by Fezokuhle Mthonti
My
approach in this paper will be slightly unorthodox. I will speak about Barack Obama and Bill
Cosby. I will talk to you about theatre and its performers and in so doing will
relay to you, my first encounter with Frantz Fanon. My approach to this paper
will be two -fold 1) My encounter with Fanon as live and present body on stage
and 2) My encounter with Fanon through the medium of television, as I
watched the Cosby Show and reconciled myself with the Politics
of Respectability.
Encountering
Fanon through presence; my encounter as live and present body on stage:
As soon
as the reader opens up the first pages of Black
Skin, White Mask they encounter Fanon pacing up and down a room while his soon-to-be
wife, Josie, transcribes every word that he says. I imagine that they encounter
Fanon gesticulating frantically while he declares certain words to his scribe,
and then, moving slowly and deliberately while he stops to think about what he
has said.
They
encounter a man who is propelled by his own thoughts; they encounter an
unfolding consciousness. More
than that, the reader encounters the immediacy and the unrelenting nature of
Fanon’s presence.
Pakistani
born and London based cultural theorist and public intellectual, Ziauddin
Sardar says the following about this text in the foreword to Black Skin, White Mask: “above all the
text has an immediacy that engages and stirs. We can feel a soil in turmoil,
hear a voice that speaks directly to us, and see the injustices descried being
lived in front of our eyes.”(1952:xi)Sardar goes on to say that “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”
(2008:xi).
Because
of the way in which this text was written, I think that it reveals a blatant
and uncensored honesty from Fanon. It is one man’s exploration of his own truth
and because of this, I feel that there
are certain demands placed on me as a reader to engage with this text as openly
and as truthfully as possible.
That
being said, I would like to frame my analysis through the lens of a performer
and theatre maker. I would argue that
the kind of presence and immediacy that Fanon evokes and expects in this book, is
that which is expected of a performer every single time they go into rehearsal
or perform for a live audience.
In a book entitled, The Empty Space, Director and Theatre Practitioner Peter Brook
describes the theatre as an “arena where a living confrontation can take
place.” (1968:122) Brooks goes on to say that the theatre “always asserts
itself in the present. This is what can make it real than the normal stream of
consciousness. This is also what can make it so disturbing” (1968:122).
I think that this idea of a living confrontation
is very relevant to Fanon’s work. To borrow Brook’s phrase “this is a picture
of the author at the moment of writing: searching within a decaying and
evolving theatre. (1968:123)Black Skin, White Mask is a continual
exploration of different living consciousness’s and the struggles they go
through in accepting or rejecting their status as black and white subjects.
It is the interplay between characters like
Mayotte Capécias and her white grandmother. It is the confrontation of Jean
Veneuse and the white man who sees his him solely as ‘the other’ and the white women
who continue to reject his advances. It is also a confrontation between the
‘two million whites against almost thirteen million natives [and the fact that
it hasn’t] occurred to a single black to consider himself superior to a member
of the white minority” (1952:68).
It is the confrontation of all these consciousness’s
that I am interested in, with the understanding that no two moments can be the
same. This underscores the nature of theatre for me; the performer is always
aware of their own engagement and response to the character that they inhabit
as well as their engagement with the audiences that then come to watch them.
The performer has to consistently engage in a form of double consciousness while
constantly being tasked with finding presence and finding truth within the
moment. In finding a way to reconcile truth in a moment then allows the
performer to move onto the next scene.
Fanon himself takes the concept of presence and
the present quite seriously in the closing chapters of his book. He argues that
“the problem considered here is one of time. Those Negroes and white men will
be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialised
Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalienation will
come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive”
(1952:176).
The
Cosby Show and the Politics of Respectability.
If he(sic) is overwhelmed to such a degree by the wish to be
white, it is because he lives in a society that makes his inferiority complex
possible, in a society that derives its stability from the perpetuation of this
complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race; to the
identical degree to which that society creates difficulties for him, he will
find himself thrust into a neurotic situation.(1952:74)
In
reading Fanon’s chapter of The Negro and
Language, one is introduced to a colonised subject who seeks to emancipate
themselves by increasing their proximity to whiteness, through mastering the colonial language and
through changing the physical carriage of their body. This is in an effort to
be recognisable to the city of the coloniser and its inhabitants.
