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(African) Fanon claims that Césaire was the first to show him that ‘it is
fine and good to be a Negro’ (African: 21)
black consciousness
Fanon’s critique of
negritude (as we shall see in a later chapter) targeted its:
_ essentialism, rejecting an idea of ‘the’ African culture, as if it was
pure and monolithic;
_ temporality, rejecting any idea of the African past, as if there is any
pre-colonial pure African past. 30
Fanon’s
(existential) emphasis on radical freedom, taken, I suggest, from
Sartre, is what makes him depart from negritude and Césaire. There
is no essential blackness, just as there is no essential whiteness – ‘the
Negro is not. Any more than the white man’, writes Fanon (180).34
Fanon’s humanism is not the western humanism inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment –
which was complicit with colonialism. Neither does it encourage the essentialisms of negritude (Haddour
2005: 300). ‘I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of
demanding human behavior from the other’, writes Fanon (Black Skin: 179). 35
The sense of self-hood, often called ‘subjectivity’, cannot be entirely dependent upon one-self. Individuals
develop a sense of self only in relation with other selves, other individuals in society. I am I because I am not
you, in my difference from you. So in order to have a sense of ‘I’ it needs a ‘you’.
You have to recognize me, acknowledge me as different, therein lies my sense of self. In other words,
subjectivity, as Fanon proposes following
INFLUENCES AND ENGAGEMENTS 35
Sartre, and the existentialists discover, is intersubjectivity. What Fanon’s
existential humanism does is to cultivate an (perhaps utopian) ideal of
a universalism based on difference, of mutual recognition and the
decolonization of both the colonizer and the colonized. 36 – 37
freud believes the root of trauma is in individual’ syche an dfamily, fanon disagrees.
Fanon begins with the idea that the black man is only the other (with
the ‘o’ in lower case to distinguish it from the Other) to the white man.
This condition where the Self is denied selfhood reduces the black man
to an object rather than a human being (Black Skin: 82). 43
the collective unconscious of the white is negative towards black and consider them with savagery , rape etc.
passage to india
‘Whoever says rape says Negro’, writes
Fanon (Black Skin: 127, emphasis in original).43
Colonial mmicry : He has to constantly mime the colonizer. The colonized hopes to be
like, and therefore liked by, the colonizer. It is only in mimicry that the
colonized reinforces his status as colonized: perpetually condemned to
just mimic. Thus the black aims to speak a different linguistic register,
claims to be ‘brown’ rather than ‘black’, Martinican rather than African.
Fanon says he is ‘astonished’ to hear blacks trying to use a different
44 COLONIALISM, RACE AND THE NATIVE PSYCHE
register, what he calls ‘putting on the white world’ (Black Skin: 23).
The black man, argues Fanon, wants to ‘turnWhite or disappear’ (xxxiii).
In other words, he seeks to deracinate himself, lose his colour, his
language and his very identity, by mimicking the white ‘masters’. Let
us take a couple of literary examples where we can see this theme of
colonial mimicry in operation. 45
_ The black man loses all sense of the self because he is never
acknowledged by the colonial master.
_ In order to acquire this acknowledgment, the colonized starts
wearing the white master’s masks. 45
Mannono states blacks are by nature dominated and white dominating. The minority feels threatened, Fanon
says these roles are inspired by economic and social conditions of the society. 51-52
Thus Fanon locates the violent personality, the mental illness and the
possible cure within the colonial system the medical, psychiatric and epistemological violence of
the colonial regime leaves very little of the colonized’s life untouched. 55