Black Skin White Masks” Chapter No: 2 &3

Topic:- “Black Skin White Masks” Chapter No: 2 &3

Name:- Upadhyay Devangana S.

Subject:- The Post colonial Literature 

Roll No:- 05

Submitted to:- MKB University

·      Introduction

               “Black Skin White Masks” by Frantz Fanon is a sociological study of the application of historical interpretation and the concomitant underlying social indicted and the psychiatrist. Frantz Fanon formulated ‘Black Skin White Masks’ to combat the oppression of black people; and thus applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that Black people experience in a white world. That the culture of the Mother Country produces an inferiority complex in the mind of the Black subject who then will try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the colonizer. Such behavior is more readily evident in upwardly mobile and educated black people who can afford to acquire status symbols within the world of the colonial acumen, such as a language of the colonizer, the white masks.

                  Based upon, and derived from the concepts of the collective unconscious and collective catharsis. After its initial publication in the mid-twentieth century, ‘Black Skin White Mask’ remained an obscure book bout the servile psychology imposed upon the colonized man, woman and child a post-colonial cultural legacy of the Mother Country to her former imperial subjects. Since the 1980s ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ has become an important anti-colonial and anti-racist work in Angloghone countries; yet, in Francophone the book is a relatively minor Franz Fanon work despite the subject’s explicit cultural connection with the societies of the black-skinned and other non-white peoples who were the French colonial Empire.

·        The Woman of color and The White Man

                   Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation. Every consciousness seems to have the components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I Love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value making superstructure on my whole vision of the world. 

                       In reaching an understanding of phenomena of this sort, the analyst and the phenomenologist are given a difficult task. And if a Sartre has ‘Being and Nothingness’ amounting only to an analysis of dishonesty and in authenticity, the fact remains that true, authentic love-wishing for others what one postulates for oneself when that postulation united the permanent values of human reality entails the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts.

                  Left far, far behind the last squealed of a titanic struggle carried on against the other have been dissipated.

                    Today we believe in the possibility of love; that is why we endeavor to trace its imperfections, its pervasions.

                 In this chapter devoted to the relations between the woman of color and the European it is our problem to ascertain to what extent authentic love will remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority or that Adlerian exaltation, that overcompensation, which seen to be the indices of the black Weltanschauung.

              For after all we have a right to be perturbed when we read, in Je Suis Martiniquaise;

“I should have liked to be married but to

A white man. But a woman of color is never altogether

Respectable in a white man’s eyes.

Even when he loves her. I know that.”

This passage which serves in a way as the conclusion of a vast delusion prods one’s brain. One day a woman named. Mayotte capecia obeying a motivation whose elements are difficult to detect, in which the most ridiculous ideas proliferated at random. The enthusiastic reception that greeted this book in certain circles foces us to analyze it. For me all circumlocution is impossible: Je Suis Martiniquaise is cut-rate merchandise a sermon in praise of corruption.

                  Mayotte loves a white man to whom she submits in everything. He is her lord. She asks nothing demands anything except a bit of whiteness in her life. When she tries to determine in her own mind, whether the man is handsome or ugly. She writes;

“All I know is that he had blue eyes,

Blond hair and a light skin, and that I loved him.”

It is not difficult to see that a rearrangement of these elements in their proper hierarchy would produce something of this order:

“All I know is that he had blue eyes,

Blond hair and a light skin, and that I loved him.”

We who come from the Antilles know one thing only too well: Blue eyes, the people say, frighten the Negro.

                   

                            There were evenings, unhappily when he had to leave me alone in order to fulfill his social obligations. He would go to Didier, the fashionable part of Fort-de-France inhabited by the “Martinique whit eye,” who are perhaps not too pure racially but who are often very rich and the “France whit eye”, most of them government people and military officers.

                  Among Andre’s colleagues, who like him had been marooned in the Antilles by the war some had managed to have their wives join them. I understood that Andre’ could not always hold himself aloof from them.

