I think it would be good if certain thing were said (Frantz Fanon).
(Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics)
The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience : the explosion will not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it envisages and aims to create.
We are presented with a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious : I do not come with timeless truths ;fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent ; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a particular place : a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.
But this not simply a historic landscape, although Black Skin, White Masks is a historic text, firmly located in time and place. Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of all those marginalised and firmly located on the fringes in Asia and Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative ideology, and the banality of the ‘War on Terror’. It is the anger of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that are ridiculed, demonised, declared inferior and irrational, and, in some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination of the Western civilisation in particular.
This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience, painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and reflection. As such, it is a guarded anger, directed at a specific, long term desire. The desire itself is grounded in self-consciousness : when it encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes the experience of desire – the first milestone on the road that leads to dignity. Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular definition of dignity. Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilisation : it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one’s own ways of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. Black Skin, White Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his dignity through an interrogation of his own Self - a journey that will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure western civilisation.
After the War, Fanon won a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. While still a student he met José Dublé, a Frenchwoman who shared his convictions against racism and colonialism. The couple married in 1952, had one son, and stayed together for the rest of their lives. Fanon also began to use psychoanalysis to study the effects of racism on individuals, particularly its impact on the self-perception of blacks themselves. During the 1950’s metropolitan France was a centre of revolutionary philosophy and a magnet for writers, thinkers and activists from Africa. Fanon imbibed the ideas of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ; and became friends with Octave Mannoni, French psychoanalyst and author of Psychology of Colonization. As a young man searching for his own identity in a racist society, Fanon identified with the African freedom fighters who came to France seeking allies against European colonialism. He began to define a new black identity ; and became actively involved in the anti-colonialist struggle. So when, in 1953, he was offered a job as head of the psychiatric department of Bilda-Joinville Hospital in Algiers he jumped at the opportunity.
Fanon arrived in Algeria just as the colony was on the verge of a full blown, violent struggle against the French. He was appalled by the racist treatment of Algerians and the disparity he witnessed between the living standards of the European colonisers and the indigenous Arab population. He developed a close rapport with the Algerian poor and used group therapy to help, as well study, his patients. There was intellectual ferment too. A major event of 1954 was the publication of Vacation de l’Islam by the Algerian social philosopher Malek Bennabi. Published to synchronize with the outbreak of the Algerian revolution, Vacation de l’Islam presented the radical concept of ‘colonisibilite’ : the historical process through which Algeria, and other Muslim countries, declined culturally and intellectual to a stage where colonialism becomes a ‘historical necessity’. Bennabi, who like Fanon spent most of his life struggling against French racism, distinguished between ‘a country simply conquered and occupied and a colonised country’ [1]. The later had lost its own cultural bearings and internalised the idea of the inherent superiority of the colonising culture. Fanon and Bennabi never met ; but it is difficult to imagine their work did not fertilise each other’s thought.
The French response to the 1954 Algerian revolt was brutal, involving torture, killing, physical abuse and barbaric repression. For two years Fanon secretly supported the revolutionaries. Then, in 1956, he resigned his post and openly joined the National Liberation Front (FLN). He moved to Tunis, where he worked for Manouba Clinic and Neuropsychiatric Center and founded the radical magazine Moudjahid (from Jihad, meaning freedom fighter). Soon he acquired a reputation as a leading ideologue of the Algerian revolution. He received many death threats from the French and their sympathisers – which only served to strengthen his resolve. By now, Fanon identified himself as an Algerian. He travelled throughout Africa speaking on behalf of the NLF ; and even served as an ambassador to Ghana on behalf of the provisional government of Algeria.
Fanon did not live to see Algeria acquire full independence. While still in Ghana he was diagnosed with leukaemia. He went first to the Soviet Union for treatment ; and later to the United States. He died in Washington on 6th December 6, 1961.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Fanon was hailed as a revolutionary writer, a hero of the Third World and anti-colonial movement. He wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, just before his death. Published in 1961, with a preface by Sartre, it became a key text for radical students and served as an inspiration for the Black Power Movement in the United States. While its endorsement of violence is problematic, The Wretched of the Earth offers one of the most penetrating analyses of the social psychology of colonialism. But Fanon’s celebrity collapsed almost as quickly as the Berlin Wall and he was even forgotten in Algeria which he claimed as his own. Conservative writers have reacted against his views on violence and leftist intellectuals have dismissed his revolutionary statements as outdated and naïve. But the arrival of postcolonial studies in the 1990 heralded a new interest in Fanon. Today, Fanon waits to be rediscovered by a new generation burning with a desire for change – the very emotion that motivated Fanon to set sail from Martinique.
Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate the psychology of colonialism. It examines how colonialism is internalised by the colonised, how an inferiority complex is inculcated, and how, through the mechanism of racism, black people end up emulating their oppressors. It is due to the sensitivities of Fanon, says Ashis Nandy, that ‘we know something about the interpersonal patterns which constituted the colonial situation, particularly in Africa’ [2]. Fanon began a process of psychoanalytic deconstruction that was developed further first by Nandy in The Intimate Enemy and then by Ngugi wa Thiong in Decolonising the Mind (1986). Other theorists of colonial subjectivity have followed in their footsteps.
Fanon writes from the perspective of a colonised subject. He is a subject with a direct experience of racism who has developed a natural and intense hatred of racism. When it comes to experience, this is no ordinary subject : already the author has fought for the resistance in the Caribbean and France, has been wounded near the Swiss border, and received a citation for courage. He has a professional interest in psychoanalysis and speaks of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung without much distinction. He is going to offer us a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem, he says. But we can be sure that this is not a therapy session. Fanon is no armchair philosopher or academic theorist. He has a more urgent and pressing thing on his mind : liberation.
There is an urgency to Black Skin, White Masks that bursts from its pages. The text is full of discontinuities, changes in style, merging of genres, dramatic movement from analysis to pronouncements, switches from objective scientific discussion to deep subjectivity, transfers from theory to journalism, complex use of extended metaphors, and, not least, a number of apparent contradictions. As a genuine, and dare I say ‘old fashioned’ polymath, Fanon is not afraid to use any and all the tools and methods at his disposal : Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, medical dissection, and good old aphorisms. And he is just as happy to subvert them – a livid subversion that some would see as contradiction. But above all the text has an immediacy that engages and stirs us. We can feel a soul in turmoil, hear a voice that speaks directly to us, and see the injustices described being lived in front of our eyes. This is most evident in the chapter on ‘The Fact of Blackness’. Here, Fanon breaks out of all convention and simply lets his stream of consciousness wash on to the paper. All this whiteness that burns me. I sit down at the fire and became aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is ? This directness, this simmering anger, makes us uncomfortable because ‘civilised society’ does not like uncomfortable truths and naked honesty. But this is exactly what makes Black Skin, White Masks such a powerful and lasting indictment of western civilisation.
There is little point, I think, in accusing Fanon of sexism and gender bias. It is indeed true, as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, that Black Skin, White Masks ‘discriminates pointedly between the experiences of men and women of colour’ [3]. But who used gender neutral language in the 1950s ? And yes, Fanon can be used both to attack and defend European humanism. That’s because European humanism does have a few redeeming features along with its totalising tendencies. He is critical of European universalism yet uses the discourse of psychoanalysis to reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes because one can distance oneself from certain varieties of universalism and get closer to certain other notions of universal thought and values. Fanon is a contextual thinker and embraces that which makes most sense to him in the context of his dilemmas.
When reading Black Skin, White Masks one ought to keep the time and circumstances in which it was written firmly in mind. This is a dynamic text written in the heat of an intense, and often bloody, liberation struggle. It emerged from a life-and-death struggle, an individual as well as a collective struggle, concerned with the survival of the body as well as the survival of the soul. The struggle is concerned as much with freedom from colonialism as with liberation from the suffocating embrace of Europe, and the pretentions of its civilisation to be the universal destiny of all humanity. The text changes and unfolds itself as the experiences of the author transform and change him, as he suffocates, gaps, twists, struggles, and turns his back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism. For Fanon, the struggle is nothing less than an attempt to survive, to breathe the air of liberty.
We need to see the context. But we also need to lift our perceptions to see its global message. For we all desire what Fanon wants.
Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilised, modern and human. That is why the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom ;when he has fought for Liberty and Justice… these were always white liberty and white justice ; that is, values secreted by his masters. Blackness represents the diametrical opposite : in the collective unconsciousness, it stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. Even the dictionary definition of white means clean and pure. We can find, in Roget’s Thesaurus, over 134 synonyms for whiteness, most with positive connotations. In contrast, Roget’s Thesaurus tells us black means dirty, prohibited and funereal. It provides 120 synonyms for black and blackness, none with positive connotation. This is why a white lie is excusable ; and black lie is all that is wicked and evil. Evolution itself moves from black to white. Indeed, even the Merciful God is white, with a bushy beard and bright pink cheeks. The conclusion : One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent. And the corollary : he is Negro who is immoral. To become moral in this scheme of the universe, Fanon tells us, it is necessary to cease being a Negro, cease being true to history and himself.
But Fanon’s anger is not directed simply at the black man who wants to turn his race white. He is equally dismissive of the man who adores the Negro : he is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him. The idealised Negro is equally a construction of the white man. He represents the flip side of the Enlightenment : he is constructed not as a real person with real history but an image. The idealised Negro, the noble savage, is the product of utopian thinkers, such as Sir Thomas Moore, who comes from ‘No place’ and is in the end ‘No person’. This Negro was born out of the need of European humanism to rescue itself from its moral purgatory and project itself, and displace, the original inhabitants of Latin American and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, Fanon does not look on lovers of Negros with favour.
