To the customary question “Why did you write such and such?” writers usually answer: “Because I felt like writing it,” which is a way of not answering. Because what is being asked, in fact, is: why this book and not another? Why you and not someone else? The point is that they themselves cannot explain the “why” of this book; they know only the need from within that made them produce this particular book.
If I had to answer this question accurately, I would have to say why I write about the same issue, book after book, and that issue is oppression. Admittedly, I could answer the way I often do: because oppression exists, why else? Because it’s huge, so blatantly obvious, all over the world, in all societies, because it has always existed, and we don’t know when it will come to an end, if indeed it ever will!
But of course, this in itself is inadequate. There is so much hardship in the world, in addition to the natural miseries of pain and sickness. Still, I am convinced that the misery of oppression is all the more dreadful and intriguing in that it is inflicted on people by other people, and in that respect, it is perhaps the most unbearable of all. But the question does remain: why me? For the simple reason, perhaps, that I was born a colonized Jew, son of an artisan, and that we unwittingly always return to these discoveries of childhood. I can only defer to my early books, which were novels. But that would merely postpone the problem.
Putting that aside, I would simply state that it is about following a timeline, the way a good craftsman goes about his work in a certain order. I wrote The Colonizer and the Colonized, then Portrait of a Jew, followed by a few sketches of American Blacks. It made sense for me to complete the picture by adding a few other figures of oppressed peoples: thus, in Dominated Man, along with a return to the colonized, Jews and Blacks, I include domestics, proletarians, and women, as well as newer demands such as those of the French Canadians, whom I believe need to be heard before any rush to judgment, which happens all too often. And since I am writing this piece for Droit et Liberté, let us say that the issue of racism is also raised. I regret not being able to fit the question of children into the scope of this book, a complaint quite rightly raised by some readers. I shall be addressing this matter in the future.
But this book involves, implicitly, a different approach from that of my previous books: this grouping and cross-referencing of several figures of oppression all at once allows for comparison, and results in the uncovering of similarities. I have tried this time to demonstrate that there are a certain number of shared mechanisms at work among various forms of oppression, whether they be within the objective conditions, the concrete interactions between dominator and dominated, and their respective behaviors, or within each side’s ideologies, which exist in mutual resonance with each other, in any case, as do their behaviors. The result is this fascinating play of relationships, like a mirror effect, between myth and counter-myth of oppressors and oppressed.
Along the way, however, I was keen to make clear that however many features were shared among various forms of oppression, born of comparable misfortunes, there were also important variations which, taken together, define the specificity of each oppression. Research has brought to light the differential specificity, which is just as important as simple description, for it should be able to generate a solution geared toward each separate condition. Readers will rightly conclude that I am starting to believe that it is only by working on the specificity of oppression that political errors will be avoided in the future, for such mistakes often spring from the very generosity of sympathetic militants and observers.
Finally, Dominated Man lays the groundwork and foreshadows a more definitive work on the oppressed, a book soon to come. But I am still postponing my explanation—all the way until the end, I suppose—until I feel I have thoroughly dealt with the theme of oppression. And since I myself do not know whether it is inadvertent on my part, or whether it runs so deep that it underpins my entire body of work, perhaps I won’t be through with oppression until I have quit writing altogether. [ . . . ]
In May 1963, a Boston television station invited three famous black leaders to come and explain the meaning of the black revolt.1 [. . . They were] James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. There is a reason [ . . . ] for placing King at the end: clearly it is he who is the favorite of American television, which hopes that his arguments win the day. But objectively this sequence is wrong. History has taught us, in many a hard lesson, that in revolt there is a certain rhythm. It is this: King, or Baldwin, but Malcolm X certainly last.
I have only met one of these three men—Baldwin—but I have no difficulty in imagining the others.2 Colonization has shown me these types of suffering humanity by the score. King is the moderate, who knows how to allay the fears of his adversary, how to restrain the impatience of his troops, and how to win himself allies: in fact, he is already a politician. [ . . . ]
Baldwin is the intellectual, sincere and emotional, or, in other words, intelligent, passionate and tormented; understanding everything and forgiving much; with friends in the enemy camp; [ . . . ] who knows that his friendships and his loves are already doomed, already impossible ones. For he has grasped the fact that the moderates are by now in the wrong, that the time for moderation and understanding is past, and that these qualities have been engulfed in the rising tide of violence. [ . . . ]
This violence is personified by Malcolm X. [ . . . ] Malcolm no longer understands anyone, nor wishes to understand anyone. He has no friends on the other side and perhaps never has had. [ . . . ] This man of violence accuses, condemns and excludes even more virulently certain members of his own race, for a black man who does not fight with all his strength is worse than an enemy. [ . . . ] Malcolm and King seem totally opposed. [ . . . ]
And yet King, Baldwin and Malcolm X do not represent three different historical solutions to the black problem, three possible choices for the Americans. [ . . . ] No, there is only one face, undergoing a gradual change of expression, from pained surprise, still full of hope, to hatred and violence, to the desire for destruction and death. King, Baldwin and Malcolm X are signposts along the same inexorable road of revolt. [ . . . ]
King is the most noble figure among them, the least disturbing [ . . . ] “Love your oppressors as yourselves,” he says. [ . . . ] This unnatural love so shocks his own followers. Read the fine distinctions he draws between the different kinds of love. [ . . . ] For the oppressed are not filled solely with resentment against their oppressors; they also admire them and would even actually love them, with a kind of love, if they could.
