cannibalism has been made eminently plain in order that I may not lose sight of it. My chromosomes were supposed to have a few thicker or thinner genes representing cannibalism. In addition to the sex-linked, the scholars had now discovered the racial-linked.6 What a shameful science!
But I understand this “psychological mechanism.” For it is a matter of common knowledge that the mechanism is only psychological. Two centuries ago I was lost to humanity. I was a slave forever. And then came men who said that it all had gone on far too long. My tenaciousness did the rest; I was saved from the civilizing deluge. I have gone forward.
Too late. Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. My trembling hands take hold of nothing; the vein has been mined out. Too late! But once again I want to understand.
Since the time when someone first mourned the fact that he had arrived too late and everything had been said, a nostalgia for the past has seemed to persist. Is this that lost original paradise of which Otto Rank speaks? How many such men, apparently rooted to the womb of the world, have devoted their lives to studying the Delphic oracles or exhausted themselves in attempts to plot the wanderings of Ulysses! The pan-spiritualists seek to prove the existence of a soul in animals by using this argument: A dog lies down on the grave of his masters and starves to death there. We had to wait for Janet to demonstrate that the aforesaid dog, in contrast to man, simply lacked the capacity to liquidate the past.
We speak of the glory of Greece, Artaud says; but, he adds, if modern man can no longer understand the Choephoroi of Aeschylus, it is Aeschylus who is to blame. It is tradition to which the anti-Semites turn in order to ground the validity of their “point of view.” It is tradition, it is that long historical past, it is that blood relation between Pascal and Descartes, that is invoked when the Jew is told, “There is no possibility of your finding a place in society.”
Not long ago, one of those good Frenchmen said in a train where I was sitting: “Just let the real French virtues keep going and the race is safe. Now more than ever, national union must be made a reality. Let’s have an end of internal strife! Let’s face up to the foreigners (here he turned toward my corner) no matter who they are.
It must be said in his defense that he stank of cheap wine; if he had been capable of it, he would have told me that my emancipated-slave blood could not possibly be stirred by the name of Villon or Taine.
An outrage!
The Jew and I: Since I was not satisfied to be racialized, by a lucky turn of fate I was humanized. I joined the Jew, my brother in misery.
An outrage!
At first thought it may seem strange that the anti-Semite’s outlook should be related to that of the Negro-phobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: “Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.” And I found that he was universally right—by which I meant that I was answerable in my body in my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro.
You come too late, much too late. There will always be a world—a white world—between you and us. . . . The other’s total inability to liquate the past once and for all. In the face of this affective ankylosis of the white man, it is understandable that I could have made up my mind to utter my Negro cry. Little by little, putting out pseudopodia here and there, I secreted a race. And that race staggered under burden of a basic element? What was it? Rhythm! Listen to our singer, Léopold Senghor:
It is the thing is most perceptible and least material. It is the archetype of the vital element. It is the first condition and the hallmark of Art, as breath is of life: breath, which accelerates or slows, which becomes even or agitated according to the tension in the individual, the degree and the nature of his emotion. This is rhythm in its primordial purity, this is rhythm in the masterpieces of Negro art, especially sculpture. It is composed of a theme—sculptural form—which is set in opposition to a sister theme, as inhalation is to exhalation, and that is repeated. It is not the kind of symmetry that gives rise to monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free. … This is how rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, tyrannically, to make us penetrate to the spirituality of the object; and that character of abandon which is ours is itself rhythmic.7 |
Had I read that right? I read it again with redoubled attention. From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?
I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I. Out of the necessities of my struggle I had chosen the method 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. Up to the neck in the irrational. And now how my voice vibrates!
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass Those who never learned to conquer steam or electricity Those who never explored the seas or the skies But they know the farthest corners of the land of anguish Those who never knew any journey save that of abduction Those who learned to kneel in docility Those who were domesticated and Christianized Those who were injected with bastardy. . . . |
Yes, all those are my brothers—a “bitter brotherhood” imprisons all of us alike. Having started the minor thesis, I went overboard after something else.