Liberation begins by recognising these constructions for what they are. The first impulse at the arrival of awareness is self-loathing : as I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. Here, Fanon is articulating a common feeling. If all you represent – your history, your culture, your very self – is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that you do not see yourself in a kindly manner. But this neurotic situation is not the route to emancipation. There is only one solution : to raise above the absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.
So the first thing that the black man wants is to say no. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man : freedom. And, above all, no to those who attempt to build a definition of him.
While it is understandable, Fanon asserts, that the first action of the black man is a reaction, it is necessary to go beyond. But the next step brings us face to face with a dilemma. Should the black man define himself in reaction to the white man thus confirming the white man as a measure of all things ? Or should one strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man ? Where is the true mode of resistance actually located ? How should the black man speak for himself ?
Fanon uses ‘white’ as a generic term for European civilisation and its representatives. In contrast, ‘black’ refers to the non-West in general. The question then becomes : can the non-West develop its own self-definition by using the tools and instruments of western civilisation ? In human sciences, Fanon detects a problem : they have their own drama. They have emerged from a particular cultural milieu and reflect the concerns and prejudices of that culture and worldview. If western civilisation and culture are responsible for colonial racism, and Europe itself has a racist structure, then we should not be too surprised to find this racism reflected in the discourses of knowledge that emanate from this civilisation and that they work to ensure that structural dominance is maintained. The seeds of inferiority of the non-West are already laid in the first chapter of 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. But western history not only writes cannibalism in the very chromosomes of the non-West, it also writes off the history of the non-West. History, both History of the West and History as perceived by the West, is transformed into a mighty river into which all Other histories flow and merge as mere minor and irrelevant tributaries. What Fanon detects in human sciences applies equally to social sciences. Anthropology was developed specifically to described, manage and contain the black man. Political science places white man at the apex and is deeply Eurocentric. Science and Empire went hand in hand : the consequent racial economy of science, where its benefits accrue primarily to the rich developed nations and its negative consequences are suffered largely by the developing countries, are patently plain. What Fanon says about the comics of the 1950s, the magazines are put together by white men for little white men, with their white heroes and evil black villains, works just as effectively in the way disciplines are taught, discourses are promoted, and knowledge is advanced. In all these areas there is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly… work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world. All these disciplines and discourses are the products of a culture which sees itself hierarchically at the top of the ladder of civilisation ; they postulate all that the world contains and all that the world has produced and produces, is by and for the white man. This is why it is taken as an a priori give that the white man is the predestined master of this world.
But the dominance of western culture, and its globalisation through this dominance, should not be confused with universalism. Just because a particular discipline or a discourse is accepted or practised throughout the world, it does not mean that discipline or discourse is universally valid and applicable to all societies. After all, as I have written elsewhere [4], burgers and coke are eaten and drunk throughout the world but one would hardly classify them as universally embraced, healthy and acceptable food : what the presence of burgers and coke in every city and town in the world demonstrate is not their universality but the power and dominance of the culture that produced them. The same logic applies to disciplines and discourses. When Fanon talks of universalism he is not talking of the alleged universalism of Western dominance which is a product of European history, emerges from western discourses, or is the gift of liberal humanists of the Enlightenment. His thinking lies elsewhere.
So what does Fanon means when he wants to transcend his ethnic perspectives and affiliation and wage his anti-colonial struggle in the name of universal human values ? What are we to make of the fact that he also sometimes roundly denounces this universalism ? Some post-colonial theorists have seen this as two different varieties of Fanon. Nicolas Harrison, for example, suggests the way to reconcile ‘these two distinct strains within Fanon’s writing, which is at times anti-universal and at times pro-universal (and anti-pseudo-universal) is to relativize/historicize them in terms of personal history and the changes in opinion that his experienced produced. Another would be to treat his varied claims as a writer’s rhetorical and/or strategic gestures, and to consider their efficacy in mobilizing opinion, generating solidarity, etc.’ [5]. But Fanon is not anti-universal per se – he is only anti a particular kind of universalism, one based on the notion of superiority which projects that superiority as a universal discourse. His stated purpose in examining (western) universalism is clear : I hope by analysing it to destroy it. There are not two contradictory but one single, unified position here. Moreover, Fanon is not concerned at all with postmodern ambiguity ; it could hardly be so given the devastating dominance of the coloniser he experienced firsthand. For him, the nuances in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised are irrelevant given the fact that the coloniser is totally deaf to the political condition of the colonised and what the colonised has to say.
Fanon’s idea of universalism is based on the notions of dignity, equality and equity : on a concrete and ever new understanding of man. It is a universalism that does not exist as yet, it cannot emerge from the dominant discourse, and it cannot be seen as a grand narrative that privileges a particular culture and its representatives. It is the universalism we need to struggle for and build. That is why Fanon is not content simply with knowledge and criticism. He wants man – and here he does mean man as the universal person – to be actional. Having thought, we must prepare to act. Our prime task as humans, he assert, is to preserve in all our relationship the respect for the basic values that constitute a human world. The world is not human. Don’t believe that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality, Fanon asserts. If you want a different reality, a different world, you have to change the one you have.