From the point of view of mental hygiene, King’s solution is perhaps healthier and more restful for everyone, including the oppressed. King is advocating a kind of collective Yoga, a lesson in relaxation and self-control, that is not unattractive. To be able to stay calm, and to relax mentally, even when insulted, even under blows, demands a certain degree of courage. [ . . . ]
Only, says Baldwin, even now no one listens any longer to this admirable man; no one, whether black or white. If he still retains a certain moral ascendancy over the South, he no longer has any authority in the North. [ . . . ] But there is one all-important difference between King’s situation and Gandhi’s: in India, there were countless Indians to a handful of English; in this case, there are 20 million blacks in a population of 200 million whites. [ . . . ] The demonstrations organized by King on the whole only succeeded where the blacks were relatively numerous. In contrast to King, with his prestige (he is black, but an acknowledged sovereign), his humanity (he is a preacher), his culture (he is a doctor of theology), his good breeding, his diplomacy, his self-control and his courtesy, Malcolm cuts a sinister figure. Possibly he is sinister. [ . . . ] He rejoiced in public over the assassination of Kennedy. [ . . . ] He saw in these victims only the ghosts of his former colonial oppressors. [ . . . ]
The revolutionary is a far from attractive figure. [ . . . ] The revolutionary wears a more frightening aspect than the oppressed who is still apparently on good terms with his oppressor. The black who turns revolutionary is certainly less likeable, in a manner of speaking, than the Good Negro, the shoe-shine boy or gentleman’s lackey, even when the latter decides to demonstrate, under the tutelage of King.
However, people must be brought to understand at last that these two are one and the same person; part of the same revolutionary force caught at different moments of its career. [ . . . ]
The parts played by King and Malcolm X are not from a historical point of view mutually exclusive. [ . . . ] King is the victim of oppression who still exercises self-restraint, because he still believes in the possibility of negotiation. [ . . . ] On the day set aside for negation, we must put on our Sunday best and not explode in anger before the enemy, not even make a show of our humiliation. Deeper down still, King is the victim of oppression who persists in wanting to resemble his oppressor. The oppressor will always be his model. [ . . . ] Malcolm furiously rejects all similarity with the white man. [ . . . ]
From here on the oppressed want to forge ahead by themselves, to find their own peculiar and individual path, entirely cut off from their former overlords, and at first in direct opposition to them. [ . . . ] They will persuade themselves, for instance, of the boundless grandeur of their past and of the values of their race, convinced that they need only return to that source to find there all the human qualities they need to help them live and fight. In short, whereas King’s whole philosophy can be summed up in the word integration, Malcolm is already working towards independence. [ . . . ]
And yet, I repeat, there is no definite rift between these two men, no novelty in the one independent of the other. Baldwin, who is so much closer to King, in sentiment at any rate, is constantly explaining and excusing Malcolm, just as he does the Black Muslims, who terrify him so. He has described elsewhere the visit he paid them, and how they both horrified and fascinated him; he has a presentiment that they are the logical, and maybe inevitable, conclusion of the black revolt, if the whites do not give way [ . . . ] In that case, threatens Baldwin, the fire, next time! [ . . . ]
The dual movement towards rejection of the oppressor and assertion of himself, that we now observe in the revolutionary, is the exact inverse of the oppressed man’s habitual attitude: that of self-rejection and hero-worship of the oppressor.
For King, as for Baldwin still, the black American is an American citizen, like the others; at least by rights: his ideal and his only solution, his duty and his rightful ambition is to resemble his white fellow citizens. The late Richard Wright, author of Black Boy, the finest Negro protest of our times, would nevertheless always claim: “I am first of all an American!” [ . . . ] Like all oppressed peoples, the black Americans began by rejecting themselves as blacks so far as was possible. [ . . . ] We see this in those pathetic scenes described by Richard Wright in his account of the Bandung assembly: the black women who tried desperately to uncurl their hair, and spent a fortune on so-called magic powder to whiten their skin. [ . . . ] They strove to emulate the whites to the point of assimilation in order to become perfect American citizens, that is, necessarily, white Americans.
Of course, all these efforts are in vain. One cannot tear one’s very nature up by the roots like this, nor is it possible to live in self-hatred unscathed. The black, in despair, returns again and again to this loss of identity. Nobody Knows My Name is the title of one of Baldwin’s books. Above all, the white man has never accepted the black’s emulation. [ . . . ] The oppressor is the first to refuse assimilation; later the victims of oppression themselves give up the attempt, and it is then that people like Malcolm X appear. [ . . . ] Malcolm is the poisoned fruit of the blacks’ hatred, a hatred born of a great and unrequited love. Malcolm’s violence, finally, however terrifying or however questionable it may be, is the inevitable reply to the refusal with which the blacks’ demands have so long been met.
I must admit now that it is not easy for me wholeheartedly to defend Malcolm X. Because of a certain tendency to act the demagogue, [ . . . ] because of his racism, [ . . . ] because of his anti-Semitism. [ . . . ] Not the least of the misfortunes caused by oppression is that the oppressed come to hate each other: the rivalry between Jews and Arabs is one of the most regrettable illogicalities in the history of oppression; at best, the proletariat of the different European countries showed little sympathy for the struggling colonies; and domestic servants are rarely on the side of the proletariat. [ . . . ] Malcolm is a genuine revolutionary, and the true spokesman of the black American revolt. Its aspirations, of which he has a just intuition, and of which he is the personification, are still confused and uncertain. [ . . . ]
It is within the same perspective, I believe, that we must understand what we can only call the mythology he offers his race. [ . . . ] Is it not above all precisely when his followers get discouraged that they should be offered a new image of themselves—an image all the more glorious, the longer their previous existence in contemptuous cultural anonymity. [ . . . ]
The greater his past wretchedness, the more the black’s negritude must now be made to appear desirable. [ . . . ] The whole structure of the universe has to be recast to meet this new emergency: the past and the future, art and metaphysics; the first man was black, and the man of the future will be black, even to God himself, who has always been black, not white, as those ignorant, tendentious commentators of Holy Writ would have him.
