2

Writing through the Zone of Nonbeing

Fanon was an ironic writer who was struggling with the complex question of paradoxical reason and history. The modern collapse of “Reason” and “History” into all things European represented a failure of reason and history that required self-deception regarding Europe’s scope. Put differently: Europe sought to become ontological; it sought to become what dialecticians call “Absolute Being.” Such Being stood in the way of human being or a human way of being. It thus presented itself as a theodicy. Theodicy (from theos, meaning god, and dikē, meaning justice) is the branch of inquiry that attempts to account for the compatibility of an omnipotent, omniscient, and good god with injustice and evil. There are several formulations of the problem: If such a god has the power to do something about injustice and evil, why doesn’t the god do that? If that deity has created everything and is perfect, how could there be imperfect (often evil) beings? If the deity has foreknowledge, how could we continue to insist on the god’s goodness when the god had advanced knowledge of the consequences of the god’s creation? There have been many classical efforts to address this problem. The most influential has been St. Augustine’s insistence, in The City of God, that the deity’s love for humanity required human freedom, and freedom requires the ability to do right or wrong. The problem does not emerge only in the Western tradition. Among the Akan of Ghana, for instance, the problem emerges as well, and solutions similar to St. Augustine’s (and the modern philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s) have been posed by, for example, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye.1 There, the Akan Supreme Being, Onyame, is supposed to be the force (sunsum) behind and through all Being. Is he, then, the source of evil as well? Oddly enough, theodicy does not disappear with modern secularism, as idolatrous treatment of states and even intellectual practices such as modern science attest. Whatever is advanced as a Supreme Being or Supreme Source of Legitimacy faces a similar critical challenge.

Rationalizations of Western thought often led to a theodicy of Western civilization and thought as systems that were complete and intrinsically legitimate in all aspects of human life, on levels of description (what is) and prescription (what ought to be), of being and value, while its incompleteness, its failure to be so, hallmarks of the “dark side of thought” lived by those constantly being crushed under its heels, remained a constant source of anxiety, often in the form of social denial.² People of color, particularly black people, live the contradictions of this self-deception continually through attempting to participate in this theodicy in good faith. This lived contradiction emerged because a demand often imposed upon people of color is that they accept the tenets of Western civilization and thought without being critical of them. Critical consciousness asks not only whether systems are consistently applied but also whether the systems themselves are compatible with other projects, especially humanistic ones. Take, for instance, rationality. Rationality emerges in many systems (especially modern liberalism) as free, say, of racist adulteration. What should we make, then, of racist rationality? An explosion erupts in the soul of a black person, one that splits the black person into two souls, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed in The Souls of Black Folk and the earlier “Conservation of the Races,” with a consciousness of a frozen “outside,” of a being as seen by others, in the face of the lived-experience from an “inside,” from a being who is able to see that he or she is seen as a being without a point of view, which amounts to not being seen as a human being.³ Such interplay of ironic dimensions of sight and thought, of doubled doubling, are critical hallmarks of Fanon’s thought.

Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks by announcing a hypothetical “explosion” that is either “too soon” or “too late” (Pn, 5) and then confesses that there was a “fire” in him that has cooled sufficiently to address the “truths” at hand.4 He wasn’t kidding. His brother Joby recounts, in Isaac Julien’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995), visiting him during his studies at Lyon. A faculty member described Fanon to Joby as “fireworks on the outside, fireworks on the inside!” This motif of fiery affect recurs in the book. Fanon recalls anger (fire) that had now become sober (cooled). Sobriety here does not mean an absence of heat. Throughout the work, Fanon struggles to hold the fire at bay, the result of which is an ongoing heat that occasionally bursts into flame. Cooled, he reflects sardonically on modern liberalism—equal rights and fraternity—and the many ways in which modern thinkers have attempted to address the so-called “black problem.” “Still,” he reflects, “a single line would be enough. Supply a single answer and the black problem loses its seriousness. What do blacks want?” (Pn, 6).⁵

The convergence of the “black problem” with desire (“want”) already marks a distinction in Fanon’s analysis. When Du Bois considered the so-called black problem half a century earlier, he argued against the question itself; it confuses, he argued, blacks with their problems.⁶ Blacks themselves are not the problem. The problem is the tendency to construct blacks as the problem, and whites produced that construction. Blacks’ seeing themselves to be “the problem” evokes a double consciousness of themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. Identifying the source of this construction leads to a new, critical perspective, which Paget Henry, building on Du Bois, calls “potentiated double consciousness.” It involves identifying the contradictions that made the first kind of double consciousness possible.⁷ By adding the dimension of what blacks want, Fanon raises and expands the question of the subjective life of blacks, of black consciousness, that parallels the Freudian question of women—What do women want?⁸ This question of want, of desire, is not as simple as it may at first seem, for the life of desire is prereflective and reflective. What one claims to want is not always what one actually wants. And what one actually wants could become discarded on reflection. That Fanon has raised the question of subjective life poses, as well, the split between lived reality and structure. An individual black’s desire may not comport with the structural notions of black desire. As Fanon cautions the reader, “Many nègres will not find themselves in what follows. This is equally true of many whites. But the fact that I feel a foreigner in the worlds of the schizophrenic or the sexual cripple in no way diminishes their reality” (Pn, 9). He affirms this focus later on: “I am speaking here, on the one hand, of alienated (mystified) blacks, and, on the other, of no less alienated (mystifying and mystified) whites” (Pn, 23).

The French word nègre means “Negro” and “nigger” depending on the context. Persuaded by Ronald A. T. Judy’s extraordinarily insightful essay on Fanon’s nomenclature, I have decided to use that French word to retain the flavor of its ambiguity in Fanon’s writings.9 In a way, the subtext of “Negro” is always the “nigger,” who awaits his or her appearance. As well, to maintain the sense of Fanon’s prose, I will also use “the black” and “the white” in places where he writes le Noir and le Blanc.¹⁰ Although the translators have often chosen the expression “the black man” and “the white man,” Fanon’s meaning is not often gendered except where he is specifically referring to women and men. So, I will do the same.

In his analysis, Fanon raises the schism between individual and structure by making an important distinction. The study of the black as a form of human study requires understanding what he calls ontogenic and phylogenic approaches. Ontogenic approaches address the individual organism. Phylogenic approaches address the species. The distinction pertains to the individual and structure. Fanon adds that such distinctions often miss a third factor—the sociogenic. The sociogenic pertains to what emerges from the social world, the intersubjective world of culture, history, language, and economics. In that world, he reminds us, it is the human being who brings such forces into existence. What does recognition of such a factor offer our understanding of “the black problem” and “what blacks want”?

The dehumanizing bridge between individual and structure posed by anti black racism marks the black, who is, in the end, “anonymous” in a perverse way, which enables “the black” to collapse into “blacks.” It is perverse because whereas “blacks” is not a proper name, antiblack racism makes it function as such, as a name of familiarity that closes off the need for further knowledge. Each black is, thus, ironically nameless by virtue of being named “black.” This naming affords a strange intimacy, in which blacks are always too close, which stimulates anxiety for distance to the point of disappearance or absence. So blacks find themselves, Fanon announces at the outset, not structurally regarded as human beings. They are problematic beings, locked in what he calls “a zone of nonbeing.”