A great deal has changed since Fanon’s time. But the underlying structures of oppression and injustice remain the same. Empire shaped the current national identity of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. And Empire continues to play a key role in the psychological makeup, political and cultural outlook of Africa and Asia. The old European empires have been replaced by a new Empire, a hyperpower that wants to rule and mould the world in its own image. Its ‘war on terror’ has become a licence to flout every international law and notion of human rights. Racism, both in its most blatant and incipient forms, is the foundation of Fortress Europe – as is so evident in the re-emergence of the extreme right in Germany and Holland, France and Belgium, as well as Scandinavia, and the discourse of refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers and the Muslim population of Europe. Direct colonial rule may have disappeared ; but colonialism, in its many disguises as cultural, economic, political and knowledge-based oppression, lives on.
So Fanon’s voice is as important and relevant today as it was during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, in many respects it is even more so. For Fanon, the nature and mode of operation of oppression is irrelevant. It is utopian to try to ascertain in what ways one kind of inhuman behaviour differs from another kind of inhuman behaviour. The inhumanity of today is not different from the inhumanity of yesteryears for all sources of exploitation resemble one another ; they are all applied against the same ‘object’ : man. We need to do much more, Fanon insists, than simply be aware of this reality : we need to take continuous action to transform and transcend this reality.
As a critique of the West, Black Skin, White Masks has few equals. But its true value is as a clarion call against complacency. Fanon warns us to be perpetually on guard against the European unconscious where the most shameful desires lie dormant ; against modern society where life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt, and which spells death ; against the idea of progress where everyone climbs up towards whiteness and light and is engulfed by a single, monolithic notion of what it means to be human. And, most of all, he warns us to be vigilant to the constant and perpetual refashioning of hate : hate is not inborn ; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognised guilt complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviour ; in a sense, he has to become hate.
This message is as fresh today as when it was written. Fanon was far, far ahead of his time. This is why he is disliked by some. This is why he is misunderstood by others. This is exactly why you should know him and listen to what he says. And if you recognise yourself in his words, then like him, I say, you have made a step forward.
Notes
1. Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, 1987, p53.
2. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, OUP, Delhi, 1983, p30.
3. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, Verso, London, 1997, p145.
4. For a more detailed discussion of this see my essay ‘Beyond development : an Islamic perspective’ in Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures : A Ziauddin Sardar Reader, edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell, Pluto Press, London, 2003 ; and Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge, London, Pluto Press, 2002.
5. Nicolas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, Polity, Oxford, 2003, p158.
6. Jenny Sharpe, ‘US Multiculturalism’, in Postcolonial Studies edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, p114.
(Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics)
The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience : the explosion will not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it envisages and aims to create.
We are presented with a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious : I do not come with timeless truths ;fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent ; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a particular place : a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.
But this not simply a historic landscape, although Black Skin, White Masks is a historic text, firmly located in time and place. Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of all those marginalised and firmly located on the fringes in Asia and Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative ideology, and the banality of the ‘War on Terror’. It is the anger of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that are ridiculed, demonised, declared inferior and irrational, and, in some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination of the Western civilisation in particular.
This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience, painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and reflection. As such, it is a guarded anger, directed at a specific, long term desire. The desire itself is grounded in self-consciousness : when it encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes the experience of desire – the first milestone on the road that leads to dignity. Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular definition of dignity. Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilisation : it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one’s own ways of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. Black Skin, White Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his dignity through an interrogation of his own Self - a journey that will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure western civilisation.
1. I was born in the Antilles
Frantz Omar Fanon, born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, in the French colony of Martinique, was a complex figure, with multiple selves. He was, as he tells us, from Antilles but he ended his life thinking of himself as an Algerian. His parents belonged to the middle class community of the island : father a descendant of slaves, mother of mixed French parenthood. In Fort-de-France, he studied at Lycée Schoelcher, where one of his teachers was poet and writer Aimé César. Cesar’s passionate denouncement of colonial racism had a major influence on the impressionable Fanon. As a young dissident, he agitated against the Vichy regime in the Antilles and travelled to Dominica to support the French resistance in the Caribbean. Soon afterwards, he found himself in France where he joined the resistance against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. While serving in the military, Fanon experienced racism on a daily basis. In France, he noticed that French women avoided black soldiers who were sacrificing their lives to liberate them. He was wounded ; and was awarded Croix de Guerre for bravery during his service in the Free French forces.After the War, Fanon won a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. While still a student he met José Dublé, a Frenchwoman who shared his convictions against racism and colonialism. The couple married in 1952, had one son, and stayed together for the rest of their lives. Fanon also began to use psychoanalysis to study the effects of racism on individuals, particularly its impact on the self-perception of blacks themselves. During the 1950’s metropolitan France was a centre of revolutionary philosophy and a magnet for writers, thinkers and activists from Africa. Fanon imbibed the ideas of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ; and became friends with Octave Mannoni, French psychoanalyst and author of Psychology of Colonization. As a young man searching for his own identity in a racist society, Fanon identified with the African freedom fighters who came to France seeking allies against European colonialism. He began to define a new black identity ; and became actively involved in the anti-colonialist struggle. So when, in 1953, he was offered a job as head of the psychiatric department of Bilda-Joinville Hospital in Algiers he jumped at the opportunity.