These are myths, to be sure! A sort of mass delirium, as disastrous as those of the oppressor! That much is certain, and Baldwin, the artist and thinker, is terrified at the discovery. [ . . . ] They are more correctly counter-myths, the crazed reaction to the accuser’s own folly. The white is a horrible monster, asserts Malcolm, and the black an angel: an African writer had already explained to us that all civilization is of black origin; it had to be, since the whites had turned the blacks into monsters and had imposed themselves as the ideal culture, beauty and truth. [ . . . ]
King’s policy of love is scarcely less myth-inspired than Malcolm’s open violence. Is there not something quite unrealistic in the attempt to solve the blacks’ problem “by disturbing the self-satisfaction of the whites”? [ . . . ] Hence the importance of religion among all the black leaders: King is a minister, as were his father and grandfather before him; Baldwin has preached in the pulpit; Malcolm abjures Christianity, only to adopt another religion—Islam. [ . . . ] Mohammedanism acts as an exact counter-myth to Christianity. To be sure, it is also the religion of many colonized Africans. [ . . . ] It is by no means certain that Mohammedans in other parts of the world could still recognize their own religion in this universe of black angels and white devils. [ . . . ]
To dare attack so apparently impregnable a position, they needed the battering ram of the most powerfully destructive myths; at the very least, radical condemnation of the white and a new Messianic religion which favored the blacks. The Hebrews needed the Column of Fire and the offer of the Promised Land to persuade them to leave Egypt, and these myths have been revived in their entirety by the present-day Zionists. [ . . . ]
In actual fact, King and Malcolm draw on two myths, or two counter-myths born out of the affliction of the black American. Both of them demand freedom and dignity for their people, but they each translate in their own way one of another of the answers that the down-trodden black can give his oppressor. King hopes to disarm the whites by a great act of love, repeated over and over until the two races fuse and become one. [ . . . ] But how can one ever expect the oppressor’s consent, when in the contract that seals their union he must sign away his privileges? [ . . . ] Malcolm is purely the embodiment of this intuition, on the verge of despair, that all is useless; revolt is first of all the acknowledgement of an impossible situation.
Then, of course, comes the period of extremism. And certainly the revolt destroys—perhaps forever—all hope of integration: the revolutionary quite clearly stands for permanent segregation. Was he not already cut off? Whose fault is it if the only hope of salvation he can see now lies in divorce and violence? Later perhaps there will be a return to Baldwin’s way of thinking, to a greater lucidity in self-examination and in the understanding of one’s own people and of others. [ . . . ]
Colonized peoples, Jews, women, the poor show a kind of family likeness; all bear a burden which leaves the same bruises on their soul, and similarly distorts their behavior. [ . . . ] We all feel slight hesitation in placing the black American in this portrait gallery, and the fault is not entirely ours. Black Americans are certainly an oppressed race; we could guess as much from their music, and it is apparent in the comedies of the American Belle Epoque, where blacks were always portrayed as servants, elevator operators and shoe-shine boys, never as heroes and never in positions of authority. [ . . . ] Later, we really came to know them, as GIs, as well-built, well-fed and well-dressed as their white counterparts. Laughing, they offered us canned meat, and we were grateful for it. [ . . . ] In the mess, for instance, a drunken white soldier would call them niggers, and this strangely sent them into towering rages [ . . . ] But at the same time the patriotic films of the period taught us that the black man, though insulted, behaved nobly like a loyal comrade: under enemy fire he would save the life of the white man, now sober and wounded, and receive his apologies. [ . . . ] The great American democracy would, with the passing of time, take it upon itself to raise them to the others’ level. [ . . . ]
I had almost forgotten the lynchings; [ . . . ] a black man would be captured by an hysterical crowd, lynched, hung, sprayed with gasoline and burned. [ . . . ] The two pictures: the one of a prosperous, free and democratic America, the other of these mediaeval bonfires, could not be reconciled, and so, as quickly as we could, we forgot about the second one. And anyway, all that happened in the South, a fossil land dreaming of past glories [ . . . ] We had all read the story of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, who went north to escape the reactionary madness of the South. The real America, the land of equality, efficiency, modernity, was in the North. In order to live a man’s life and not a nigger’s, all you had to do was go there. [ . . . ]
Thanks to James Baldwin and to his wonderfully concise, yet poetic, writing, expressed in a language so extraordinarily rich and condensed that several readings of his book are necessary to grasp all its allusions, henceforth we know that the black American is one of the chief victims of oppression. [ . . . ]
It is not a matter of a few individuals; some readjustments will not do. It is the whole of American society that excludes, martyrizes and kills the black man. [ . . . ] The black American is oppressed by the whole of American society. [ . . . ]
Of course, serious oppression is possible even within a context of relative prosperity. Are not women oppressed sometimes even in the midst of opulence? [ . . . ] Many African blacks who have now achieved independence would be glad to have their standard of living; but the fact still remains that the black American takes a dramatic view of his situation. [ . . . ] Oppression is like an octopus: it is hard to tell which of its arms has the tightest strangle-hold. Injustice, insults, humiliation and insecurity can be as hard to bear as hunger. [ . . . ]
