Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1906, at the beginning of what would prove to be a century of great turbulence. Two cataclysmic wars would ravage Europe as ‘modernity’ shuddered through society. In a climate of alienation, marginalization and violence, Sartre developed his diagnosis of the human condition. His writings – plays, biographies, novels and notebooks – explored the problems of “existential thought (la contingence) and the vicissitudes of social history through the troubled lives of individual actors” (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). With the smoke of Auschwitz still looming large over a continent in ruin after the Second World War, Sartre’s political work interrogated how the devastations of fascism, racism and inequality had erupted, and what their effects were on the individual psyche (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). In 1944, as the war petered out in Europe and an increasing number of Jews returned home from Nazi Germany, Sartre set out to examine the roots of anti-Semitism in France. Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflections sur la question juive) examined the “interpersonal construction of personal identities” in the dramatic personae of the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew (Walzer, 1995:xxvi). His central claim, perhaps: identity and culture cannot be reduced to timeless essences; they are socially constituted within historical situations; and both individual and group perceptions are intimately tied to the (often hostile) perceptions of the “other/s” (Walzer, 1995:xxiii).
The
reception of Anti-Semite extended beyond the French public.
“Certain pages of Anti-Semite and Jew,” wrote Frantz
Fanon, “are the finest that I have ever read. The finest, because
the problem discussed in them grips in our guts” (1952:140). The
book provided the central thrust to the fifth chapter of Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) entitled “The Fact of
Blackness”. “Sartre has made a masterful study of the problem of
anti-Semitism,” he wrote, “let us try to determine what are the
constituents of Negrophobia” (1952:124). In this essay I will try
to identify some of the parallels between what Sartre found in his
study of anti-Semitism and what Fanon discovered to be true of the
so-called “black problem” in his own studies and personal
experience as a black man in a world of whiteness. My intention is
not to portray Sartre as the original author of Fanon’s thoughts:
Fanon did not simply adopt wholesale Sartre’s ideas and apply them
to the colonial situation. Sartre did not ‘cause’ Fanon. The
process by which both men developed their later anti-colonial
philosophies was instead a dialogical one. Fanon employed many
aspects of Sartre’s existentialism, but disagreed with him on many
too. And as Fanon was influenced by Sartre, so the reverse was also
true. Fanon’s ideas can be detected in Sartre’s writings on
colonialism. “Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice,”
Sartre wrote in the Preface to Wretched of the Earth (1963),
“they would do well to read Fanon” (18). What follows should
therefore be read not as proof that Fanon’s ideas are in fact those
of a white man, but rather a demonstration that ideas, both those
that support oppression and those that militate against it, resonate
across space and time, evolving both consciously and unconsciously
through the structures of society and the minds of the people who
inhabit it.
In
what follows I will examine some of the points of resonance between
Sartrean and Fanonian thought. In the process I will point to what I
consider to be some of the specific parallels between the ideas
contained in Anti-Semite and Jew, and those in Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks. If I have quoted extensively, it is only
because I believed that the lyricism of these two great writers would
be compromised by over-zealous attempts to paraphrase. If I have
spoken overwhelmingly in the masculine form, it is only because
Sartre’s dramatic personae are all presented as male (Walzer,
1995:ix). But to be sure, the positions specified are ones shared by
men and women alike.
To
begin this comparison, I will examine what are some of the central
tenets of Sartre’s existential philosophy. “The first principle
of existentialism,” according to Sartre (1965) is that “man is
nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first
principle of existentialism.” In the age in which God is dead,
there is nothing which we can call “human nature” or a human
“essence” because “to begin with [man] is nothing… he will
not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of
himself”. Thus, the existentialists believe that “existence
precedes essence”. This is to be contrasted with the
theistic conception, which holds that:
God makes man according
to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures
a paper-knife, following a definition and formula. Thus each
individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which
dwells in the divine understanding.