Fanon arrived in Algeria just as the colony was on the verge of a full blown, violent struggle against the French. He was appalled by the racist treatment of Algerians and the disparity he witnessed between the living standards of the European colonisers and the indigenous Arab population. He developed a close rapport with the Algerian poor and used group therapy to help, as well study, his patients. There was intellectual ferment too. A major event of 1954 was the publication of Vacation de l’Islam by the Algerian social philosopher Malek Bennabi. Published to synchronize with the outbreak of the Algerian revolution, Vacation de l’Islam presented the radical concept of ‘colonisibilite’ : the historical process through which Algeria, and other Muslim countries, declined culturally and intellectual to a stage where colonialism becomes a ‘historical necessity’. Bennabi, who like Fanon spent most of his life struggling against French racism, distinguished between ‘a country simply conquered and occupied and a colonised country’ [1]. The later had lost its own cultural bearings and internalised the idea of the inherent superiority of the colonising culture. Fanon and Bennabi never met ; but it is difficult to imagine their work did not fertilise each other’s thought.
The French response to the 1954 Algerian revolt was brutal, involving torture, killing, physical abuse and barbaric repression. For two years Fanon secretly supported the revolutionaries. Then, in 1956, he resigned his post and openly joined the National Liberation Front (FLN). He moved to Tunis, where he worked for Manouba Clinic and Neuropsychiatric Center and founded the radical magazine Moudjahid (from Jihad, meaning freedom fighter). Soon he acquired a reputation as a leading ideologue of the Algerian revolution. He received many death threats from the French and their sympathisers – which only served to strengthen his resolve. By now, Fanon identified himself as an Algerian. He travelled throughout Africa speaking on behalf of the NLF ; and even served as an ambassador to Ghana on behalf of the provisional government of Algeria.
Fanon did not live to see Algeria acquire full independence. While still in Ghana he was diagnosed with leukaemia. He went first to the Soviet Union for treatment ; and later to the United States. He died in Washington on 6th December 6, 1961.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Fanon was hailed as a revolutionary writer, a hero of the Third World and anti-colonial movement. He wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, just before his death. Published in 1961, with a preface by Sartre, it became a key text for radical students and served as an inspiration for the Black Power Movement in the United States. While its endorsement of violence is problematic, The Wretched of the Earth offers one of the most penetrating analyses of the social psychology of colonialism. But Fanon’s celebrity collapsed almost as quickly as the Berlin Wall and he was even forgotten in Algeria which he claimed as his own. Conservative writers have reacted against his views on violence and leftist intellectuals have dismissed his revolutionary statements as outdated and naïve. But the arrival of postcolonial studies in the 1990 heralded a new interest in Fanon. Today, Fanon waits to be rediscovered by a new generation burning with a desire for change – the very emotion that motivated Fanon to set sail from Martinique.
2. The architecture of this book is rooted in the temporal
Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks when he was 27. Published in 1952, it was his first and perhaps most enduring book. And it was ignored. Its significance was recognised only after the death of the author, particularly after the publication of the English translation a decade and a half later in 1967. It was a year when anti-war campaigning was at its height ; and student strikes and protests, that began at Columbia University, New York, started to spread like wildfire across the United States and Europe. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights movement and was to be assassinated a year later. Advocates of black power were criticising attempts to assimilate and integrate black people. The book caught the imagination of all who argued for and promoted the idea of black consciousness. It became the bible of radical students, in Paris and London, outraged at the exploitation of the Third World.Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate the psychology of colonialism. It examines how colonialism is internalised by the colonised, how an inferiority complex is inculcated, and how, through the mechanism of racism, black people end up emulating their oppressors. It is due to the sensitivities of Fanon, says Ashis Nandy, that ‘we know something about the interpersonal patterns which constituted the colonial situation, particularly in Africa’ [2]. Fanon began a process of psychoanalytic deconstruction that was developed further first by Nandy in The Intimate Enemy and then by Ngugi wa Thiong in Decolonising the Mind (1986). Other theorists of colonial subjectivity have followed in their footsteps.