Everything seems calculated to convince them of this: the world is white and they are black; power, wealth, pleasure, ideas, art are white; even God is white. How then can the black man not think himself an inferior being? [ . . . ] This anguish he feels in confronting the white man’s world is nurtured in him from birth by his own people. [ . . . ] The black man’s fear, his shaking knees and great rolling eyes, correspond then to a certain reality, but should no longer make us laugh. [ . . . ]
No doubt, the new generation, Baldwin’s own and particularly that of his juniors, no longer wants to believe that it is forever inferior, and will no longer be content to take the back seat assigned to it. [ . . . ] The present one is overflowing with aggrieved and humiliated men, filled with a perpetual rage and torment [ . . . ] And as life is unlivable with such poison in the heart, they seek oblivion in alcohol, in drugs and in crime. This is merely another form of destruction. [ . . . ]
In fact, the situation of the black American is not only a matter of opinions and prejudices. [ . . . ] It arises too from events and institutions that are very real and very hard to bear, that weigh on him from day to day, and distort his relations with his fellow citizens. [ . . . ]
To sum up, if we define total oppression as a state which affects the human being in all aspects of his existence, in the way he sees himself and in the way others see him, in his various entrees into urban society, and in his future in history, then the oppression of the American Negro is undeniably a total oppression. A product of the whole of American society, it affects the whole of the black man’s existence. [ . . . ] The battles at the entrances of southern universities showed a shocked world that you have to be a hero to pursue higher education when you have the insolence to be an ambitious black man. [ . . . ] He is the poor man among the poor whites, who are crueler than the rich because they need to maintain and to widen the pathetic distance which separates them. [ . . . ]
The fundamental desire of the white man, whether disguised or openly confessed, is to remove the black man from his sight entirely. [ . . . ] In the final analysis what the white hopes for is the annihilation of the black. [ . . . ] Just as pogroms were no accident in Jewish history, but the sign of an endemic disease, exacerbated and coming to a head, so lynchings, hangings and bonfires are the final explosion of the true sentiments of the white man with regard to the black man. [ . . . ]
Their elders have tried all the false escape routes and none has saved them: not submission, nor hatred, nor economic repression, not religion, not the Church. [ . . . ] No solution is workable while the context remains the same. Since the whole of American society questions the existence of the black man, the existence of this society must in turn be called in question. To combat a total oppression, he calls for a total revolt.
Total revolt is the result of a situation where those who revolt, having no longer anything to protect, are no longer restrained in any way. Neither by the fear of death, nor, which is perhaps more serious still, by the respect of values they share with the oppressor. Total revolt means war, the discovery of violence and of the terror it inspires. We saw on television the other evening one of the leaders of the Black Muslims; this man filled us with horror by his overwhelming hatred of white men, by his cold-blooded determination to eliminate them all one day if he has the power. It is impossible to deny the accuracy of his analysis: that the mere fear which the blacks might eventually arouse would have the power to drive back the oppressor. A high price must surely be paid for such a revolt, but: “A people from whom everything has been taken away, including, most crucially, their sense of their own worth [will do] anything to regain it . . . for, at the very worst, I would merely have contributed to the destruction of a house I hated, and it would not matter if I perished, too. One has been perishing here so long.”
Total revolt means also immoral, or rather amoral, warfare. [ . . . ] It is an unprincipled war, for principles have too long been used to mystify and grind down the oppressed. [ . . . ] Since in slavery nothing was possible, in revolt everything is allowed. [ . . . ]
Baldwin [ . . . ] has white friends, to some of whom he would entrust his life; he advocates mixed marriages, and would fight if necessary against the fanaticism of the Black Muslims. [ . . . ] The truth is that all blacks suffer the same oppression, and that now they have all come to believe that it must end: they all demand a structural transformation of the nation and a modification of its values. [ . . . ] Is Baldwin saying anything different, when he suggests, calmly and with apparent mental balance, that America should cease to consider itself as a white nation? [ . . . ]
He wants to believe that the threat is still postponed: The fire next time. Blacks and whites of good-will can still unite to ward off the catastrophe. [ . . . ] The Americans must consent to becoming a nation of half-breeds. [ . . . ] That would have been the real solution to the colonial tragedies of our era: an accelerated interpenetration of the races. [ . . . ]
When the oppressed has seen the extent of his oppression in this way, then it becomes unbearable to him. [ . . . ]
“The word judéité invented and used by Albert Memmi seems to be the Jewish equivalent of ‘Negritude.’” In his book Les Voies du Hassidisme, the author and essayist Arnold Mandel [thus] suggests that the word Negritude inspired me to coin the term judéité.
It is possible that I may have been influenced in my own research on Judaism by the Blacks’ search for their identity which resulted in the creation of the term Negritude, the crystallization of their hopes and concerns. [ . . . ] I have [ . . . ] been too engrossed by the awakening of subjugated peoples not to have been influenced by one or another of their discoveries about themselves. [ . . . ]
I do not wish to dwell at length on the three concepts I have proposed and defined—judéité, judaïcité and judaïsme. When I decided to take inventory of myself as a Jew, I soon required a word which would express (to the exclusion of all other uses) the fact of being a Jew. I was both surprised and perplexed to find that such a word did not exist. To be more exact, there was the word Judaism, but it had too many different meanings to be used in any one specific and unequivocal way. I needed, therefore, to adopt or coin a specific word, so I invented the word judéité.