Fanon points to this rehearsed claim to dignity
and humanity through telling the story of a Negro who quietly repeats to
himself, “Yes, I must take great pains with my speech, because I shall be more or less judged by it. With
great contempt they shall see me” (1965:11).
With this understanding of the colonised
subject’s plight, we see that the Black subject almost has to act and gesticulate
differently. They have to assume a character and they have to think about the
distribution of the weight in their bodies so that they do not resemble the
Negro which is still in a stage of “slow evolution monkey into man”
(1965:8) The colonised subject is under
enormous strain not to act or look like something that is unrecognisable to the
ways of the coloniser. In fact, Fanon says that “furtively observing the
slightest reactions of others, listening to his own speech , suspicious of his own tongue –a wretchedly lazy organ he
(sic) will lock himself into his room and read aloud for hours-desperately
determined to learn diction” (1965:11).
It will
be my assertion that this phenomena that Fanon has referred to here is what Mychal
Denzel Smith has called a ‘respectability politics or The Politics of
Respectability’. This is the belief that “one can overcome any kind of racism
(or any other form of oppression) by way of your own personal actions,
presenting one’s self as a citizen worthy of respect as defined by way of your
personal actions” (2013:1).
I would argue that this is also the way in which
black subjects arrest their bodies in
particular ways so that they are more palatable to the norms dictated to by
white normativity. For example, this idea can manifest itself in the need for
black women to incessantly wear their hair differently from the way in which it
grows from their scalp; this is so that they can attain a job, or at the very
least, look presentable. It is also in the way that black men have to cower and
make themselves smaller in the presence of white females, lest they be accused
of being sexual predators. “To express it in genetic terms, his (sic) phenotype
undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation”(1952:9).
This kind of a ‘physiological politics of
respectability’ not only articulates itself in the French colonies that have
been described by Fanon, but these
politics are also pervasive in contemporary understandings of black people in
all societies that have not reconciled
themselves with non-racialism.
As a young girl in KwaZulu Natal, I was not
distinctly taught about ‘the politics of respectability’ but I was aware of
what my white neighbours deemed ‘good black people.’ These ‘good black people’
looked like the characters on the Cosby Show.
There was nothing about that family that was distinctly black (except
for their skin colour) but there was a lot about them that was distinctly white
or, rather, there was an overwhelming amount of similarities with their
characters and that of other predominantly white sitcoms. So in an attempt to become recognisable in my
own community I started to practice the grammar of respectability using the
template of Cosby Show. I started to
emulate Rudy Huxtable, the youngest of the Huxtable family; I wore sensible
clothes that weren’t too bright, I asked my mother to relax my hair and I stared
to practice my enunciations of words with a particular R twang. Although these
characters were not necessarily white, they were well rehearsed in the grammar
of whiteness. I had started to inject
into the “labyrinth of [my] arteries [and], entrenched in [to my] little pink
fingernails, a solidly rooted, white dignity.”(1965:36)
However, as I will show in subsequent analysis,
‘the politics of respectability’ can be damaging. This is not only in the way that it can act as
a form of erasure of one’s identity , leaving the black subject in a ‘black
abyss’ but also in the way that it can affect larger black communities.
In an article entitled Respectability Politics Won’t Save Us: On the Death of Jonathan Ferrel by
Mychal Denzel Smith, Smith unpacks how influential figures like CNN anchor Don
Lemon and renowned comedian, Bill Cosby can be dismissive of the kinds of
institutional problems around racism that affect the livelihood and the
development of black people in the United States of America. In fact President
Barack Obama’s recent initiative entitled My
Brother’s Keeper which seeks to mentor and correct the behaviour of men of
colour in the USA, has come up against a lot of criticism from the African
community because of its inability to locate the problems that these young men
face in the kinds of structural inequality and racism that alienate these young
men.
Instead of dealing with these institutional and
ideological problems these individuals have asked these black communities to increase their
proximity to whiteness, ‘by getting an education and getting up and out of the
projects’ and in so doing, assume that they have then corrected the problem.
It
would be my assertion that Smith finds Lemon and Cosby to be part of a long
tradition of men and women who hope to ‘save the race by not slipping back into
blackness!’ They form part of a
collective that “no longer [tries] to negrify the world,” but rather, tries in
their own bodies and in their own minds “to bleach it” in the same way that Mayotte
Capécias seeks to correct, what she understands as the mistake of her
blackness. (1952:30) Some of the individuals that have canonised The Politics of Respectability, are for
Smith, individuals like Booker T. Washington, Elijah Muhammed, Condelezza Rice
and ,more recently, President Barack Obama.