What blacks want is not to be problematic beings; they want to escape from that zone. They want to be human in the face of a structure that denies their humanity. In effect, this “zone” can be read in two ways. It could be limbo, which would place blacks below whites but above creatures whose lots are worse; or it could simply mean the point of total absence, the place farthest from the light that, in a theistic system, radiates reality, which would be hell. His claim that “in the majority of cases, the black lacks the benefit of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell (Enfers)” (Pn, 6) suggests the first reading. Yet this is more of a collapse than a fall because, as we will see, it places the black body into a schema of deviations and imitation. As deviation, it falls from a presumed original white body. Why doesn’t it rise from the white? As the standard, the white would make illegitimate the movement in any direction of deviation; whether up or down, the consequence is failure. The path, then, seems to be to overcome the deviation by reclaiming an original unity. The white, however, denies the original unity, because that would entail a potential blackness at the heart of whiteness, which makes the claimed reclamation imitation. As imitation, what is lacked is the original advantage of the self as standard. The imitation, in other words, is not its own standard. It becomes a failure even of its achievement. To achieve imitation is to fail at what an imitation imitates, namely, an original. We will return to this theme of failure shortly.

Fanon, however, has much in store for the reader. For even if the “majority” of blacks lack such an ability of descending into a true hell, it does not follow that in this case—namely, Fanon’s unfolding narrative—the descent into Enfers cannot be made. Such thoughts suggest that although the text has an epigraph from Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme, the suffering of which he speaks gains its poetic flavor from the mythopoetics of hell that have governed many writers in the Western world—namely, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.11 Support for this connection is that Fanon’s formal education was exclusively Western, and that the Martinique of his childhood was (and continues to be) predominantly Roman Catholic means that the grammar of normative life would take the poetic form of the church’s founding imagery despite Fanon’s existential atheism. The connection with Dante’s Inferno raises the question, however, of Fanon’s role in his text. Is Fanon Dante, the seeker threatened by sin (the “fire” he brought to truth), or Virgil, the (“cooled”) guide from Limbo? Or is he both? The social world is such that it is not simply a formal mediation of phylogeny and ontogeny. It also offers the content, the aesthetics, and the “lived” dimensions of mediation. Fanon our guide, then, plans to take us through the layers of mediation offered to the black. As such, he functions as Virgil guiding us through a world that many of us, being “imbeciles,” need but often refuse to see. So, utilizing Fanon’s observation of the sociogenic dimensions of this structural denial, the argument takes the following turn.

CONSTRUCTIVITY AND FAILURES OF RECOGNITION

There is a white construction called “the black.” This construction is told that if he or she really is human, then he or she could go beyond the boundaries of race. The black can supposedly “really choose” to live otherwise as a form of social being that is not black and is not any racial form or designation. Racial constructions are leeches on all manifestations of human ways of living: language, sex, labor (material and aesthetic), socializing (reciprocal recognition), consciousness, and the “soul.” Black Skin, White Masks thus describes a quasi-anonymous black hero’s efforts to shake off these leeches and live an adult human existence. Each chapter represents options offered the black by modern Western thought. In good faith, then, the black hero attempts to live through each of these options simply as a human being. But the black soon discovers that to do so calls for living simply as a white. Anti-black racism presents whiteness as the “normal” mode of “humanness.” So, the black reasons, if blackness and whiteness are constructed, perhaps the black could then live the white construction, which would reinforce the theme of constructivity. Each portrait is, however, a tale of how exercising this option leads to failure. And in fact, “failure” takes on a peculiar role in the work; it is the specialized sense in which Fanon is using the term “psychoanalysis”: “If there can be no discussion on a philosophical level—that is, the plane of the basic needs of human reality—I am willing to work on the psychoanalytical level—in other words, the level of ‘failures’ [ratés], in the sense in which one speaks of engine failures” (Pn, 18). The French word that matches the ordinary English use of the word failure, where defeat or setback is meant, is échec. Raté more properly refers to a misfire, missing the mark, or something backfiring, as in an old combustion engine, which explains Fanon’s reference to engine failures. The word is also used, however, to refer to not measuring up, of failing to meet a standard, as in the expression raté de père, a man failing to meet the expectations or standards of fatherhood, a concept rich with psychoanalytical content.12 Fanon is thus referring to the frustration not only of missing the mark but also of the repercussions, which, inevitably, lead to therapy. That is why he says he is “willing to” work on the psychoanalytical level, for, as we will see, Fanon raises, as well, the question of whether the approach of failure is also a form of failure, which further raises the question of whether such a psychoanalytical approach is exemplified or transcended because of ultimately not measuring up or failing to meet its own standard. There is thus a paradox of failure: To fail at it is to succeed; to miss the mark is to demonstrate the validity of rejecting it, and therefore affirming or achieving it.

The motif of failure raises, still more, the question of the type of text Fanon has composed and how he is situated in relation to it. What we find is that each failure is not necessarily Fanon’s, for he is both the voice of the text (the black) and the voice about the text (the theorist and guide). Thus, although Fanon the quasi-anonymous hero of the text, the black, constantly fails (misses his mark), Fanon the critic of Western discourses of Man, Fanon the revolutionary theorist who demands systemic and systematic change, succeeds (by identification of each failure). Paradoxically, if the hero of the text wins (that is, achieves his aims), the hero of thought (the theorist) fails, and vice versa. Thus, after announcing in the introduction that ontogenic and phylogenic explanations fail and need to be mediated by sociogenic explanations premised on human agency, Fanon charts the course of the black with these theoretical “idols” of humanization. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, who sought to break the idols of (and, thus, idolatry in) Western civilization, Fanon hopes to destroy the idols that militate against the human spirit in an antiblack racist and colonial world.13

The transformative force of linguistic mastery is one such idol. Language is a construction that has the force of forming reality. Taking heed of Marx’s counsel in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach—“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”—Fanon advances the godlike quality of this dictum through Paul Valéry’s observation that language is “the god gone astray in the flesh.”¹⁴ To transform language, then, is the godlike project of transforming reality. Living language is, however, embodied. Flesh and such language are, in other words, symbiotic. Fanon is here referring to the phenomenological view of body and flesh; they refer, as well, to consciousness, which, from an existential phenomenological perspective, is always embodied consciousness of things, including inter-subjective consciousness or the social world. This is because consciousness requires a point of view, a perspective, which cannot be achieved, as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty showed, without a body.¹⁵ That language invests meaning in those who embody it means, then, that the transformation of language entails the transformation of language-users. The black, thus, takes it upon himself or herself to transform the world through a different language of self-presentation. He or she attempts to live words that transcend, if not eradicate, blackness. The efforts are familiar: “I am not black, I am brown.” “I am not black, I am a mulatto.” “I am not black, I am biracial.” Or: “I am not black, I am myself.” “I am not black, I am Martinican.” “I am not black, I am French.” “I am not black, I am simply a human being.”