Fanon writes from the perspective of a colonised subject. He is a subject with a direct experience of racism who has developed a natural and intense hatred of racism. When it comes to experience, this is no ordinary subject : already the author has fought for the resistance in the Caribbean and France, has been wounded near the Swiss border, and received a citation for courage. He has a professional interest in psychoanalysis and speaks of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung without much distinction. He is going to offer us a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem, he says. But we can be sure that this is not a therapy session. Fanon is no armchair philosopher or academic theorist. He has a more urgent and pressing thing on his mind : liberation.
There is an urgency to Black Skin, White Masks that bursts from its pages. The text is full of discontinuities, changes in style, merging of genres, dramatic movement from analysis to pronouncements, switches from objective scientific discussion to deep subjectivity, transfers from theory to journalism, complex use of extended metaphors, and, not least, a number of apparent contradictions. As a genuine, and dare I say ‘old fashioned’ polymath, Fanon is not afraid to use any and all the tools and methods at his disposal : Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, medical dissection, and good old aphorisms. And he is just as happy to subvert them – a livid subversion that some would see as contradiction. But above all the text has an immediacy that engages and stirs us. We can feel a soul in turmoil, hear a voice that speaks directly to us, and see the injustices described being lived in front of our eyes. This is most evident in the chapter on ‘The Fact of Blackness’. Here, Fanon breaks out of all convention and simply lets his stream of consciousness wash on to the paper. All this whiteness that burns me. I sit down at the fire and became aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is ? This directness, this simmering anger, makes us uncomfortable because ‘civilised society’ does not like uncomfortable truths and naked honesty. But this is exactly what makes Black Skin, White Masks such a powerful and lasting indictment of western civilisation.
There is little point, I think, in accusing Fanon of sexism and gender bias. It is indeed true, as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, that Black Skin, White Masks ‘discriminates pointedly between the experiences of men and women of colour’ [3]. But who used gender neutral language in the 1950s ? And yes, Fanon can be used both to attack and defend European humanism. That’s because European humanism does have a few redeeming features along with its totalising tendencies. He is critical of European universalism yet uses the discourse of psychoanalysis to reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes because one can distance oneself from certain varieties of universalism and get closer to certain other notions of universal thought and values. Fanon is a contextual thinker and embraces that which makes most sense to him in the context of his dilemmas.
When reading Black Skin, White Masks one ought to keep the time and circumstances in which it was written firmly in mind. This is a dynamic text written in the heat of an intense, and often bloody, liberation struggle. It emerged from a life-and-death struggle, an individual as well as a collective struggle, concerned with the survival of the body as well as the survival of the soul. The struggle is concerned as much with freedom from colonialism as with liberation from the suffocating embrace of Europe, and the pretentions of its civilisation to be the universal destiny of all humanity. The text changes and unfolds itself as the experiences of the author transform and change him, as he suffocates, gaps, twists, struggles, and turns his back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism. For Fanon, the struggle is nothing less than an attempt to survive, to breathe the air of liberty.
We need to see the context. But we also need to lift our perceptions to see its global message. For we all desire what Fanon wants.
3. What does the black man want ?
At first sight, Fanon is rather hard on the ‘black man’. He is supposed to be a good nigger who even lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. But Fanon’s anger is directed not towards the ‘black man’ but the proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must be black in relation to the white man. It is the internalisation, or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this inferiority that concerns him. When the black man comes into contact with the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego collapses. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his behaviour is to emulate the white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a man. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon ; and which ultimately he wishes to eliminate. This is the declared intention of his study : to enable the man of colour to understand…the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro.Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilised, modern and human. That is why the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom ;when he has fought for Liberty and Justice… these were always white liberty and white justice ; that is, values secreted by his masters. Blackness represents the diametrical opposite : in the collective unconsciousness, it stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. Even the dictionary definition of white means clean and pure. We can find, in Roget’s Thesaurus, over 134 synonyms for whiteness, most with positive connotations. In contrast, Roget’s Thesaurus tells us black means dirty, prohibited and funereal. It provides 120 synonyms for black and blackness, none with positive connotation. This is why a white lie is excusable ; and black lie is all that is wicked and evil. Evolution itself moves from black to white. Indeed, even the Merciful God is white, with a bushy beard and bright pink cheeks. The conclusion : One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent. And the corollary : he is Negro who is immoral. To become moral in this scheme of the universe, Fanon tells us, it is necessary to cease being a Negro, cease being true to history and himself.
But Fanon’s anger is not directed simply at the black man who wants to turn his race white. He is equally dismissive of the man who adores the Negro : he is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him. The idealised Negro is equally a construction of the white man. He represents the flip side of the Enlightenment : he is constructed not as a real person with real history but an image. The idealised Negro, the noble savage, is the product of utopian thinkers, such as Sir Thomas Moore, who comes from ‘No place’ and is in the end ‘No person’. This Negro was born out of the need of European humanism to rescue itself from its moral purgatory and project itself, and displace, the original inhabitants of Latin American and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, Fanon does not look on lovers of Negros with favour.