Having
said that, it then important to interrogate how and why The Politics of Respectability can be damaging, especially if it is
legitimated by the above named black leaders. I would argue that this kind of
politicking works on the plane of fictive kinship.
I have
come to understand the term fictive kinship through the work of African
American academic, Mellissa Harris-Perry who defines it as “the connections
between members of a group who are unrelated by blood or marriage, but who
nonetheless share reciprocal social or economic relationships.”(2011:102) I am
particularly interested in the kinds of racial connections that can arise from
fictive kinship, and in this instance, the connections that the likes of Lemon,
Cosby and Obama share with an imagined, African African community, is the
colour of their skin. Harris-Perry goes on further to say that “this imagined
community of familial ties underscores a voluntary sense of shared identity”
(2011:102).
That
being said however, these ideas do not account for the fact that some people,
like the urban poor, are rendered unrecognisable to the state and whenever they
try to use the law and the constitution they are met with contempt and violence
from the state.
These
ideas are dangerous because they are informed by a misrecognition of the
problem.
While
these ideas are disseminated in good faith and in the hopes of encouraging
their imagined familial ties, these kinds of claims can be damaging, because
they further alienate and misrecognise the pervasive racism within those
societies. Smith argues that it does not reflect their own truths, but rather,
“they erase an even larger truth about racism” (2014:1).
In
fact, I would argue that these kind of statements act as kind of collective
shaming.
It is
the kind of ‘collective shaming’ that Black Consciousness thinker, Steve Biko
abhors in his own article entitled The
Church as seen by a Young Layman where he criticises black ministers for adding
“insecurity by its inward-directed definition of the concept of sin and its
encouragement of the mea culpa attitude”(1978:61) The Latin phrase mea culpa which is used by Biko, is ordinarily used as a Catholic expression to
denote the acknowledgement of one’s fault. In this particular instance, the
phrase is used as a means in which black people can acknowledge their own
complicity in poverty, as well as of complicity, in their self-induced
alienation from the state. This kind of politics can be damaging because it
denies the majority of black people within that country, their own experiences
of institutional race and class discrimination.
These
ideas rest on The So-Called Dependency
Complex that Fanon wishes to refute. They position themselves as a
consistent reminder of their oppression. Instead of the white man (sic)
reinforcing this alienation from the world, I would contend that the Politics
of Respectability allow black subjects to not only remind each other of their
shortcomings, but to also further entrench cycles of inferior epidermalisation.
Fanon says that “I begin to suffer not being a white man to the degree that the
white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonised native, robs me of
all worth, all individuality, tells me that I am a parasite to the world [and]
that I must bring myself as quickly as possible onto step with the white
world” (1952:73).
Moreover,
I would argue that the politics of the ‘politics of respectability’ are
responsible for the creation of Fanon’s conception of a middle class society.
For Fanon, a middle class society is “any society that become rigidified in
predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all
discovery. I call middle class a closed society a closed society in which life
has no taste , in which the air is tainted, in which the men and the ideas are
corrupted” (1952:175).
The
kind of society that Fanon describes to us is in fact a dying society and these
traits are becoming more and more visible in our contemporary socio-political
societies. That being said however, Fanon does not want us to sit in our
nihilism. He wills the reader to action through embarking on a quest for a true
humanism.
For
Fanon, the ultimate goal is to find one’s own self in the world and to
recognise that you have one right alone: “that of demanding human behaviour
from the other!” (1952:179)
As
Fanon draws to a standstill in his room, he both asks the reader a simple
question and gives them a direct instruction: “Was my freedom not given to me
then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I
want the world to recognise with me, the open door of every consciousness”
(1952:181).
References Used
Biko.
S. 1978. I Write What I Like. London:
The Bowerdean Press
Brook.
P. 1968. The Empty Space. New York :Simon
and Schuster
Fanon.
F. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press
Harris-Perry.
M. 2011. Sister Citizen: Shame,
Stereotype and Black Women in America.
New Haven: Yale University Press
Smith.
M. D. 2013. Respectability Politics Won’t
Help Us: On the Death of Jonathan Ferrell.
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176183/respectability-politics-wont-save-us-death-jonathan-ferrell