The result is tragicomic. Fanon recounts many instances of the black struggling to wear and thereby express nonblackness—the effort at ontological transformation by departure from colored colonies to living for a time in Paris, the French metropole (because in Paris, there are “real” French people, those at the center of the French world, so by becoming Parisian, one “really” becomes French), where the Reality Principle awaits; the struggle with the r-eating tongue, which Fanon describes as a “wretchedly lazy organ,” as in the case of the newly arrived Martinican who knows the stereotype—“Je suis Matiniquais, c’est la pemiè fois que je viens en Fance” (“I am Matinican; it is mi fust time in Fance”)—has practiced rolling his rs to the point of yelling, “Garrrçon! Un vè de biè.” (“Waiterrr! Bing me a beeya!”).16

Fanon recounts many admonitions from his childhood against speaking Creole and the advocacy of speaking “real French,” “French French,” that is, “white” French. The phenomenon is familiar in the Dutch-speaking, Anglo-phone, Lusophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean. In the Anglo Caribbean, one is admonished against speaking patois (the creolized mixture of West African and European languages) and encouraged to speak the “Queen’s English.” Such French, Dutch, English, and Spanish—and in other areas German, Portuguese, and Italian—offer words of whiteness.¹⁷ A critic may be quick to respond that there is an important class dimension to this observation, for certain ways of speaking the dominant language offer, as well, economic mobility. Fanon, however, has a powerful response.

The black’s effort at transformative linguistic performance is a comedy of errors; instead of being a transformer of words, the black is considered to be a “predator” of words, and even where the black has “mastered” the language, the black discovers in those cases that he or she becomes linguistically dangerous. Against the class critique, Fanon observes that the black never speaks whiteness as even working-class whites speak whiteness. Such whites speak whiteness “bookishly,” whereas people of color, especially blacks, speak whiteness “whitely” or “white-like.” Speaking whiteness white-like means that the black does not achieve the normative escape that he or she seeks but instead the limitation of what semiological poststructuralists call “semiotic play.” Semiotic play refers to the activity of taking seriousness out of the use of signs and symbols of a language. Seriousness is absolute; it leaves no option. It collapses the world into “material values,” where there is supposedly no ambiguity.18 “White-like” and “whitely” signify imitation. The black, thus, becomes a masquerade, a black wearing a white linguistic mask. The tragedy, in this tragicomedy, is that such a mask signifies a monstrosity, a danger:

Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world. I have had occasion to talk with students of foreign origin. They speak French badly: Little Crusoe, alias Prospero, is at ease then. He explains, informs, interprets, helps them with their studies. (Pn, 30)

The reference to Crusoe and Prospero are, of course, to the allegory of their relation to Friday and Caliban. In both Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Shakespeare’s Tempest, the white interloper exercises dominion over the island native who seeks the powers of the interloper’s ways of knowing—in other words, language and science. The impact of this allegory on modern thought is tremendous, to the point of there now emerging “ways of knowing” that attempt to understand, if not alleviate, Friday’s and Caliban’s condition. Friday and Caliban, after all, had ways of knowing that preceded Crusoe’s and Prospero’s conquest of their islands. From such a perspective, the study of European civilizations becomes “Crusoe or Prospero studies,” and the effort to understand Friday’s and Caliban’s situation (which incorporates their knowledge of Crusoe and Prospero), becomes “Friday or Caliban studies.” Fanon’s description of the danger is Calibanist: Prospero (the white) is safe so long as Caliban (the black, or perhaps more on the mark, the “nègre”) struggles with instead of “masters” the language of mastery.¹⁹ It is a double standard that is demanded: Blacks are human if they can speak white, but if they can speak white, they are dangerous; therefore, they must be reminded of their limitation: “Yes, the black is supposed to be a good nègre [bon nègre]. . . . And naturally, just as a Jew who spends money without thinking about it is suspect, a black who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched.” More: “When a nègre talks of Marx, the first reaction is always the same: ‘We have brought you up to our level and now you turn against your benefactors. Ingrates! Obviously nothing can be expected of you.’ And then too there is that bludgeoned argument of the plantation-owner in Africa: Our enemy is the teacher” (both quotes from Pn, 27–28).²⁰ He then further invokes Prospero’s point of view through an excerpt from Dr. Michel Salomon’s Présence Africaine article, “D’un juif à des nègres” (“From a Jew to Nègres”), which he cites in note 9 of that chapter. Writes Salmon, as quoted by Fanon:

I knew some nègres in the school of Medicine. . . . In a word, they were a disappointment; the color of their skin should have permitted them to give us the opportunity to be charitable, generous [magnanimes], or scientifically friendly. They were derelict in this duty, this claim on our good will. We were left with our sniveling tenderness, with our cunning concern. We had no nègres to patronize, nor did we have anything to hate them for; they counted for virtually as much as we in the scale of the little jobs and petty chicaneries of daily life.

The black finds no direction that offers refuge here. Colored discourses represent a “lowering.” To demand that whites speak to blacks with that discourse signifies condescension. To speak to whites in their language represents imitation and usurpation. The recourse of both colored and white reality is often the same to such a black: “You had better stay in your place” (Pn, 26).

There is, as well, for some whites who may have transcended fear, the moment of marvel in the face of blacks who have mastered the dominant language. Fanon cites André Breton’s introduction to Aimé Césaire’s classic poetic anticolonial work, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, where Breton declared: “And here is a black who handles the French language as no white today has”; to which Fanon replies: “I do not see why there should be any paradox, anything to outline, for in truth M. Aimé Césaire is a native of Martinique and a university graduate” (Pn, 31). The black television reporter who speaks as white reporters speak, the black attorney who speaks as other attorneys speak, the black medical doctor who speaks as white medical doctors speak, the black university professor who speaks as other university professors speak, the black president or prime minister who speaks as other presidents and prime ministers speak, and so on—why does these professionals’ speech often surprise, and at times shock and frighten, other times arouse, those who hear them?

The promise of language is not only seductive but also unfaithful. Semiotic resistance, albeit important—Fanon, after all, admonishes the use of condescending language—at times intensifies the problem instead of alleviating it. Mastering the language for the sake of recognition as white reflects a dependency that subordinates the black’s humanity. As Chester Fontenot succinctly summarizes this conclusion: “The Blacks unwittingly place themselves in an inferior, compromising position to that of the whites. The Blacks’ attempts to assert themselves against the colonialists serve to imply that they seek recognition from the colonialists, and are, therefore, relegated to an inferior status.”21 To its credit, however, the intensification of the semiotic problem brings the importance of language into focus. A significance of language is its inherent publicity. Failing a public retreat, the black may now move inward, to the private sphere, to the sexual sphere, for sanctuary.