Tumescence
. . . But those without whom the earth would not be the earth Tumescence all the more fruitful than the empty land still more the land Storehouse to guard and ripen all on earth that is most earth My blackness is no stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day My blackness is no drop of lifeless water on the dead eye of the world My blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral It thrusts into the red flesh of the sky It hollows through the dense dismay of its own pillar of patience.8 |
Eyah! the tom-tom chatters out the cosmic message. Only the Negro has the capacity to convey it, to decipher its meaning, its import. Astride the world, my strong heels spurring into the flanks of the world, I stare into the shoulders of the world as the celebrant stares at the midpoint between the eyes of the sacrificial victim.
But they abandon themselves, possessed, to the essence of all things, knowing nothing of externals but possessed by the movement of all things uncaring to subdue but playing the play of the world truly the eldest sons 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, throbbing with the very movement of the world.9 |
Blood! Blood! … Birth! Ecstasy of becoming! Three-quarters engulfed in the confusions of the day, I feel myself redden with blood. The arteries of all the world, convulsed, torn away, uprooted, have turned toward me and fed me.
“Blood! Blood! All our blood stirred by the male heart of the sun.”10
Sacrifice was a middle point between the creation and myself—now I went back no longer to sources but to The Source. Nevertheless, one had to distrust rhythm, earth-mother love, this mystic, carnal marriage of the group and the cosmos.
In La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire, a work rich in perceptions, De Pédrals implies that always in Africa, no matter what field is studied, it will have a certain magico-social structure. He adds:
All these are the elements that one finds again on a still greater scale in the domain of secret societies. To the extent, moreover, to which persons of either sex, subjected to circumcision during adolescence, are bound under penalty of death not to reveal to the uninitiated what they have experienced, and to the extent to which initiation into a secret society always excites to acts of sacred love, there is good to conclude by viewing both male and female circumcision and the rites that they embellish as constitutive of minor secret societies.11 |
I walk on white nails. Sheets of water threaten my soul on fire. Face to face with these rites, I am doubly alert. Black magic! Orgies, witches’ sabbaths, heathen ceremonies, amulets. Coitus is an occasion to call on the gods of the clan. It is a sacred act, pure, absolute, bringing invisible forces into action. What is one to think of all of these manifestations, all these initiations, all these acts? From very direction I am assaulted by the obscenity of dances and of words. Almost at my ear there is a song:
First our hearts burned hot Now they are cold All we think of now is Love When we return to the village When we see the great phallus Ah how then we will make Love For our parts will be dry and clean.12 |
The soil, which only a moment ago was still a tamed steed, begins to revel. Are these virgins, these nymphomaniacs? Black Magic, primitive mentality, animism, animal eroticism, it all floods over me. All of it is typical of peoples that have not kept pace with the evolution of the human race. Or, if one prefers, this is humanity at its lowest. Having reached this point, I was long reluctant to commit myself. Aggression was in the stars. I had to choose. What do I mean? I had no choice. …
Yes, we are—we Negroes--backward, simple, free in our behavior. That is because for us the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. And long live the couple, Man and Earth! Besides, our men of letters helped me to convince you; your white civilization overlooks subtle riches and sensitivity. Listen:
Emotive sensitivity. Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek.13 Water rippled by every breeze? Unsheltered soul blown by every wind, whose fruit often drops before it is ripe? Yes, in one way, the Negro today is richer in gifts than in works.14 But the tree thrusts its roots into the earth. The river run deep, carrying precious seeds. And, the Afro-American poet, Langston Hughes, says: I have known rivers ancient dark rivers my soul has grown deep like the deep rivers.The very nature of the Negro’s emotion, of his sensitivity, furthermore explains his attitude toward the object perceived with such basic intensity. It is an abandon that becomes need, an active state of communion, indeed of identification, however negligible the action—I almost said the personality—of the object. A rhythmic attitude: The adjective should be kept in mind.15 |
So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, “standing before the bar,” ruling the world with his intuition, the Negro recognized, set on his feet again, sought after, taken up, and he is a Negro—no, he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in the foreground of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, “open to all the breaths of the world.” I embrace the world! I am the world!