I must state that, without lessening the importance of the meaning of this term, my first aim was to satisfy a methodological need. Better tools were necessary before I could grasp the complex reality which still escaped me. It was only in trying to explain the reality of the phenomenon of the Jew, in studying all dimensions of the problem separately, that I was led to do the following: (a) seek a definition for judéité which would be as specific and as adequate as possible; (b) distinguish it from all other dimensions; and (c) distinguish and define each dimension separately. [ . . . ]
I am still not sure today that I have exhausted the three dimensions of the Jewish reality with these definitions. I readily accept criticism, but I am more convinced than ever that they had to be separated, in order to secure some idea of their specific natures.
It did not take me long to realize that the expression, Judaism, which embraced multiple meanings, was not only too complex and vague, but also too restricting and inefficient for objective and exacting research. The term referred at once to the traditional, religious and moral values which govern the collective life of the Jews, to any Jewish community (we speak of “French Judaism,” for example), to the membership of an individual Jew in his group, and to the Jew’s degree of attachment to traditional beliefs. Since the Zionist movement, it has even come to mean a Jew’s loyalty to Jewish values which may not be strictly religious. [ . . . ] Is it not evident, then, that it would be better to assign only one of these meanings to Judaism and find different terms for the others? A little order, even at the expense of a seeming loss of vocabulary, could not help but be salutary. It seemed to me, therefore, that the most adequate meaning for Judaism would be “the body of cultural and religious traditions.”
I immediately felt that we should seek greater precision in meaning when I tried to take a more complete inventory of the Jewish situation. Out of this body of cultural values should we not distinguish the religious heritage per se from the ethical prescriptions which form the moral philosophy of the Jews? Must all the new works of contemporary Jewish philosophers and essayists come under the heading of “Judaism?” Though these men may be said to cling to the cultural tradition, their findings are quite novel. It is a grave problem, at least for the specialist, to know the proper domain of the Jewish heritage. Does it have a clear-cut scope which makes it hostile to innovation? Should it embrace a dynamic and evolutionary course which, although enriching it, would also transform it over time?
To keep from unduly multiplying my initial working concept, I have included under the same heading all institutions which organize Jewish collective life and which stem from and influence its values. One must realize, however, that to speak and write more accurately about Jewish ideology and its works, and about the Jews—as individuals and as a group—who share this ideology and in various degrees live up to it, it is most important and urgent to consider the two facets separately.
In order to designate specifically the Jewish group, I selected the word judaïcité [i.e., Jewry]. In making this selection, I also made a small discovery. I had a vague idea that this word already existed and that I need only attribute a single meaning to it. But the word was not to be found in any dictionary. I propose, therefore, that its status be “legalized.”
I suggest we retain this concept which I designate by the term judaïcité, but leave it open for discussion. Bearing in mind the particular demographic physiognomy of the Jewish people, it is necessary to define the term both in a broad and a narrow sense. Judaïcité would thus embrace the following: (a) total Jewish population—the worldwide judaïcité; and (b) each local Jewish community, in order to take into account the fragmenting of this judaïcité into multiple communities through the world (for example, the French judaïcité, the American judaïcité, etc.). It is, however, essential that the demographic sense be preserved: judaïcité designates a group of Jews.
Judéité, then, would exclusively describe the manner in which a Jew is a Jew, subjectively and objectively—the way in which he feels Jewish and reacts to the condition of the Jew. As I previously stated, I had to invent an entirely new word to express an indisputably original fact. [ . . . ]
Contrary to the word judaïcité, judéité measures both objectively and subjectively the degree to which the individual belongs to the group. As the final element of the triangle, it is clear that membership in a group is rarely defined negatively by the act of mechanical solidarity in the face of danger. In belonging to a group, one always expresses recognition of its values to a certain degree. [ . . . ]
In summing up, it appeared necessary to clearly separate the following distinct elements: (a) the Jewish group, or judaïcité; (b) the values of the group, or Judaism; (c) the degree to which the Jew participates in his group and shares its values, or judéité.
I have already given a detailed account of these three concepts and the definitions below will serve as a matter of record:
“Judaïcité consists of the body of Jews, i.e., in a broad sense, the total number of Jews throughout the world; in a narrow sense, a given group of Jews geographically situated (for example, the judaïcité of France or of New York).”
“Judaism is the group of Jewish doctrines, beliefs and institutions—standardized or not, written or oral. It is the set values and the organization which constitute and regulate the life of a Jewish group. Judaism also comprises Jewish culture in a broad sense—common customs, religion, philosophy, laws and art.”
“Judéité is the fact and manner of being a Jew—the objective sociological, psychological and biological characteristics which make a person a Jew; the way in which a Jew lives, his membership in the judaïcité and his place in the non-Jewish world.”
Now let us construct the parallel between Negritude and judéité. It is interesting to note that my situation as a Jew strikes me as being similar to that of the Blacks. My problem was to describe, delineate and define my personality as a Jew, i.e., my relationship to the collective personality of the group to which I belong. The Jewish group was subjected to a particular condition—a condition of oppression. From such a situation arise difficulties which must be objectively analyzed. Illusions exist, in part the product of the accusations of others but also of the rejection of self and the invention of other myths to counteract the accusations. These illusions are also born in part—and this is a more serious problem—of an objective and atypical condition which far differs from that of a people who are masters of their own destiny and for whom the relationship between religion and culture, for example, is of an altogether different style. The concept of Negritude, on the whole, responded to the same need for definition, delineation and description: the term provided a recognition of the black man’s uniqueness, summing it up in one convenient word. It was a concept which proposed to be the standard bearer for a movement of self-liberation and self-realization. [ . . . ]
It was L. S. Senghor who attempted to define the term more vigorously. He defined Negritude as: “The body of cultural values of the Blacks as they find expression in their lives, institutions and achievements.” This parallels my strict definition of Judaism: a word which expresses the cultural and religious traditions which men continue to espouse today—and not the men themselves or the groups to which they belong. Furthermore, when Senghor states, “Our one thought has been to accept this Negritude and having lived it to make it meaningful,” he furnishes the equivalent of judéité, i.e., the way of living and coping with one’s values. [ . . . ]
Negritude, in a more or less confused fashion, does mean all these things—the group of black men as a whole, their values, and the participation of each man and each black group in his world and in its values. We are not dealing with three tightly closed drawers whose contents must not be mingled: I made this point forcefully enough when I spoke of the conceptual trilogy concerning the Jew. [ . . . ]
There is a certain similarity between most conditions of oppression. I add in passing that the same need, born of a similar confusion, exists in the Islamic world. The same term, Islam, refers variously to those who believe in the religion of Mohammed, to the religion itself and to the ethical values which generally accompany it. Would it not also be timely to differentiate between these meanings? [ . . . ]
The oppression of the Jew is not the same as that of the black man or of that of the colonized. The oppression of the individual black is not the same as that of the group of blacks.