“PLEASE, BE MY MIRROR”

Fanon’s discussion of psychosexual retreat has received much criticism. It has been the basis of accusations of his being misogynous because of his discussion of women of color and especially his criticisms of Mayotte Capécia’s autobiographical novel Je suis Martiniquaise, winner of the Grand Prix Litteraire des Antilles in 1949, and her follow-up novel, La nègresse blanche.²² The first is ordinarily translated as I Am Martinican, but the “e” on the end signifies the author’s gender, which renders the translation literally as I Am Martinican Woman. To smooth the English, one could add an article, rendering it as I Am a Martinican Woman. There is much ambiguity here, however, for the author stands as more than “a” Martinican woman, given the way texts by black authors are read. She stands as “Martinican woman” or worse—“the Martinican woman.” The second book’s title is straightforward, given her use of the definite article “la”: The White Negress. The back-and-forth in the critical literature on Fanon’s treatment of Capécia’s first book has been such that one commentator, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, wrote an account and criticism of how the debate has spilled over into a debate on Fanon and feminism.²³ I have often wondered if many of the critics actually read what Fanon said instead of commentaries on what he is reputed to have said. That being so, I should like to state here that there are flaws in arguments that expect symmetry in analyses focused on the absence of symmetry, and it is unclear to me how Fanon is expected to have written on the two main accounts of women of color, Capécia’s and A. Sadji’s, without the criticisms he has offered as part of his ongoing argument.²⁴

Fanon announced that he was examining pathological cases, those of the phobic and of failure. Throughout the text, I do not see black (especially Martinican) men faring particularly well either. They are tragicomic seekers of recognition, full-of-themselves visitors in Paris who return to the Antilles to be “deified,” deluded foragers of civilization in a pair of “white breasts,” pathetic slaves in search of whiteness through, if not white women, at least mulattas who condescendingly offer a bit of whiteness, and so on. Added to this treatment is Fanon’s relationship with his father. The relationship is the stuff of which drama could be made; as we have seen, his hostility to the man was such that it seemed at best insensitive, if not cruel. Fanon acted as though he only had a mother, especially during his years in North Africa and Southern Europe during World War II, as we saw in this correspondence on the eve of a dangerous mission, the rest of which I will here quote:

Papa, you were sometimes remiss in your duty as a father. If I allow myself to so judge you, it’s because I am no longer of this life. These are the reproaches of one from the Beyond. Mama was sometimes made unhappy because of you. She was already unhappy because of us. . . . If we, your eight children, have become something, it’s Mama alone who must be given the glory. . . . I can see the expression you’ll make in reading these lines, but it’s the truth. Look at yourself, look at all the years gone by; bare your soul and have the courage to say, “I deserted them.” Okay, repentant churchgoer, come back to the fold.25

He states repeatedly in Black Skin, White Masks that the black is not a man, and he mentions, as we have seen, seeking his virility, his manhood, in his lover. Although he is speaking figuratively—as something that people generally do—he is also speaking autobiographically. Fanon’s behavior makes sense if we take heed of his growing up in a colonized Caribbean. The biographical and critical literature on Fanon is almost entirely devoted to the French influences on Martinican society, influences that are clearly patriarchal. Fanon reminds us that “the patriarchal European family with its flaws, its failures, its vices, closely linked to the society that we know, produces about 30 per cent neurotics” (Pn, 39). This is one of the outcomes of the insight, which Fanon erroneously attributes to Nietzsche, that (in Fanon’s paraphrasing) “Man’s misery (le malheur) is that he was once a child” (Pn, 8). The actual source was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), a text that, along with The Second Sex (1949), as Matthieu Renault informs us, reveals affinities between Beauvoir and Fanon.²⁶ Beauvoir offers this formulation in two places. The first is in reference to Descartes’s observation of infinite freedom in the face of limited power: “Man’s misery, said Descartes, comes from having been born a child.”27 The second is elaborated in terms of her own argument: “Man’s misery comes from his having been a child because his freedom was initially masked leaving him nostalgic for the time when he was ignorant of its exigencies.”²⁸ Although at first an observation on the human condition, Beauvoir subsequently brought it to bear on specific modes of embodiment, identities, and the longing human beings may have for times before such ways of being were realized. Her observation in The Second Sex of not being born but instead becoming a woman is premised on this insight and clearly prefigures Fanon’s thesis of the black as a white construction, that blacks are made or constructed. As Beauvoir scholarship reveals Jean-Paul Sartre’s indebtedness to her for crucial concepts such as the Look and discussions of concrete relations with others in Being and Nothingness, it is clear that Fanon, too, is influenced by her thought on at least the philosophical anthropology of human development, the limitations of Hegelian dialectics of recognition, and the importance of psychoanalysis in his inaugural work.²⁹ Beauvoir and Fanon argue that gender and racialization raise problems of a social condition that impedes human development: Man’s unfortunate nostalgia for childhood makes sense where adulthood is realizable. But what is there to do in a world that offers nothing beyond imposed childhood? As women are not men, what are the consequences of some men being a standard by which other males are denied manhood? How do those latter men relate to women?

Returning to the European patriarchal family as the model, what many Martinicans, and other Caribbean peoples, tried desperately to shed was their African lineage, an identity marked by ascriptions of “primitivism” (humanity’s childhood). Beyond this distorted conception of their African ancestry there is also a dimension marked by cultural retentions of a majority African-descended population, one that structures property, for instance, matrilineally. The result, often, is that the household, and even home ownership, tends to be female-centered. If the colonial values were not imposed as “real” values over the African and (in other regions) indigenous ones, this situation would simply be one of living two sets of values. A matrilineal household would not be a “defect.” But where culturally mixed communities privilege patriarchal values, the result is catastrophic. Fanon’s father was a customs official who was at times employed and at other times working through the family shop, but Fanon felt, as no doubt many black sons did, that their fathers held no power against white men, however few in number those white men were. Fanon shows evidence of having been ashamed of his father because he felt that his father wasn’t a man and therefore not properly a father; he regarded his father, in other words, as a raté de père.The result was that Fanon himself was ever on guard for masculine demotion. There is a famous footnote, to which we will later turn, where he denies the existence of the Oedipus complex in Martinique. He was both right and wrong. He was right in the sense that a structural White Man hovered over black male reality. But he was wrong in his own existential situation, for he longed for the replacement of his own father. This longing emerged in a world where the manhood of colored males is always called into question. In such a society, a male of color is manly to the extent that he is useful, but with an economy that renders him little more, often less, useful than the female inhabitants to a colonizing force that infantilizes and exploits them both, such gender questioning is incessant. It has been the case everywhere where there is racism.30 In the end, then, Fanon was neither misogynist nor homophobic (as we will later see) but instead a man who hated the role laid out for him as a black male. He recounts the role of the hero offered to white boys and that of the villain and savage offered to black ones in comic books, where the heteronormative presumption for girls (of all races) is the path of white men rescuing them from black and other men of color (Pn, 120).³¹ If the black male was not—indeed, could not be—a man, and Fanon was a black male, then he, too, was presumably not, and could not be, a man. Fanon aimed to be a man, which, under such a schema, appeared like Sartre’s formulation of man’s useless passion of becoming a deity.³²