The
assertion that man wholly defines himself through experiences in the
world over the course of his life not only flies in the face of the
divine vision that “man is created in God’s image”; even
atheists like Diderot, Voltaire and Kant believed that “each man is
a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of
Man” (Sartre, 1965). The existentialist turn was thus a radical
one, and Fanon too was drawn to it. If existence precedes essence,
then arguments that assert the black’s supposedly essential
backwardness and savagery fall flat. More than this, if man is
what he makes of himself (excuse the masculine), then society is what
men (and women) make of it. Fanon (1952:4) wrote that “man is what
brings society into being. The prognosis is in the hands of those who
are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure”.
Of
course, the human agent is not entirely free to see whatever
reality he imagines instantiated on earth. The human being is
limited: it occupies an organic body which is born and which must
die, it is immersed in a physical world and is bound in a specific
temporality. This is what might be called our facticity, and
none of us can escape it except through a wilful act of
self-deception, an act which can only, at best, be partially
successful. We will look at such attempts later in relation to both
the anti-Semite and the inauthentic Jew. But while the world we
inhabit may restrict us, there is again no human essence
hard-wired into our facticity. We are limited but not
determined by the fact of our embodiment in a physical world. Rather,
our facticity is the condition for the possibility of our acting at
all. If the world does not exist, then nor can our freedom.
Existentialism,
Sartre continues, is underpinned by an ethic of responsibility, of
action and of self-commitment: “when a man commits himself to
anything he [or she] cannot escape from the sense of complete and
profound responsibility” (Sartre, 1965). Existentialists believe
that we possess an inherent freedom to genuinely choose between a
range of options at any one time. That is not to say that the quality
of the choices offered is always appealing. Anti-Semitism and racism,
to be sure, do not offer the Jew or the black person a desirable
spectrum of choice. But even in such oppressive atmospheres, we are
free to make an undetermined choice nonetheless. “The slave in
chains is as free as his master”, goes Sartre’s famous dictum.
Chains only exercise external restriction, but one can never be
robbed of the capacity to choose. And we are responsible for the
choices we make. We are more than just actors following a script
authored by God, or indeed microcosmic manifestations of a “universal
Idea”, playing our determined role in its dialectic unfolding, as
Hegel would have it (Wahl in Sartre, 1988:5). No. History has no end
point, no grand telos. Instead, a vast expanse of nothingness
is what stands before us as human subjects. On the occasion we catch
a glimpse of this nothingness and we are filled with anguish, for we
know that we alone are responsible for what comes next: “we are
left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man
is condemned to be free… from the moment he is thrown into the
world, he is responsible for everything he does” (Sartre, 1965).
This is what Sartre calls the “human condition”: while limited by
our ‘situation’ in a particular time and space, we are
nonetheless free to choose how to respond to this facticity and
thereby capable of transcending it. This is existentialism’s
only assertion of universality: a universal capacity for
transcendence, or, as Fanon put it, “the open door of every
human consciousness” (Fanon, 1982:181).
A
coward is only a coward because he chooses to be so. A hero makes
himself thus through his chosen deeds. And the anti-Semite makes of
himself an anti-Semite through a “free and total choice” (Sartre,
1948:11). Every moment holds the possibility for any one of them to
choose to be something other than what they are (Sartre, 1965). It is
anguish that greets the coward who realises that he could just as
well have acted heroically up until his present juncture. So too is
the anti-Semite in anguish, though he will vehemently deny it: “there
are many, indeed, who show no such anxiety. But [existentialists]
affirm that they are merely disguising their anguish or are in flight
from it” (Sartre, 1965). This is Sartre’s final prognosis of the
anti-Semite: he is afraid of the human condition (Sartre, 1948:38).
Though the anti-Semite’s choice “emanates from freedom, it
ultimately annihilates that freedom” (Sartre, 1965). In his dogged
determination to remain what he is and deny that he can be anything
other than that, the anti-Semite denies his transcendence and is thus
enveloped in bad faith, demonstrating “a basic fear of oneself and
of truth” (Sartre, 1948:12). And Sartre (1965) believes we should
judge such self-deception harshly:
I can form judgements
upon those who seek to hide from themselves the wholly voluntary
nature of their existence and its complete freedom. Those who hide
from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with
deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards.