The identification of the former Black slave with the White nation which enslaved and then apparently adopted him, inevitably contains a subtle poison: the success of the operation—if one can speak of success—demands that the Black man renounce himself as Black. It must be admitted that for a long time the Black himself consented to the White man’s monstrous demand. This is understandable: it is not up to the powerful to become more like the weak; assimilation takes place from the dominated to the dominant, from the dominated culture to the dominating culture, hardly ever in the inverse sense. Such is the price, in any case, for what appears to both partners as a rise in social status. Now as one of the results of this unnatural effort, the war waged by the White against the Black also brings about a war of the Black against himself, a war that is perhaps even more destructive, for it is unremittingly carried on from within. I shall not go further into the mechanism of self-rejection, which I described at length in connection with the colonized and the Jew. Fanon recounts that when as a child he happened to be particularly unbearable, his own mother told him not “to act like a nigger” (Black Skin, White Masks). And no doubt henceforth throughout his life, Fanon unconsciously or not tried not to play the “nigger,” for the “Black is not a man” (Ibid.). He was not alone in this: the West Indians in general made fun of the Senegalese and other African savages because the West Indians did not consider themselves Black. This first and decisive split contains the germ of Fanon’s tragedy.
That is why it came as such a thunderbolt (and scandal) for Martinique and the adolescent Fanon as well, when his teacher and long-time hero Aimé Cesaire, already a recognized West Indian poet, proclaimed one day that “Black is beautiful.” This marked a proclamation of the end of the “White Illusion.” It gave the West Indian permission finally to take off his White mask, which he believed he had to wear in order to get ahead in the world. But what should replace this White mask? Did this mark a new era of self-affirmation? Should the West Indian decide to engage in battle together with his people, for their liberation and his own? It is at this moment that the specific destiny of Fanon emerges and that one can glimpse his ultimate political and intellectual personality. When a dominated man has understood the impossibility of assimilation to the dominator, he generally returns to himself, to his people, to his past, sometimes, as I have indicated, with excessive vigor, transfiguring this people and this past to the point of creating counter-myths. When Fanon finally discovered the fraud of assimilating West Indians into French citizens, he broke with France and the French with all the passion of which his fiery temperament was capable. He would henceforth have to combat this first love, to tear it out of him, with a violence all the more painful because he had believed in it and made it a part of himself. He would have to battle France in order to fight this aspect of his personality and ultimately become himself. Yet it was Fanon’s particular tragedy that, while henceforth he hated his former colonizer, he never again returned to Negritude and the West Indies.
This is a solution to which only few among the oppressed have had recourse. By now we are well acquainted with the principal responses of the oppressed to his condition: the oppressed either rejects or accepts himself, accepts or rejects the colonial model. Most frequently, rejection and affirmation are intimately intertwined in variable proportions, according to the particular moment in the hero’s itinerary and the historical situation. It is quite possible, indeed, that there exists a third way and that Fanon’s life illustrates it: one might suppose that identification with Algeria took the place of an unattainable identification with Martinique.
When Aimé Cesaire proclaimed that “Black is beautiful” and then with Senghor launched the concept of Negritude, he did not merely reject what his long stay in Paris had made out of him: a French intellectual and one of the elite graduates of the French university system, an intimate of the surrealists and a member of the French communist party. He also reaffirmed himself as West Indian and Black. He returned to his country, took a teaching position in Fort de France and became the political representative of his country. For a brief time Fanon felt enthusiasm for the daring of his former teacher, but then he took the position that Negritude was not the solution and that in resisting the white error, we must not yield to the Black mirage. Thereupon we see him firing red-hot broadsides into Negritude, and condemning it in the most radical terms throughout his work. Nor has enough attention been paid to the fact that he scarcely ever set foot again in Martinique. It is even more striking that with the exception of two or three instances he never discussed the problems of his native island. His friends still recall today with what scornful irony he used to refer to his former fellow countrymen when he happened to speak of them.
“When I met him in Tunis in 1958, he greeted me coldly. Well are you still politicking in the West Indies and Guiana? One of these days, France will give you a kick in the ass that will force you to seize your independence. You will owe it to Algeria, our Algeria that will turn out to have been the whore of the French colonial empire.”
“Several weeks later tragic disturbances took place in Fort de France. The CRS killed several islanders. I went to see him. He was jubilant: Let them gather their dead, disembowel them and take them on open trucks all over town . . . let them call out to the people: look at what the colonialists have done. They’ll do nothing of the sort. They’ll vote symbolic protest motions, and go on rotting in poverty. Actually this outburst of anger reassures the colonialists. It’s simply a psychological release, a little like certain erotic dreams. You make love with a shadow. You soil your bed. But the next day all returns to normal. You no longer think about it . . .”