I cannot, however, excuse Fanon’s failure to articulate his indebtedness to Beauvoir. Although he acknowledges the psychoanalytical contributions of Anna Freud, the existential philosophical domains appear squarely in the hands of men such as Jaspers and Sartre when it is clear that Beauvoir not only offered much intellectual sustenance for Fanon’s thought but also that he was well aware of at least two of her major contributions at the time of writing Black Skin, White Masks, as the presence of these books in his home library attest.³³ Beauvoir’s contributions to philosophy and especially the area of human sciences were by that point monumental, though controversial. Controversy is not a challenge of which Fanon was afraid, which makes her presence at the level of ideas but exclusion at that of citation a form of epistemic sexism. There is, however, an additional twist in this genealogy of thought. Beauvoir, after all, admitted the influence Richard Wright had on her thought, especially regarding ideas ranging from double consciousness to her treatment of the lived-experience of women and racialized subjects in The Second Sex.34 Wright also influenced Sartre’s thought in a similar way, as Ronald Hayman reports in Sartre: A Life:

The black American writer Richard Wright had told him: “There is no Negro problem in the United States, there is only a white problem.” In France, Sartre declared, there was no Jewish problem, only a problem of anti-Semitism. It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew; the question to ask was not “What is a Jew?” but “What have you made the Jews into?”³⁵

This circle of thought reveals an evolving community of ideas in which each participant influences the other, through which to draw on resources of one is to evoke the other. There is, in other words, a fundamental relationality of ideas through which speaking of race in terms of gender reveals a symbiosis of each. Acknowledging Beauvoir means, in other words, also evoking Wright, and reading through Fanon should, then, bring forth Beauvoir and the many exemplars of existential critical work on oppression. So why is she absent at the level of citation in this work on which she had clear influence? That Beauvoir, Fanon, Sartre, and Wright, each of whom came to know each other, are all dead, and that Josie Fanon, who participated in the composition of this work, has also passed leaves much of this matter to speculation.

I return, then, to Fanon’s discussion of the challenges of studying the meeting of gender and race: The question is about the ultimate purpose of his analysis. Capécia, as at least characterized in the imaginative resources of her text, desperately wanted to be something more than a woman. She wanted to be white. She already knew that she was a woman, but as a woman of color, she was locked on a scale of desire that sought, above all, something she lacked. She did not only desire whiteness, but she desired to be desired, and since she considered whiteness to be most desirable, that is what she most desired. Both Fanon and Capécia represented a failure, but his failure will manifest itself throughout Black Skin, White Masks. His goal in chapters 2 and 3, in particular, is to explore failure of a special kind, that which emerges from the retreat from the public sphere of language to the supposed private sphere of sexual intimacy. To understand Fanon’s analysis of such a retreat, we need, at first, to understand the Lacanian psychoanalytical dimensions of his argument.

Jacques Lacan, the famed semiological psychoanalyst, presented several important discussions of the impact of language on the Oedipus complex.³⁶ For Lacan, the Father as symbol made legitimacy also part of a symbolic order. “Woman” has a problematic existence in the symbolic order, which is patriarchal, positioned by the Father and, more mundanely, fathers. Power is here phallic, and “woman” differs from and defers to, so to speak, that order. As with classical psychoanalysis, where women embody castration anxiety (the “absence” of a penis), Lacanian psychoanalysis articulates women as lack or difference or, if we will, failure. Willy Apollon, the famed Haitian Lacanian psychoanalyst, has observed that many women experience this lack, which, he noticed, led to a recurring theme of desire in his psychotic female patients—the desire for a certain type of love. What they desired, he argued, was “a certain quality of love—more precisely, words of love, certain words addressed to them as subject.”37 For those patients, the father or someone who functioned as such was the only one from whom such words had worth. Such men, or at least what they symbolized, had power, literally, to give those women what they wanted or, generalized across time, what they want.

Let us call this phenomenon “words of love.” Love offers recognition that is also legitimating. When one is loved, one receives judgment from another regarding one’s existence. The lover bestows a judgment on the world that the beloved should exist. That is why the lover finds the thought of the beloved’s death unbearable, and it is why, as Kierkegaard and many others have observed, love also continues for loved ones who have passed away; the love is the continued judgment that the beloved deceased ought never to cease existing. Lovers “see” their beloved differently than do others. The lover celebrates the perfections and imperfections of the beloved; features that may otherwise seem unattractive take on the veneer of wonder; the beloved’s uniqueness is verified by such features and confirms the beloved’s irreplaceability.³⁸ In Fanon’s words, “The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my virility, 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 . . . [;] authentic love—wishing for others what one postulates for oneself, when the postulation unites the permanent values of human reality—entails the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts” (Pn, 33).

Fanon’s treatment of the impact of alienated love on women of color anticipated Toni Morrison’s observation in The Bluest Eye: “The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.”39 What is the impact of antiblack racism on love, where one seeks in the eyes of one’s lover and from the words that flow from her or his mouth a form of justification of one’s existence? Fanon and Morrison demonstrate a special failure here, a failure to escape the social reality principle of antiblackness through a loving whiteness. Fanon’s position is not that interracial relationships must be pathological efforts to escape blackness. His argument is that where whiteness is the basis of the liaison, the effort is pathological and hence a form of failure.

Fanon’s decision to analyze Je suis Martiniquaise and Sadji’s Nini is based on two criteria: the accolades of the first book and the insights both works bring into the subordinated relations of black women and mulattas in an antiblack society. Here is how Fanon introduces Je suis Martiniquaise:

For after all we have a right to be concerned 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 knew 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 Capécia, obeying a motivation whose elements are difficult to detect, sat down to write 202 pages—her life—in which the most ridiculous ideas proliferated at random. The enthusiastic reception that greeted this book in certain circles forces us to analyze it. For me, all circumlocution is impossible: Je suis Martiniquaise is cut-rate merchandise, a sermon in praise of corruption. (Pn, 34)⁴⁰

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting provides information on the “enthusiastic reception that greeted this book in certain circles.” She writes on page 36 of her influential study:

In 1949, Mayotte Capécia would become the fourth Antillean and the first black woman to be awarded the renowned Grand Prix Littéraire des Antilles for Je suis martiniquaise (1948). The annual award, paying the handsome sum of 20,000 francs, was established in 1946 in Paris for novels, historical novels, essays, and poetry. Interestingly, the jury who found Capécia’s work worthy of recognition was composed of thirteen Frenchmen. The autobiographical novel was hardly seen as a chef d’oeuvre among the writers of the négritude movement, nor did it ever gloss the pages reserved for literary criticism and book reviews in Présence Africaine. And the authenticity, i.e., Capécia’s authorship, of the book has recently come under scrutiny. Notwithstanding Maryse Condé’s bibliography of Francophone Antillean women writers in paroles de femmes, Capécia’s work is not mentioned in Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Raphaël Confiant’s historical-literary tour de force on writings by Antilleans, Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature 1635–1975. One could certainly argue that the marginalization of black women writers by black male literati is not surprising and even that it is indicative of persistent attempts to privilege male voices and silence women’s candid articulation of their experiences. However, such a statement would be in haste, for the monthly 1940s–50s issues of Présence Africaine include scores of writings by black and white women, and Lettres créoles does in fact have a cadre of Antillean women writers, including Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Suzanne Césaire.41

The endorsement of the work, then, offered insight into what an influential group of white French men wanted to read, which provides the same into the “white construction” of Fanon’s study (cf. Pn, 6). But more, even with the realities of a market dictated by a white French reading public, there is room for understanding the portrayal of pathological blackness presented as black normality. In short, Capécia’s autobiographical novel provides supposed insight into social forces that are at work in the lives of colonized people of the Antilles.