Liberation begins by recognising these constructions for what they are. The first impulse at the arrival of awareness is self-loathing : as I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. Here, Fanon is articulating a common feeling. If all you represent – your history, your culture, your very self – is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that you do not see yourself in a kindly manner. But this neurotic situation is not the route to emancipation. There is only one solution : to raise above the absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.
So the first thing that the black man wants is to say no. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man : freedom. And, above all, no to those who attempt to build a definition of him.
While it is understandable, Fanon asserts, that the first action of the black man is a reaction, it is necessary to go beyond. But the next step brings us face to face with a dilemma. Should the black man define himself in reaction to the white man thus confirming the white man as a measure of all things ? Or should one strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man ? Where is the true mode of resistance actually located ? How should the black man speak for himself ?
4. To speak means …above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation
The black man speaks with a European language. He becomes proportionately whiter in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language ; or indeed, any western language, nowadays most particularly English. So, almost immediately, the back man is presented with a problem : how to posit a ‘black self’ in a language and discourse in which blackness itself is at best a figure of absence, or worse a total reversion ? The problem, however, is not limited simply to the use of language. When a black man arrives in France it is not only the language that changes him. He is changed also because it is from France that he received his knowledge of Mostesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, but also because France gave him his physicians, his department head, his innumerable little functionaries. At issue is thus not just language but also the civilisation of the white man.Fanon uses ‘white’ as a generic term for European civilisation and its representatives. In contrast, ‘black’ refers to the non-West in general. The question then becomes : can the non-West develop its own self-definition by using the tools and instruments of western civilisation ? In human sciences, Fanon detects a problem : they have their own drama. They have emerged from a particular cultural milieu and reflect the concerns and prejudices of that culture and worldview. If western civilisation and culture are responsible for colonial racism, and Europe itself has a racist structure, then we should not be too surprised to find this racism reflected in the discourses of knowledge that emanate from this civilisation and that they work to ensure that structural dominance is maintained. The seeds of inferiority of the non-West are already laid in the first chapter of 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. But western history not only writes cannibalism in the very chromosomes of the non-West, it also writes off the history of the non-West. History, both History of the West and History as perceived by the West, is transformed into a mighty river into which all Other histories flow and merge as mere minor and irrelevant tributaries. What Fanon detects in human sciences applies equally to social sciences. Anthropology was developed specifically to described, manage and contain the black man. Political science places white man at the apex and is deeply Eurocentric. Science and Empire went hand in hand : the consequent racial economy of science, where its benefits accrue primarily to the rich developed nations and its negative consequences are suffered largely by the developing countries, are patently plain. What Fanon says about the comics of the 1950s, the magazines are put together by white men for little white men, with their white heroes and evil black villains, works just as effectively in the way disciplines are taught, discourses are promoted, and knowledge is advanced. In all these areas there is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly… work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world. All these disciplines and discourses are the products of a culture which sees itself hierarchically at the top of the ladder of civilisation ; they postulate all that the world contains and all that the world has produced and produces, is by and for the white man. This is why it is taken as an a priori give that the white man is the predestined master of this world.
But the dominance of western culture, and its globalisation through this dominance, should not be confused with universalism. Just because a particular discipline or a discourse is accepted or practised throughout the world, it does not mean that discipline or discourse is universally valid and applicable to all societies. After all, as I have written elsewhere [4], burgers and coke are eaten and drunk throughout the world but one would hardly classify them as universally embraced, healthy and acceptable food : what the presence of burgers and coke in every city and town in the world demonstrate is not their universality but the power and dominance of the culture that produced them. The same logic applies to disciplines and discourses. When Fanon talks of universalism he is not talking of the alleged universalism of Western dominance which is a product of European history, emerges from western discourses, or is the gift of liberal humanists of the Enlightenment. His thinking lies elsewhere.
So what does Fanon means when he wants to transcend his ethnic perspectives and affiliation and wage his anti-colonial struggle in the name of universal human values ? What are we to make of the fact that he also sometimes roundly denounces this universalism ? Some post-colonial theorists have seen this as two different varieties of Fanon. Nicolas Harrison, for example, suggests the way to reconcile ‘these two distinct strains within Fanon’s writing, which is at times anti-universal and at times pro-universal (and anti-pseudo-universal) is to relativize/historicize them in terms of personal history and the changes in opinion that his experienced produced. Another would be to treat his varied claims as a writer’s rhetorical and/or strategic gestures, and to consider their efficacy in mobilizing opinion, generating solidarity, etc.’ [5]. But Fanon is not anti-universal per se – he is only anti a particular kind of universalism, one based on the notion of superiority which projects that superiority as a universal discourse. His stated purpose in examining (western) universalism is clear : I hope by analysing it to destroy it. There are not two contradictory but one single, unified position here. Moreover, Fanon is not concerned at all with postmodern ambiguity ; it could hardly be so given the devastating dominance of the coloniser he experienced firsthand. For him, the nuances in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised are irrelevant given the fact that the coloniser is totally deaf to the political condition of the colonised and what the colonised has to say.