It is striking that he says, you, your, they; he is not one of them; neither his politics nor his independence are involved; he does not consider these victims who were murdered by the CRS his people, nor does he feel part of the crowd which he scorns, even while he incites them to demonstrate.
So it appears that his rejection of the West Indies and the West Indians was now categoric and final. This rejection has a long history, to be sure: it is still the same denial of himself and his people which poisoned Frantz Fanon’s soul in his youth, as it has poisoned the soul of every young colonized individual who has become conscious of his condition. But in fact we find ourselves at a subsequent stage where the colonizer’s role is revealed for what it is and the colonized rejects the colonial relation. This is usually the moment when the return to self takes place, when the colonized individual decides to fight for and with his people. It is clear that for Fanon this change of orientation did not occur. Why? We might mention here the influence of Sartre who declared that Negritude is only the weak phase in the dialectic of Black liberation. Fanon was strongly impressed by Sartre, right to the end of his life, even when he was condemning French intellectuals as a group. And when, in Black Orpheus, Sartre attempted to reduce Negritude to its negativity (as he had tried to reduce Jewishness to a pure look),3 Fanon was consternated and had the feeling he had been deprived of his identity. Despite this reaction he accepted Sartre’s conclusions: “In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization . . . I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of the Black world. My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro values” (Black Skin, White Masks).
However even if we may perhaps agree with Sartre that Negritude—like Jewishness—marks a relatively negative upbeat in the dialectic, it is still necessary to live this phase before passing on to the next one; and the fact that it is lived gives it a very heavy weight of positiveness. Sartre’s error as always is that he is not sufficiently aware that even negativity and misfortune, when they are lived, become in a way flesh and blood, that is positivity (just as he has not been aware enough of the importance of a people’s affirmations, even when these are very humble or obfuscated by hallucinations and myths). In any case, every stage counts in the long march of a people towards its liberation and it is quite meaningless to disdain one or the other of these stages by calling it negative. Fanon, incidentally, foresaw this weakness in Sartre’s thesis, even though he ended up by resigning himself to it because it met his need. Why did Fanon end by refusing to commit himself to his own people, who were irritated and resentful of his attitude, though in the end the younger generation rediscovered him by the round-about way of Africa and revolution? His propensity for repeating ceaselessly: “I am an Algerian . . . we Algerian patriots,” which so irritated the West Indians, can be traced back to the fact that, whether he was aware of it or not, he had no expectation of finding the solution to his problem in his own people.
Fanon therefore broke with France, the French people and Europe; but he could not be content with a verbal rupture; he could not have settled down in Normandy, for example, in order to engage, with the aid of several other exiles, in a vague opposition on principle. He had to tear himself loose to the last fiber and eradicate what had constituted his life up to that point: the young man who had enlisted in the ranks of the Free French, the student at the medical school in Lyon, the doctor who practiced in French hospitals, the husband of a French woman (here again critics scarcely mention the significance of this marriage). “I say the hell with Europe. Its culture, its diplomas, the social conditions which it tolerates are just so many instruments of domination. We must junk it all and say to ourselves that we have nothing to lose. Otherwise, no liberation is possible.”
Would not the best solution for him have been to return home to the West Indies, to become one of the leaders of the revolt against Europe and France, and to identify his revolt with that of his people? That is what immediately comes to mind. Only his own people were not ready for revolt. In a certain manner of speaking it was the West Indies that betrayed Fanon, it was his country which revealed itself incapable of furnishing him with the psychological and historical remedy to his tragic situation. The failure of Martinique immediately to undertake its own liberation is also the sign of its powerlessness to aid Fanon, who remained alone with his revolt.
Black Skin, White Masks contains a curious attempt to explain the psychological disturbance of the colonized personality: he is said to be stricken with “abandonitis.” Frantz Fanon borrowed this theory from a little known psychological work by Germaine Guex, that makes no mention of the colonized but seems to have impressed Fanon a great deal. One borrows only what one needs: Fanon had enough personal experience with this feeling of abandonment to make it the pivot of the colonized’s conduct. Once he discovered the frightful betrayal by the White mother country, he felt himself forsaken. Worse yet, he realized that he had always been forsaken, that he had never been a true child of his country. Like every colonized individual he would gladly have turned to his native land with all his demands, to the only homeland of which he could henceforth be sure. Provided, of course, that it could be both father and motherland, so to speak, provided that it might remedy the abandonment in which he found himself. That is just what Martinique could not do. “The tragedy,” wrote Césaire, “is that doubtless this West Indian would not have found West Indians of his stature, and would have been isolated among his people.”
When the colonized finally recovers his identity, he needs to find the psychological and material resources to succeed in his combat against the oppressor. Beyond this he needs to reconstruct his identity, to acknowledge his past and to have a more or less clear vision of his future. For the time being, at least, Martinique could help Fanon in neither of these endeavors, neither in the negative nor positive effort to free himself. As a department of France, Martinique still believed too much in its integration into the French community to view it as an outsider. Martinique did not even dare imagine separation from France. Revolt and armed struggle seemed scandalously matricidal, even though the mother was suspected of not being a very good mother. Was Fanon then going to fight alone?