Valorization of whiteness is well known in all of the Caribbean. In Fanon’s time—and arguably today, as well—there were two principles at work in the life of the people of these islands, where the demographics were typically similar to Martinique’s: a small white population from Europe, a small population of “local” or Creole whites, a population of brown people (usually mulattoes and, in the Anglophone Caribbean, a small number of Chinese and East Indians), and the majority black population. Capécia characterized these populations as “France’s whiteys,” “Martinican whiteys,” “mulattoes,” and “nègres.” (In Jamaica, an Anglophone island, one hears of “whites,” “white neygas” [“white niggers”], “browns” and “coolies,” and “blacks” and “neygas.”) The seriousness of these categories is such that in, for instance, the island of Hispaniola it was a major factor in undermining the goals of the Haitian Revolution, and in the Dominican Republic, the dictator Rafael Trujillo declared, with his policy of blanquismo (“whitening”), a population of white and Native Caribbean, specifically Taíno, mixtures. Many Dominicans came to believe this fiction, despite the history of genocide implemented by the Spanish Conquistadors since Columbus’s time leaving nearly no indigenous presence versus a very large African one. With regard to Haiti, Anna Julia Cooper observed:

These color prejudices . . . were easier to hate in theory when one did not live in the places where they had been perpetuated for centuries, and when one knew nothing of the life of the colonies, where they had grown so deep that they were even stronger than all the other social distinctions made between the free man and the slave since ancient times, to the point where a mulatto slave would have refused to obey a free Negro, even if the latter had the audacity to buy him. And we are certainly obliged to recognize that in Santo Domingo the attitude of the mulattoes was even more cruel than that of the white colonists, and that the mulattoes resisted the emancipation of their still-enslaved brothers more than did the white colonists.42

Her description had few exceptions across the colonies with continued consequences of division among racially dominated groups into the twenty-first century. In regard to the other side of the island, Trujillo’s effort, endorsed by many Dominicans, in effect eliminated even mulattos from the Dominican Republic’s racial schema.⁴³ Mulatto, we should bear in mind, is from the Latin word mulus, which means “mule,” and it refers to any mixture between whites (horses) and “negroes” (donkeys). The mule reference illustrates the form of self-deception that permeates antiblack societies: Such racial mixtures supposedly produce sterile off spring.⁴⁴ One could imagine the social ontological forces threatened by a “fertile mulatto,” who is supposedly a contradiction of terms. Some communities attempt to resolve the contradiction through pure white identification. The claim of brown Dominicans being white and Taíno amounts to their not being mulatto (black and white). In Puerto Rico, such reasoning in the Latin Caribbean is a source of amusement through many poems with the riff, “You say you’re white, then show me your grandmother,” which alludes to a history of infusion of whiteness in the black population that both contradicts claims of purity and issues a reminder of their often falling short of romance. Notice the Puerto Rican adage’s absence of gender symmetry; one does not ask, in other words, for the racial snob to produce her or his black “grandfather.” Implicit is the social convention that many mulattoes face concealing not only the existence of a recent black ancestor but also that the union with the white ancestor was often without the conventional blessing of wedlock. The number of white women who had their relationships with black men concealed by the morphological whiteness of their offspring during those times also substantiate the point since they, unlike many of their black female counterparts, had reasons to authenticate their child’s whiteness with a claim to purity instead of mixture.45

Capécia, Fanon observes, could not describe her lover’s beauty beyond the fact that he was blond, had blue eyes, and was white. He points out that her childhood bears witness to a woman of action. In her early years, she attempted to “blacken” the world by throwing ink over lighter-skinned children and whites who insulted her. Learning the limitations of her efforts, she switched to whitening her environment, to laundering it, to “cleaning” it. She became a laundress. But that was not sufficient, and in spite of the success of her laundering business, whiteness could not be achieved without white recognition. Her white lover, André, was a white officer who afforded such a gift. Capécia submits to him totally. In Fanon’s Hegelian reading—where a Lord–Bondsman relationship emerges in struggles for recognition—André “is her lord.” He continues: “She asks nothing, demands nothing, except a bit of whiteness in her life” (Pn, 34). She supports him, and at one moment convinces him to take her to an upper-class social of whites, where she is humiliated by the behavior of the white women there: “The women,” she writes, “kept watching me with a condescension that I found unbearable. I felt that I was wearing too much makeup, that I was not properly dressed, that I was not doing André credit, perhaps simply because of the color of my skin—in short, I spent so miserable an evening that I decided I would never again ask André to take me with him” (Pn, 35).⁴⁶ Why did Capécia find all the faults in her? Why didn’t she simply admit that those white women were a group of racists or that André was both racist and spineless?

In her references to blacks, Capécia spared no invective, especially in her subsequent La nègresse blanche, where black men are typically referred to as “nègres” (with the meaning of “niggers”) and black women as “nègresse whores” and “sluts” (with the meaning of “nigger whores and sluts”). The answer is simple. Whites can do no wrong. They are gods. Fanon observes her outrage at the film Green Pastures, which has God and the angels played by black actors. Her protest: “How is it possible to imagine God with characteristics of a nègre? This is not my vision of paradise. But, after all, it was just an American film” (Pn, 41).47 We know the god of Capécia’s theodicy and, by extension, her paradise.

At one point, Capécia is delighted to discover that her maternal grandmother was white. Fanon’s response, in stream with what is said in Puerto Rico, is that

Since he is the master and more simply the male, the white man can allow himself the luxury of sleeping with many women. This is true in every country and especially in colonies. But when a white woman accepts a black man there is automatically a romantic aspect. It is a giving, not a seizing. In the colonies, in fact, even though there is little marriage or actual sustained cohabitation between whites and blacks, the number of hybrids is amazing. This is because the white men often sleep with their black servants. (Pn, 37n5)

After quoting in the same note Manoni’s representation of French soldiers’ liaisons with young Malagasy women as free of racial conflict, Fanon adds:

Let us not exaggerate. When a soldier of the conquering army went to bed with a young Malagasy girl, there was undoubtedly no tendency on his part to respect her entity as another person. The racial conflicts did not come later; they coexisted. The fact that Algerian colonists go to bed with their fourteen-year-old housemaids in no way demonstrates a lack of racial conflicts in Algeria. No, the problem is more complicated. And Mayotte Capécia is right: It is an honor to be the daughter of a white woman. That proves that one was not “made in the bushes.” (This expression is applied exclusively to all the illegitimate children of the upper class in Martinique; they are known to be extremely numerous: Aubery, for example, is supposed to have fathered almost fifty.)