The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of “a certain world,” forever after lost to him and his. When that happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that could not identify, so little used as he is to such reactions. Somewhere beyond the objective world of farms and banana trees and rubber trees, I had subtly brought the real world into being.
The essence of the world was my fortune. Between the world and me a relation of coexistence was established. I had discovered the primeval One. My “speaking hands” tore at the hysterical throat of the world. The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret. I was interrogated; turning away with an air of mystery, I murmured:
Tokowaly, uncle, do you remember the nights gone by When my head weighed heavy on the back of your patience or Holding my hand your hand led me by shadows and signs The fields are flowers of glowworms, stars hang on the bushes, on the trees Silence is everywhere Only the scents of the jungle hum, swarms of reddish bees that overwhelm the crickets’ shrill sounds And covered tom-tom, breathing in the distance of the night. You, Tokowaly, you listen to what cannot be heard, and you explain to me what the ancestors are saying in the liquid calm of the constellations, The bull, the scorpion, the leopard, the elephant, and the fish we know, And the white pomp of the Spirits in the heavenly shell that has no end, But now comes the radiance of the goddess Moon and the veils of the shadows fall. Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and shining.16 |
I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and, as I was told by a friend who was a teacher in the United States, “The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance.” At last I had been recognized, I was no longer a zero.
I had soon to change my tune. Only momentarily at a loss, the white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development: “Your properties have been exhausted by us. We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach. Study our history and you will see how far this fusion has gone.” Then I had the feeling that I was repeating a cycle. My originality had been torn out of me. I was wept a long time, and then I began to live again. But I was haunted by a galaxy of erosive stereotypes: the Negro’s sui generis odor … the Negro’s sui generis good nature … the Negro’s sui generis gullibility. …
I had tried to flee myself through my kind, but the whites had thrown themselves on me and hamstrung me. I tested the limits of my essence; beyond all doubt there was not much of it left. It was here that I made my most remarkable discovery. Properly speaking, this discovery was a rediscovery.
I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took away my breath. In his book L’abolition de l’esclavage Schoelcher presented us with compelling arguments. Since then, Frobenius, Westermann, Delafosse—all of them white—had joined the chorus: Ségou, Djenné, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran). All of that, exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historic place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago. And too there was something else, something else that the white man could not understand. Listen:
What sort of men were these, then, who had been torn away from their families, their countries, their religions, with a savagery unparalleled in history? Gentle, men, polite, considerate, unquestionably superior to those who tortured them—that collection of adventurers who slashed and violated and spat on Africa to make the stripping of her the easier. The men they took away knew how to build houses, govern empires, erect cities, cultivate fields, mine for metals, weave cotton, forge steel. Their religion had its own beauty, based on mystical connections with the founder of the city. Their customs were pleasing, built on unity, kindness, respect for age. No coercion, only mutual assistance, the joy of living, a free acceptance of discipline. Order—Earnestness—Poetry and Freedom. From the untroubled private citizen to the almost fabulous leader there was an unbroken chain of understanding and trust. No science? Indeed yes; but also, to protect them from fear, they possessed great myths in which ‘the most subtle observation and the most daring imagination were balanced and blended. No art? They had their magnificent sculpture, in which human feeling erupted so unrestrained yet always followed the obsessive laws of rhythm in its organization of the major elements of a material called upon to capture, in order to redistribute, the most secret forces of the universe. . . .17 Monuments in the very heart of Africa? Schools? Hospitals? Not a single good burgher of the twentieth century, no Durand, no Smith, no Brown even suspects that such things existed in Africa before the Europeans came. … But Schoelcher reminds us of their presence, discovered by Caillé, Mollien, the Cander brothers. And, though he nowhere reminds us that when the Portuguese landed on the banks of the Congo in 1498, they found a rich and flourishing state there and that the courtiers of Ambas were dressed in robes of silk and brocade, at least he knows that Africa had brought itself up to a juridical concept of the state, and he is aware, living in the very flood of imperialism, that European civilization, after all, is only one more civilization among many—and not the most merciful.18 |
I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank, “Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.” I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably. … I had won. I was jubilant.