We
should rightly judge these people as cowards, not simply because they
are running away from the their own freedom, but because they run
from the fact that others are free. It is from self-deception that
the forces of oppression bubble forth. Indeed, I have yet to mention
another aspect of facticity, one that is crucial to our present
exploration; that is, that the human subject does not inhabit the
world alone. Rather, he finds that he shares it with other people,
“and discovers them as the condition of his own existence”
(Sartre, 1965). It is only through the mediation of others that we
can come to know any truth about ourselves:
Under these conditions,
the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation
of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot
think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at
once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of
“inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to
decide what he is and what others are (Sartre, 1965; emphasis
mine)
It
is unfortunate for the Jew that what many decided to do with their
freedom was to make anti-Semites of themselves, and, in the process,
a Jew of him. For it is “the anti-Semite that creates the Jew”
(Sartre, 1948:101). Not everyone has been wholly convinced by this
assertion however. They object to the implication that the Jew is but
the figment of the anti-Semite’ imagination which was subsequently
internalised by Jews (Rybalka, 1999:165; Sungolowsky,
1963). Jews do exist independently as a distinct
cultural or religious group, irrespective of the imagination of the
anti-Semite, they counter. And indeed, at times in Anti-Semite and
Jew, Sartre does appear to attribute the anti-Semite with more of
an objective reality than the Jew, who by contrast appears as an
almost ghostly figure, purely a product of a wild and racist
imagination rather than identifiable being. On this point I would
concur. Sartre’s claim that Jews have no history apart from a “long
martyrdom [and] a long passivity” (Sartre, 1948:47) that emerged
purely as a function of anti-Semites’ invention of the category of
“Jew” cannot withstand the fact that there existed a very rich,
historical Jewish identity before the anti-Semite invented his
impoverished version of the Jew. Jewish identity amounts to far more
than simply negation. But while the anti-Semite may not create the
Jew, I believe Sartre is not wrong when he asserts that the
anti-Semite creates the Jew in the sense of creating an idea of
the Jew which, for a time, reigned hegemonic in Europe through the
anti-Semite’s cowardly attempts to flee from freedom, from his
capacity for transcendence. Indeed, the idea is all that
matters to the anti-Semite – he cares little about what history the
Jew actually has. His concern is not to find truth. Indeed, as we
have elaborated, it is truth he is fleeing. Yes: the Jew loves money,
the Jew is underhanded, the Jew is evil incarnate. Sartre (1948:8)
asserts that this idea of the Jew, “of his nature and of his role
in society”, is one which is formed in advance in the mind of the
anti-Semite, a priori – before experience. The Jew becomes
entrapped by this fictional idea, he is objectified by it, it makes
of him an “essence” – “a substantial form [which] the Jew,
whatever he does, cannot modify, any more than fire can keep itself
from burning” (Sartre, 1948:27). Every thought, every action is
tainted by his Jewishness. Yet Sartre asserts that it is not only the
Jew who is enslaved by this vision. The anti-Semite too is (wilfully)
shackled by the idea of the Jew with shattering psychological
effects. It drains him of humanity, he becomes “a pitiless stone, a
furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man”
(Sartre, 1948:38).