Fanon’s remarks hardly represent hatred of women of color or a failure to understand their situation. He is addressing a reality that permeates every racist society. How was it, for example, that so many mulattoes emerged during slavery and in postbellum nineteenth-century America when there were laws against miscegenation? One need simply look at Angela Y. Davis’s classic study, Women, Race, and Class, and recent genetic studies in the former colonies to find answers to such questions.⁴⁸

Black-hating blacks and mulattoes often regard whiteness by itself as a good, but evidence of voluntary gifts of whiteness is a bonus. In Nini, there is an educated black male accountant, Mactar, who pursues a mulatta stenographer, Nini. Of Mactar, Fanon writes, “One must apologize for daring to offer black love to a white soul. . . . Just as Mayotte Capécia tolerates anything from her lord, André, Mactar makes himself the slave of Nini, the mulatta” (Pn, 44–45). Mactar is rebuked to the point of the mulatto community attempting to sic the police on him. In the story, a white man eventually offers his hand in marriage to the mulatta, which occasions a celebration of hope among the mulatto community and a new level of degradation: Mulattas who were engaged to mulattoes were now rebuked for failing to achieve a higher possibility.

Where does all this lead? There are two principles that emerge in an anti-black society. They are “be white!” and “avoid blackness!” Capécia and Nini represent these edicts thus: “There are two such women: the negresse and the mulâtresse. The first has only one possibility and one concern: to turn white. The second wants not only to turn white but also to avoid slipping back”(Pn, 44). These two principles structure the failure of these women’s effort to escape. For the white lover’s desire to serve as a transformation of their blackness, it must be either a love born from their love for blackness or their hating blackness but failing to see it in the beloved. The first has to be rejected because such love would devalue the lover’s affections in the anti-black black’s eyes, for the aim of the pathology was to eradicate blackness. This rejection eliminates a third possibility, that the white lover both loves blackness and happens to love the beloved, for the lover’s loving blackness would ruin the conjunction. So we go to the second. There, the problem is that a white lover who hates blacks but is in love with a black through denying the blackness of the beloved is lost in a game of self-deception or bad faith. The self-deception is twofold: Both the white lover and the black beloved would be in bad faith. The white lover’s self-deception would be one about his beloved’s blackness. The black beloved’s is, however, another matter. There, the deception emerges from the meaning of what the white lover offers her. In this case, recalling Willy Apollon’s observation of words of love, it will be “words of whiteness.” We find ourselves here on the plane of narcissism, a phenomenon to which Fanon refers throughout the text. Fanon writes of many efforts by blacks to be “seen” in a special way, to be seen as white. On narcissism, Jean Baudrillard has argued that the narcissist seeks a deluding self-image in the eyes of others and is thus seduced by the deception. He writes:

“I’ll be your mirror” does not signify “I’ll be your reflection” but “I’ll be your deception.” . . . To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion. . . . Narcissus too loses himself in his own illusory image; that is why he turns from his truth, and by his example turns others from their truth.49

Similarly, Heinz Kohut has identified a form of rage that he calls “narcissistic rage.” Narcissistic rage manifests itself as hatred of limitations in one’s desire to live without limitations.⁵⁰ The enraged narcissist desires to be beautiful or special without limitation, which amounts to being the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most exceptional, and so on, to the point of becoming, in a word, godlike or, even better, a god. In stream with Baudrillard’s depiction, narcissistic rage invites seduction because no human being is a god, which means the desire from such rage requires a lie to the self. The demand of narcissism is for others to be the narcissist’s mirror, to offer the narcissist a desired image, an image of the world as the narcissist would like it to be. Veiled by “I will be your mirror” is the truth: “I will be your lie.” Perhaps the quintessential modern allegory of narcissism is the effort of the stepmother in the Brothers Grimm’s fairytale “Snow White.”⁵¹ The stepmother queen looks into the mirror and orders it to tell her what she knows deep down is not true and cannot be maintained. Even if one were once the most beautiful woman in the land, it defies reality always to remain so. One could be so, if and only if, one is the last woman in the land, and even there the criteria for beauty would become vague, if not absurd. The mirror’s eventual answer to her query is, however, simple and imposes an objective limit on her lie: Snow White. The elimination of Snow White, whose name signifies both white virtue and the coldness (snow) of truth (white), becomes a necessary condition for the preservation of her lie. (Oddly enough, the third element isn’t in her name: her blood-red lips, which, perhaps, signify life and are perhaps a reason for her extraordinary ability to survive.) Thus, the mirror is, in the end, not the lie, but instead her projected mirror becomes her narcissistic fantasy.

Fanon’s discussion of the effort to escape on the level of intimacy portrays a tale of narcissism. Narcissism is the theme of some of his examples along the way:

I was talking only recently to one such woman [who deplored black men]. Breathless with anger, she stormed at me, “If Césaire makes so much display about accepting his race, it is because he really feels it as a curse. Do the whites boast like that about theirs? Every one of us has a white potential, but some try to ignore it and others simply reverse it. For my part, I wouldn’t marry a nègre for anything in the world.” Such attitudes are not rare, and I must confess that they disturb me, for in a few years this young woman will have finished her examinations and gone off to teach in some school in the Antilles. It is not hard to guess what will come of that. (Pn, 38)

No doubt Fanon was added to Césaire on this woman’s list. We will see, however, that this woman’s assessment of Césaire is not without some validity, for would not valorization of blackness also be a form of narcissistic rage? What Fanon has in mind, however, is brought out further by another example: “I knew another black girl who kept a list of Parisian dance-halls ‘where-there-was-no-chance-of-running-into-nègres’”(Pn, 40). One could imagine what such a woman expected to see in those dance halls. Imagine what it would take for her to be in a room with no “nègres.” It would, indeed, have to be a room with no mirrors save the eyes of the white patrons. Those eyes, should they behave without irritation, should they behave as though things were “normal,” would affirm that black woman’s self-deception: It would seem as though there were no blacks in the dance hall, and since she would be among the patrons, then she would be among the no-blacks-in-the-dance-hall. Those whites would be her mirrors, or, as Baudrillard informed us, what she wants—namely, her lie. This is what Capécia sought when she demanded André to take her to a white social. What the gathering and he offered her were the self-deceiving words of whiteness, words that only whites could offer her. The situation is a failure because love is what should appear on the personal terrain; André, not his whiteness, should have offered her existence something. André, however, doesn’t seem to have deserved even her near-white kind of love, for the novel ends with his playing a very typical role of the white French military toward black female love by abandoning her and their child, and she is ironically thankful for the bit of whiteness left in her life. Love, in this liaison, was unattainable because of the imposition of whiteness; no love words, only white ones, remained.