“Lay aside your history, your investigations of the past, and try to feel yourself into our rhythm. In a society such as ours, industrialized to the highest degree, dominated by scientism, there is no longer room for your sensitivity. One must be tough if one to be allowed to live. What matters now is no longer playing the game of the world but subjugating it with integers and atoms. Oh, certainly, I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do our children—to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world. You are so real in your life—so funny, that is. Let us run away for a little while from our ritualized, polite civilization and let us relax, bend to those heads, those adorably expressive faces. In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves.”
Thus my unreason was countered with reason, my reason with “real reason.” Every hand was a losing hand for me. I analyzed my heredity. I made a complete audit of my ailment. I wanted to be typically Negro—it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic:
But there is something more important: The Negro, as we have said, creates an anti-racist racism for himself. In no sense does he wish to rule the world: He seeks the abolition of all ethnic privileges, wherever they come from; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of all colors. At once the subjective, existential, ethnic idea of negritude “passes,” as Hegel puts it, into the objective, positive, exact idea of proletariat. “For Césaire,” Senghor says, “the white man is the symbol of capital as the Negro is that of labor. … Beyond the black-skinned men of his race it is the battle of the world proletariat that is his song.” That is easy to say, but less easy to think out. And undoubtedly it is no coincidence that the most ardent poets of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists. But that does not prevent the idea of race from mingling with that of class: The first is concrete and particular, the second is universal and abstract; the one stems from what Jaspers calls understanding and the other from intellection; the first is the result of a psychobiological syncretism and the second is a methodical construction based on experience. In fact, negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression: The theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is insufficient by itself, and the Negroes who employ it know this very well; they know that it is intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.19 |
When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, “The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.” Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being.
Orphée Noir is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black. And Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source:
| Will the source of Poetry be dried up? Or will the great black flood, in spite of everything, color the sea into which it pours itself? It does not matter: Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through Poetry; sometimes the poetic impulse coincides with the revolutionary impulse, and sometimes they take different courses. Today let us hail the turn of history that will make it possible for the black men to utter “the great Negro cry with a force will shake the pillars of the world” (Césaire).20 |
And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history.
In terms of consciousness, the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as an absolute density, as filled with itself, a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire. Jean-Paul Satre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable. I needed to lose myself completely in negritude. One day, perhaps, in the depths of that unhappy romanticism. …
In any case I needed not to know. This struggle, this new decline had to take on an aspect of completeness. Nothing is more unwelcome than the commonplace: “You’ll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young … you’ll see, it will all pass.”
The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower.
But, I will be told, your statements show a misreading of the processes of history. 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 make my mouth the lips of your wound make my knees the broken pillars of your abasement AND YET I want to be of your race alone workers peasants of all lands … … white worker in Detroit black peon in Alabama uncountable nation in capitalist slavery destiny ranges us shoulder to shoulder repudiating the ancient maledictions of blood taboos we roll away the ruins of our solitudes If the flood is a frontier we will strip the gully of its endless covering flow If the Sierra is a frontier we will smash the jaws of the volcanoes upholding the Cordilleras and the plain will be the parade ground of the dawn where we regroup our forces sundered by the deceits of our masters As the contradiction among the features creates the harmony of the face we proclaim the oneness of the suffering and the revolt of all the peoples on all the face of the earth and we mix the mortar of the age of brotherhood out of the dust of idols.21 |
Exactly, we will reply, Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes. What a difference, for instance, 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 came to me His hands red with blood Spat his contempt into my black face Out of his tyrant’s voice: “Hey boy, a basin, a towel, water.”22 |
Or this other one:
My brother with teeth that glisten at the compliments of hypocrites My brother with gold-rimmed spectacles Over eyes that turn blue at the sound of the Master’s voice My poor brother in dinner jacket with its silk lapels Clucking and whispering and strutting through the drawing rooms of Condescension How pathetic you are The sun of your native country is nothing more now than a shadow On your composed civilized face And your grandmother’s hut Brings blushes into cheeks made white by years of abasement and Mea culpa But when regurgitating the flood of lofty empty words Like the load that presses on your shoulders You walk again on the rough red earth of Africa These words of anguish will state the rhythm of your uneasy gait I feel so alone, so alone here!23 |
From time to time one would like to stop. To state reality is a wearing task. But, when one has taken it into one’s head to try to express existence, one runs the risk of finding only the nonexistent. What is certain is that, at the very moment when I was trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered my last illusion. While I was saying to him.