Sartre
asserts that it is a sense of mediocrity that led the anti-Semite to
invent his vision of the Jew. Unwilling to face up to the fact that
it is he who is responsible for his own mediocrity, terrified
by the vast nothingness that his freedom opens up before him,
stricken by the anguish that comes from realising that he could be
other than the pitiful being he has shaped up to be, he creates the
idea of the Jew through what is a spineless and perpetual act of
self-delusion in the hope of escape from his own freedom. And he
joins a chorus of people who attempt to do the same:
The anti-Semite has no
illusions about what he is. He considers himself an average man,
modestly average, basically mediocre. There is no example of an
anti-Semite’s claiming individual superiority over the Jews. But
you must not think that he is ashamed of his mediocrity; he takes
pleasure in it; I will even assert that he has chosen it. This man
fears every kind of solitariness, that of the genius, as much as that
of the murderer; he is the man of the crowd. However small his
stature, he takes every precaution to make it smaller, lest he stand
out from the herd and find himself face to face with himself (Sartre,
1948:15)
The
anti-Semite is mediocre because he fears being alone. He believes his
mediocrity is unchangeable because he is afraid of being free. And he
“makes of this irremediable mediocrity a rigid aristocracy” by
which he is able to assert his own superiority (Sartre, 1948:28). In
this endeavour, Sartre argues, the anti-Semite finds “the existence
of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise to whom would he be
superior?” (Sartre, 1948:28). It is this dependence that leads
Sartre to proclaim “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would
invent him” – a notion which Fanon would echo many years: “have
the courage to say it outright: it is the racist who creates his
inferior” (Fanon, 1952:69). “‘Dirty nigger!’ (Fanon,
1952:82): like the anti-Semite, so the anti-black racist comes to be
imprisoned by his ideas, of blackness and of whiteness. The racist is
dehumanised in his dehumanising the black: “the white man slaves to
reach a human level … The white man is sealed in his whiteness”
(Fanon, 1952:2). And mediocrity, too, lies at the foundations of
self-deceptive attempts to deny that the black is but human:
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.”
(David Diop in
Fanon, 1952:104).
Fanon,
like Sartre, believes that identity is not a natural given, but is
rather sociogenic in origin – that is, it is socially
constructed (1952:4). It is this – this scandalous invention
undertaken by the white racist in bad faith – that leads Fanon
(1952:1) to declare on the first page of Black Skin, “at the
risk of arousing the resentment of [his] coloured brothers … that
the black is not a man.” Rather, blackness was invented “by the
other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details,
anecdotes, stories” (Fanon, 1952:84). The black is savage, the
black is brutish, the black is illiterate: another set of a priori
“truths”. Yet Fanon points out a fundamental difference
between the plight of the Jew and that of the black person: it is
only the idea of the Jew by which condemns him and, as such:
the Jew can be unknown
in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits.
His actions, his behaviour are the final determinant. He is a white
man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can
sometimes go unnoticed (Fanon, 1952:87)
Sartre
himself pointed to this potential for evasion: “one may love a
Jewess very well if one does not know what her race is” (1948:7).
But unlike the Jew, who is “overdetermined from the inside”
(Sartre, 1948:95), the black person cannot hope to evade detection.
The black skin is a cloak of essentialised backwardness worn on the
outside of the body. There is no mistaking it: “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 other
has of me but of my appearance” (Fanon, 1952:87; emphasis mine).
Nonetheless,
Fanon still regards the Jew as “my brother in misery” (1952:92).
Indeed, there are more points of resonance than departure in the
plight of both the Jew and the Negro. There are marked similarities,
for example, in the manner in which both the Jew and the Negro come
to discover that they are condemned by a society which regards them
as essences. “Some children,” writes Sartre (1948:75):
at the age of five or
six, have already had fights with schoolmates who call them “Yids”.
Others may remain ignorant for a long time… But however it comes
about, some day they must learn the truth: sometimes from the smiles
of those around them, sometimes from rumour or insult. The later the
discovery, the more violent the shock. Suddenly they perceive that
others know something about them that they do not know, that people
apply to them an ugly and upsetting term that is not used I their own
families.