Although Fanon formally examines the failure of the man of color in the succeeding chapter, he hints at it early on in his discussion of Mactar and Nini. Mactar was also a Capécia, but he was so in relation to a mulatta. If Mactar, or any black male for that matter, lives as a man in the Lacanian framework of value-endowing words, then the issue would have been what he brought to Nini, not what Nini brought to him. His words of love should have been enough. But since he is also Capécia, then he sought something from Nini, her words, that disrupt the order of patriarchal bourgeois European society. Fanon returns to this theme in his formal discussion of the man of color, where the focus is Jean Veneuse, the protagonist of René Maran’s autobiographical novel, Un homme pareil aux autres (“A Man Like Others”), whom he describes as “a lamb to be slaughtered” (Pn, 53).52 Veneuse/Maran was an orphan from the Antilles who grew up in French boarding schools. In his adult years, he is a bookworm, an “introvert,” a so-called “good guy” (bon garçon), the “kind of nègre one would like many whites to be like” (Pn, 53).⁵³ When a white girl flirts with him, he replies: “Courage is a fine thing, but you’re going to get yourself talked about if you go on attracting attention this way. A nègre? Shameful—it’s beneath contempt. Associating with anybody of that race [cette race] is just utterly disgracing yourself” (Pn, 53).⁵⁴ Notice Veneuse/Maran’s language of distance (“that race”). The story takes a decisive turn when Andrée Marielle, a white woman, emerges as a love interest. She loves Veneuse/Maran, and he loves her. But Veneuese/Maran tells her that their relationship cannot be.

Now if Veneuse/Maran were white, a standard analysis of the situation would be that he is an abandonment neurotic. Orphaned in his youth, an introvert in his adult life, he is afraid of abandonment, so he abandons others to avoid such an experience himself. That he is black and Marielle white brings a dimension to love and abandonment that draws Veneuse/Maran closer to Capécia than he and Mactar should have been. Marielle writes him a letter declaring her love for him. She has, literally, given her words of love, words that, given the antiblack racial dimensions of the context, should have functioned as well as words of whiteness. But Jean Veneuse needs “authorization,” argues Fanon. “It is essential that some white man say to him, ‘Take my sister’”(Pn, 55). He consults a white male friend, M. Coulanges, who replies with the much-sought words of whiteness:

In fact you are like us—you are “us.” Your thoughts are ours. You behave as we behave, as we would behave. You think of yourself—others think of you—as a nègre? Utterly mistaken! You merely look like one. As for everything else, you think as a European. And so it is natural that you love as a European. Since European men love only European women, you can hardly marry anyone but a woman of the country where you have always lived, a woman of our good old France, your real and only country. . . . Andrée Marielle, who is white of skin, loves Jean Veneuse, who is excessively brown and who adores Andrée Marielle. . . . As soon as you are back in France, rush to the father of the girl who already belongs to you in spirit and strike your fist savagely on your heart as you shout at him: “I love her. She loves me. We love each other. She must marry me. Otherwise I will kill myself at your feet.” (Pn, 55–56)55

And there we have it: An alienated black man who has joined alienated black women in search of words of whiteness from the same source—the white man—words that affirm them as most desirable, as desired desire, as, in similar kind, Snow White’s stepmother attempted to prod her mirror to affirm her. Yet in both classical and Lacanian psychoanalyses, there is a distinction between what a woman wants and what a man wants. The “unhealthy” dimension (for those forms of psychoanalysis) raised by race is that the distinction disintegrates. The antiblack black woman and the anti-black black man collapse into the same. Their desires mark the limitations of their flight into the world of intimacy. Having whitened that world with introduced words of whiteness, they have thrown to the wayside the project of love. Fanon’s concluding assessment of Un homme pareil aux autres?

Un homme pareil aux autres is a sham [imposture], an attempt to make the relationship between two races dependent on an organic unhealthiness. There can be no argument: In the domain of psychoanalysis as in that of philosophy, the organic, or constitutional, is a myth only for him who can go beyond it. If from a heuristic point of view one must totally deny the existence of the organic, the fact remains, and we can do nothing about it, that some individuals make every effort to fit into pre-established categories. (Pn, 64)⁵⁶

SOMETIMES A GUN IS A GUN

Fanon’s reference to constitutionality announces the quarry of chapter 4, Dominique Mannoni’s constitutional rationalization of a supposed colonial complex among colonized people as presented in his Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization.⁵⁷ He had already identified a colonial apologist’s tendency in Mannoni’s work when Mannoni attempted to treat white French soldiers’ access to young Malagasy girls as a situation without racial conflict. Mannoni’s error was that he was persistent. He argued, for instance, that the Malagasy had a colonization complex; their mythic life supposedly had, at its normative core, a pre-conquest conviction of their inferiority. Mannoni went further to compare French society with other European nations and concluded that since the French were supposedly the least racist of the lot, the racism and colonialism that emerged in Madagascar were functions of complexes that were already there when the French arrived.

In response, Fanon advances his famous dictum that either a society is racist or it is not. It is because French society is racist that it conquered, colonized, and imposed its racist structure on the Malagasy. Mannoni’s rationalization violates Du Bois’s admonition against problematizing people instead of addressing their problems; it is tantamount to claiming that the “appearance of varicose veins in a patient does not arise out of his being compelled to spend ten hours a day on his feet, but rather out of the constitutional weakness of his vein walls; his working conditions are only a complicating factor. And the insurance compensation expert to whom the case is submitted will find the responsibility of the employer extremely limited” (Pn, 69). After chronicling Mannoni’s various rationalizations, he concludes that Mannoni and all constitutionalist theorists of colonization simply miss the point: All forms of colonial exploitation are forms of dehumanization. The basic problem, echoing his response to his brother Joby’s lycée professor several years earlier, is to restore the humanity of each degraded person. Mannoni compared forms of colonialism without ultimately bringing colonialism itself on trial. His project was, in other words, a theodicy of colonialism; it was an effort to free the system from critique by blaming the people it dominates.58

At this point, Fanon’s argument takes an interesting turn. Although psychoanalysis was earlier advanced as the analysis of failure, a dimension of psychoanalysis is rendered untenable in the colonial and racist context: the relevance of classical psychoanalytic symbolism in a colonial setting. Here, the symbolic is not psychoanalytical but colonial reality. Instead of black soldiers bearing rifles representing the phallus and sexual fantasies of classical, or even Lacanian, psychoanalysis in the nightmares of Malagasy children, they stood, instead, as signifiers of real encounters with colonial violence. They were the images of the black Senegalese soldiers used to maintain the colonial order in Madagascar and the reality of there no longer being precolonial Malagasy but instead those who lived in relation to the French who colonized them. This failure of the classically symbolic psychoanalytical interpretations closes three stages of failure—the public, structurally private, and ontogenically private (the constitution of the organism or individual). Of importance here, as well, is that schemes of rational explanation are at their limits. In each instance, the black attempts to address a problem and encounters himself or herself as the problem. So Fanon then goes to a deeper level of interiority or inward existence: His own experience as lived, to which we now turn.