Fanon’s idea of universalism is based on the notions of dignity, equality and equity : on a concrete and ever new understanding of man. It is a universalism that does not exist as yet, it cannot emerge from the dominant discourse, and it cannot be seen as a grand narrative that privileges a particular culture and its representatives. It is the universalism we need to struggle for and build. That is why Fanon is not content simply with knowledge and criticism. He wants man – and here he does mean man as the universal person – to be actional. Having thought, we must prepare to act. Our prime task as humans, he assert, is to preserve in all our relationship the respect for the basic values that constitute a human world. The world is not human. Don’t believe that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality, Fanon asserts. If you want a different reality, a different world, you have to change the one you have.
5. What matters is not to know the world but to change it
Fanon was not a postmodern theorist. His ideas emerged in the crucible of colonial experience, were put into practice, and used to aid the anti-colonial struggle. Indeed, by the time Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks, he had already fought for the French resistance in the Caribbean and against the Germans in France. He had lived in a racist society and felt its dark side ; he spoke with knowledge and experience. He is thus quite different from most post-colonial writers. But can we see him as the intellectual father of postcolonial studies ? As Jenny Sharpe notes, Fanon and other anti-colonial writers, such as C L R James, Aime Cesaire, Amilcar Cabral, Ngugi wa Thiong and Albert Memmi, ‘were geographically and historically removed from the institutional development of postcolonial studies. Unlike the literature of decolonisation, which was bound up with Third World national liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, postcolonial studies is primarily a First World academic discourse of the eighties and nineties’ [6]. Fanon did not have the luxury for theorising for the sake of theorising. And unlike many postcolonial texts, Black Skin, White Masks is not a technical manual of theory full of esoteric - but ultimately futile - jargon. Rather, it is a text full of passion, argument, analysis and anecdotes. Fanon wants to show that action does not follow automatically from understanding or theorising. Action requires aspiration and desire. That’s what he seeks to communicate ; that’s what he tries to promote.A great deal has changed since Fanon’s time. But the underlying structures of oppression and injustice remain the same. Empire shaped the current national identity of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. And Empire continues to play a key role in the psychological makeup, political and cultural outlook of Africa and Asia. The old European empires have been replaced by a new Empire, a hyperpower that wants to rule and mould the world in its own image. Its ‘war on terror’ has become a licence to flout every international law and notion of human rights. Racism, both in its most blatant and incipient forms, is the foundation of Fortress Europe – as is so evident in the re-emergence of the extreme right in Germany and Holland, France and Belgium, as well as Scandinavia, and the discourse of refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers and the Muslim population of Europe. Direct colonial rule may have disappeared ; but colonialism, in its many disguises as cultural, economic, political and knowledge-based oppression, lives on.
So Fanon’s voice is as important and relevant today as it was during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, in many respects it is even more so. For Fanon, the nature and mode of operation of oppression is irrelevant. It is utopian to try to ascertain in what ways one kind of inhuman behaviour differs from another kind of inhuman behaviour. The inhumanity of today is not different from the inhumanity of yesteryears for all sources of exploitation resemble one another ; they are all applied against the same ‘object’ : man. We need to do much more, Fanon insists, than simply be aware of this reality : we need to take continuous action to transform and transcend this reality.
As a critique of the West, Black Skin, White Masks has few equals. But its true value is as a clarion call against complacency. Fanon warns us to be perpetually on guard against the European unconscious where the most shameful desires lie dormant ; against modern society where life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt, and which spells death ; against the idea of progress where everyone climbs up towards whiteness and light and is engulfed by a single, monolithic notion of what it means to be human. And, most of all, he warns us to be vigilant to the constant and perpetual refashioning of hate : hate is not inborn ; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognised guilt complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviour ; in a sense, he has to become hate.
This message is as fresh today as when it was written. Fanon was far, far ahead of his time. This is why he is disliked by some. This is why he is misunderstood by others. This is exactly why you should know him and listen to what he says. And if you recognise yourself in his words, then like him, I say, you have made a step forward.
Notes
1. Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, 1987, p53.
2. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, OUP, Delhi, 1983, p30.
3. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, Verso, London, 1997, p145.
4. For a more detailed discussion of this see my essay ‘Beyond development : an Islamic perspective’ in Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures : A Ziauddin Sardar Reader, edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell, Pluto Press, London, 2003 ; and Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge, London, Pluto Press, 2002.
5. Nicolas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, Polity, Oxford, 2003, p158.
6. Jenny Sharpe, ‘US Multiculturalism’, in Postcolonial Studies edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, p114.