·        The Man of Color And The White Woman

                               In analyzing Je Suis Martiniquaise and Nini, we have seen how the Negress behaves with the white man. Through a novel by Rene Maran- which seems to be autobiographical let us try to understand what happens when the man is black and the woman white.

                      The problem is admirably laid out for the character of Veneuse will make it possible for us to go much more deeply into the attitude of the black man. What are the terms of this problem? Jea Veneuse is a Negro. Born in the Antilles, he has lived in Bordeaux for years; So he is a European. But he is black; So he is a Negro. There is the conflict. He does the whites do not understand him. And he observes,

“The Europeans in general and the French

In particular not satisfied with simply ignoring

The Negro of the colonies, repudiate the one who

they have shaped into their own image.”

                                  The personality of the author does not emerge quite as easily as one might wish. An orphan sent compelled o spends his vacations there. His friends and acquaintances scatter all over France on the slightest pretext, where as the little Negro is forced into the habit is his books. At the extreme, I should say there is a certain accusatory character certain resentment an ill-disciplined aggression in the long list-too long-of “travelling companions” that the author offers us: at the extreme, I say but it is exactly to the extreme that we have to go.

                    Unable to e assimilated, to pass unnoticed he consoles himself by associating with the dead or at least the absent. And his associations unlike his life ignore the barriers of centuries and oceans. He talks with Marcus Aurelius, Joinville, Pascal, and Perez Galdo’s RabindranathTagore. If we were compelled to hang a label on Jean Veneuse, we should have to call him an introvert; others might call him a sentimentalist, but sentimentalist who is always careful to contrive a way of winning out on the level of ideas and knowledge. As a matter of fact his friends and schoolmates hold him in high regard:

“What a perpetual dreamer! You know my old pal, Veneuse,

Is really a character. He never takes him nose out of his books

Except to scribble all over his notebooks.”

                          But a sentimentalist who goes nonstop from singing, Spanish songs to translating into English. Shy but uneasy as well:

“As I was leaving them, I degrade say to him”

A good kid that Veneuse- he seems to like being sad

And quiet, but he’s always helpful.

You can trust him. You’ll see.

H’s the kind of Negro that a lot of white gags ought to be like.”

                              Uneasy and anxious indeed. As anxious man who cannot escape his body. We know from other sources that Rene’ Maran cherished an affection for Andre’ Gide. It seems possible to find a resemblance between the ending of Un home pareil aux autres and that of Gide’s strait is the Gate. This departure, this tone of emotional pain of moral impossibility seems an echo of the story of Jerome and Alissa.

            But there remains the fact that Veneuse is black. He is a bear who love solitude. He is a thinker. And when a woman tries to start a flirtation with him he says,

“Are you trying to smoke out and old bear like me?

Be careful, my dear. Courage is a fine thing,

But you’re going to get yourself talked about

If you go on attracting attention this way.

A Negro? That race is just utterly disgracing yourself.”

                  Above all, he wants to prove to the other that he is man, their equal. But let us not be misled: Jean Veneuse is the man who has to be convinced. It is in the roots of his soul, as complicated as that of any European, that the doubt persists. If the expression may be allowed, Jean Veneuse is the lamb to be slaughtered. Let us make the effort.

                         After having quoted Stendhal and mentioned the phenomenon of “Crystallization” his simplicity of the Negro is a myth created by superficial observers.

·        Conclusion

                  When woman of colour go after white men and put down men of their own colour Fanon says the cause is just what many of us suspect: internalized racism.

                  Nor does this woman truly love these white men: they just love their colour. They go with them not out of ups about race.

                  It is because the black woman feels inferior that she aspires to gain admittance to the white world.

                       Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinque, starts by saying of himself:

“I want to be recognized not as Black but as white…

Who better than the white woman to bring this about?

By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy

Of a white love. I am loved like a white man.

I am a white man.”

                     Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle white civilization and worthiness become mine.

                   Veneuse’s was left alone in the world by mother as a small boy and is hung up on that. So he is afraid to love and be loved. He holds everyone arm’s length, even the woman he wants to marry. Therefore we cannot draw any general conclusions from Veneuse’s case.