The
discovery process is just as traumatic for the black child: “the
first encounter with a white man oppresses him with the whole weight
of his blackness” (Fanon, 1952:116). “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon,
1952:82)
Running
through the lived experience of both the Jew and the Negro is also a
sense of irreconcilable duality within – what W.E.B. Du Bois would
call “double consciousness”. I am describing the state in which
the subject finds him/herself torn between two worlds. The world to
which the subject must accommodate him/herself, the hegemonic order,
is one structured by the self-deceptive denial of what the subject
knows to be true. It is a world which asserts that the Jew or the
Negro is merely an essence. But all the while, the subject lives
and breathes the truth of his transcendence: he knows he is not
timeless substance but rather a human being whose future is as yet
unwritten. The Jewish child, writes Sartre (1948:76), “feels that
he is set apart, but he still does not understand what sets him
apart; he is sure of only one thing: no matter what he does, he is
and will remain a Jew”. Similarly, Fanon writes: “Negroes are
savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these
statements were false” (1952:88).
“The
time had long since passed,” he continues, “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”
(1952:88). This points to another aspect that characterises the lived
experience of both the Jew and the Negro: a deep and abiding desire
to escape the mould crafted for them but not by them through the
passionate hatred of their tormentor. It is accompanied always by a
profound sense of inescapability: the more he flees, the more he is
trapped. Sartre asserts that the “inauthentic Jew” who seeks
continually for a means of escaping his/her Jewishness is condemned
to fail: “he wants people to receive him as “a man”, but even
in the circles which he has been able to enter, he is received as a
Jew”; he is the “rich or powerful Jew… the ‘good’ Jew, the
exceptional Jew, with whom one associates in spite of his
race” (Sartre, 1948:71). One hears a similar tale of futility from
Fanon (1952:88): “it was always the Negro teacher, the Negro
doctor” and “when people like me, they tell me it is in spite
of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not
because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal
circle.” One can pinpoint this shared situation to a fundamental
problem of recognition. Indeed, it is the case with both the
inauthentic Jew and the Negro that “reason” is appealed to in
trying to demonstrate that the only essence they carry is that of
being essentially human; and it is the case in both that this appeal
to reason fails: “people will always reject the proof which [is]
furnished” (Sartre, 1948:59). The anti-Semite, Sartre writes
(1948:13) is “afraid of reasoning”, wishing only for
the kind of life
wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein
one seeks only what has already been found. This is nothing but
passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning-like
certainty; it alone can hold reason in leach; it alone can remain
impervious to experience and last for a whole lifetime. The
anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; from the outset
he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons (emphasis added)
Fanon
(1952:90) too writes that the belief that the white man could be
convinced of the black person’s humanity “Played cat and mouse”
with him:
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 like us he has his heart on the left side. But on
certain points the white man remained intractable.
And
just as Sartre asserts that the Jew “remains like a hard kernel in
the circles which accept him” (1948:100), surrounded at all times
by an “impalpable atmosphere, which is genuine France” in
which the Jew is continually reminded that “he has no part”
(1948:59), Fanon writes: “all around 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…”
(1952:86). In both cases, the appeal to reason fails. Neither the Jew
nor the Negro, it seems, can escape their condemnation through the
path of rationality.
This
futility of trying to escape does not, however, prevent either from
continually trying. And this has the consequence of fracturing what
could be a united front of resistance against the forces that
objectify and oppress them. Sartre writes of the fact that the
inauthentic Jew often turned against other Jews, sometimes displaying
even fiercer anti-Semitism than the anti-Semite:
When there is another
Jew with him, he feels himself endangered before the others [and he
now] looks at his coreligionist with the eyes of an anti-Semite
spying out with a mixture of fear and fatalism the objective signs of
their common origin (1948:103).