My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral, it thrusts into the red flesh of the sun, it thrusts into the burning flesh of the sky, it hollows through the dense dismay of its own pillar of patience . . . |
While I was shouting that, in the paroxysm of my being and my fury, he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term. In all truth, in all truth I tell you, my shoulders slipped out of the framework of the world, my feet could no longer feel the touch of the ground. Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man.24 Between the white man and me the connection was irrevocably of transcendence.25
But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes, I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.
My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro. …
And there was my poor brother—living out his neurosis to the extreme and finding himself paralyzed:
the negro: I can’t, ma’am. lizzie: Why not? the negro: I can’t shoot white folks. lizzie: Really! That would bother them, wouldn’t 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 folks. the negro: But they’re white folks. |
A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white. All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good.
the negro: That’s how it goes, ma’am. That’s how it always goes with white folks. lizzie: You too? You feel guilty? the negro: Yes, ma’am.26 |
It is Bigger Thomas—he is afraid, he is terribly afraid. He is afraid, but of what is he afraid? Of himself. No one knows yet who he is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out. And when the world knows, the world always expects something of the Negro. He is afraid lest the world know, he is afraid of the fear that the world would feel if the world knew. Like that old woman on her knees who begged me to tie her to her bed:
“I just know, Doctor: Any minute that thing will take hold of me.” “What thing?” “The wanting to kill myself. Tie me down, I’m afraid.” In the end, Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world’s anticipation.27 |
So it with the character in If He Hollers Let Him Go28—who does precisely what he did not want to do. That big blonde who always in his way, weak, sensual, offered, open, fearing (desiring) rape, became his mistress in the end.
The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes. I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My hearts makes my head swim.
The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, “Resign yourself to your color the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims.”29
Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.
ENDNOTES
1. Jean Lhermitte, L’Image de notre corps (Paris: Nouvelle Revue critique, 1939), p. 17.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Grove Press, 1960, pp. 112–13.
4. Ibid., p. 115.
5. Jon Alfred Mjoen, “Harmonic and Disharmonic Race-crossings,” The Second International Congress of Eugenics (1921), Eugenics in Race and State, vol. 2, p. 60, quoted in Sir Alan Burns, op. cit., p. 120.
6. In English in the original (Translator’s note).
7. “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” in Claude Nordey, L’Homme de couleur (Paris: Plon, 1939), pp. 309–310.
8. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956, pp. 77–78.
9. Ibid., p. 78.
10. Ibid., p. 79.
11. De Pédrals, La vie sexulle en Afrique noir (Paris: Payot, p. 83.
12. A. M. Vergiat, Les rites secrets des primitifs de P’Oubangui (Paris: Payot, 1951), p. 113.
13. My italics—F.F.
14. My italics—F.F.
15. Léopold Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” in Nordey, op. cit., p. 205.
16. Léopold Senghor, Chants d’ombre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1945).
17. Aimé Césaire, Introduction to Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation (Paris: Universitaires de France, 1948), p. 7.
18. Ibid., p. 8.
19. Jean-Paul Sarte, Orphée Noir, preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nëgre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universit,aires de France, 1948), pp. xl ff.
20. Ibid., p. xliv.
21. Jacques Roumain, “Bois d’Ebène,” Prelude, in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, p. 113.
22. David Diop, “Le temps du martyre,” ibid., p. 174.
23. David Diop, “Le Renégat.”
24. Though Sartre’s speculations on the existence of The Other may be correct (to the extent, we must remember, to which Being and Nothingness describes an alienated consciousness), their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious. That is because the white man is not only The Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary
25. In the sense in which the word used by Jean Wahl in Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1944).
26. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Respectful Prostitute, in Three Plays (New York: Knopf, 1949), pp. 189, 191. Originally, La Putain respectueuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). See also Home of the Brave, a film by Mark Robson.
27. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940).
28. By Chester Himes (Garden City: Doubleday, 1945).