Fanon
too recounts how he tried to find solace and solidarity with his
“brothers, Negroes like myself” but, to his horror, “they too
reject me, They are almost white. And besides they are about to marry
white women. They will have children faintly tinged with brown. Who
knows, perhaps little by little” (1952:88)
The
anti-Semite will never accept the Jew as a transcendent being any
more than the anti-black racist will come to accept the “open door”
of the consciousness which inhabits a black body. Another way to
explain this intransigence may be to evoke the notion of “secular
theodicy” as articulated by Lewis Gordon (2007:7). Theodicy
describes the mechanism by which belief in an all-good, all-powerful
God is reconciled with the existence of evil – a fundamental
contradiction. Despite the death of God, however, this logic remains
in the modern era in the form of secular theodicy, which seeks
to prove that the existence of oppression and inequality in the world
does not negate the ultimate benevolence and justice of the
overarching social, economic and political systems which structure
our world. Trouillot (1995:84) too points to the operation of secular
theodicy when he argues that “built into any system of domination
is the tendency to proclaim its own normalcy”. It is secular
theodicy which allowed the anti-Semite to turn a blind eye as Jews
were rounded up across Europe and herded into crematoria; it is
secular theodicy which attempts to cast black people as “problem
people”. Writes Sartre (1948:28):
The anti-Semite is
afraid of discovering that the world is ill-contrived, for then it
would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that
man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened
with an agonizing and infinite responsibility. Thus he localizes all
the evil of the universe in the Jew.
And
later: “the anti-Semite has his conscience on his side: he is a
criminal in a good cause” (1948:35). So too in the case of the
white person who seeks to externalise blackness from a world of
unsullied whiteness: “Indeed no, the good and merciful God cannot
be black: He is a white man with bright pink cheeks” (Fanon,
1952:36)
In
the Manichaean world of “good versus evil” which the operation of
theodicy reinscribes, “no reconciliation is conceivable [between
the good anti-Semite/white and the evil Jew/Negro]; one of them must
triumph and the other be annihilated” (Sartre, 1948:41). Neither
the Jew nor the Negro can wait on the generosity of their tormentors
to recognise their inclusion in the human world. The only recourse is
authenticity: accepting that the identity which is imposed
upon them is as real as a brick wall in that its oppressive effects
are not imaginary but experienced perpetually. For Sartre, the
“authentic Jew”: “knows himself and wills himself into history
as a historic and damned creature; he ceases to run away from himself
and to be ashamed of his own kind. He understands that society is
bad.” (Sartre, 1948:136). For Fanon, however, the solution is not
so simple: “The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in
order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes” (1952:107).
Indeed, Sartre inhabited a very different world from that of Fanon.
He was white. The “Negro suffers in his body quite differently from
the white man”, a fact which Fanon believed “Jean-Paul Sartre had
forgotten” (Fanon, 1952:106).
But
Sartre was not a Jew either. And his characterisation of Jewishness
in purely negative terms, as a “not yet
historical” people, bears testimony to this. Michael Walzer
(1995:xiv) points out that many of the Jewish intellectuals whom
Sartre would have considered “inauthentic” were “not only
trying to escape anti-Semitism and the anti-Semite’s construction
of Jewishness, they were also escaping the closed communities and
orthodox traditionalism of their own Jewish past – a presence, not
an absence”. Thus, while Sartre characterisation of the
anti-Semite’s denial of transcendence is chillingly convincing, his
prescription for the reclamation of this freedom on the part of the
Jew through the assertion of “authenticity” is far less so.
Perhaps this is the reason why Sartre ends Anti-Semite and Jew
blithely pronouncing the classless society to come: he was not the
one stuck waiting for the revolution to come, hungering for the
radical overturning of a world which essentialised and condemned him.
By
contrast, there was far less distance between Fanon and the object of
his study. Indeed, he was the object – ever reaching forward
in the hope of seizing hold of his subjectivity – “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”
(Fanon, 1952:85) – and ever finding this transcendence denied. The
slave in chains may realise that he is indeed as free as his master,
but that does not alter the fact that his bondage is agonizing.
Perhaps this is the reason why Fanon ends his chapter on “The Fact
of Blackness” in despair:
I feel in myself a soul
as immense as the world, truly 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 disembowelled silence fell back upon me, its
wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and
Infinity, I began to weep. (Fanon, 1952:108)
References:
Fanon,
F., 1952, Black Skin, White Masks, Pluto
Press: London.
Fanon,
F., 1963, The Wretched of the Earth,
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