On the other hand, what precisely was the cultural, even mythical past of Martinique, what original patrimony and language could the inhabitants claim as their own and draw strength from to face the whole world and especially the oppressor? Creole lacks the range of expression that can support a country’s entire spiritual and intellectual life. And worst of all it is so intermingled with French that the colonizer would in any case be present in the thought and soul of the colonized. Here we meet an extraordinary difficulty that is present as well in certain other situations where the dominated individual has been subjected so completely and for such a long time, that he does not even have an autonomous cultural personality and is unsure of the content of his liberty even while he fights for it. It is no accident that Fanon has been best understood and taken up most by Black Americans who suffer from domination of this sort. In short, Fanon needed another way, a third solution which was neither France nor Martinique. At this point he discovered Algeria.
Imagine [ . . . ] that you are poor, badly dressed, even perhaps dirty; you become a kind of permanent provocation, you are, finally, a little more foreign. Be careful to seem most anonymous, the most transparent possible. [ . . . ] Avoid raising your voice, even with the most despicable people, avoid finding yourself alone with a woman in a deserted street, above all don’t try to speak to one; there’s a chance she’ll run away shouting. Because that is a foreigner: he must be without face, without desires, without pride or else he might irritate, he might frighten.
If, finally, your skin is black! What can you do but avoid going out at all? When the daily work is done, once you’ve left the precise position behind the machine, go straight back to the collective hut, avoid placing before the others the troubling, disturbing problem of your existence among them. And if, one day, unbearably bored, you venture out all the same on a Sunday afternoon, in this foreign city [ . . . ] In such a way you will cross the city, the country, with your eyes closed, your soul closed, perhaps until the end of your exile.
Thirty-five thousand. There are 35,000 new black slaves in Paris. Thirty-five thousand. There are 35,000 new black slaves in Paris. I was watching those of Montreuil the other evening, seated on the ground in front of their huts, at the gates of the city, silent, distant, immobile, a few yards from the deafening, uninterrupted noise of the automobiles. There was an astonishing number massed together, like a brood of large black insects, gripped with terror before an extraordinary world, exuding an unbearable sadness, almost palpable, to the point of driving them mad. This is no fable; they sometimes do become mad. A blonde European friend of mine, who worked in Germany during the war, told me of this kind of sudden rage that can overcome a worker and make him commit an insane act, destroy himself in order to begin the destruction of the world. [ . . . ] Like Samson bringing down the columns of the Temple, the act of a totally desperate slave: because foreign workers are indeed the slaves of modern times.
It’s even worse than that. The slave used to belong to someone, to a man in any case. [ . . . ] There is no man, I am convinced, even the most perverted Nazi, who doesn’t try to justify his crimes to himself. This guilt at the heart of the human conscience is an enormous good fortune. Man strikes, wounds and kills, but he knows that he must explain this, first of all to himself. Then he quibbles, he at least speaks ironically, he reasons; this is the origin of a large number of ideologies: they are tortured pleas for the defense.
Now, these new black slaves, our slaves, are not the slaves of anyone in particular. That is to say, no one believes himself responsible for them. No one person is the direct cause of their abjection and their loneliness, no one person has relegated them to these huts and these hotels where they sleep twenty to a room, the same room in which they cook and even, sometimes, organize a sleep schedule, in rotation, for twenty-four hours. [ . . . ] It is of their own free will that they live that way, rent those huts, organize their sleep time, so that they might send the largest amount of money possible to their country; they even prefer to group themselves in that way rather than live, eat, sleep, and die sometimes, each on his own. [ . . . ]
Who worries about the broken families of our slaves, about their wives, young or old, who remain alone for years and who end up in despair? Who worries about their children who die—their fathers not even having seen them grow up and whose death is learned about through a clumsy letter written by a local merchant? We are legitimately horrified by the slavery which still is a practice. [ . . . ] But that should not prevent us from recognizing that from which we benefit, nor above all from seeing in it the identical meaning: that of the same ignominious trait of our own, always the same throughout history up till our own time, less cynical on the surface today but nonetheless unjust and lucrative. [ . . . ]
Quite simply, this slavery which continues, which is reborn in our cities, is, in our eyes, more troublesome in certain forms, less directly and overtly cruel, as we ourselves have, on the surface, become, but it always adheres to certain old, fundamental mechanisms. [ . . . ]
Slavery in the past was paternalistic, ours is anonymous and crushes the entire personality of the slaves, whose frame of reference, attachments and values are exploded. [ . . . ]
All right, what is the solution? [ . . . ]
Of course, one could ask for more kindness from the new masters, ask them to give better living conditions to their foreign slaves: that is to say, make less profit from them. That said, all we can do is shrug our shoulders: where have you ever seen the privileged, on their own, give up a part of their profit? In the name of what? Even if one could show them that it was to their own interest! For example, to show them that it’s never good to have such a mass of ill-fed, ill-cared-for slaves; that they are the centers of disease and of contagion; that they exert a kind of stifled discomfort on the entire social body, xenophobia, racism, that they compromise the health and the overall balance of the common society. Because there is, all the same, a common society between oppressor and oppressed, and I firmly believe it: the oppressors always pay a price for their oppression, even if they gain from it on the whole.
Failing in the matter of interest, one could ask them in the name of simple charity.
It is to be hoped, of course, that the state would encourage them, would aid them financially in a task which is not natural to private individuals.
But the true end of the misfortune of the oppressed can only come from himself: underdeveloped countries must themselves stop relying on what seems an easy solution—that is, the export of men. It brings in money, without preliminary investment: but this bleeding of men, the youngest, the most vigorous, the healthiest—isn’t this investment basically lost? And what good is independence if, as soon as they are the new citizens of a free country, they can only live by leaving that country to enter into a new condition of servitude? [ . . . ] Of course, the utilization of foreign workers is the last form of the exploitation of man, of the permanent voracity of the capitalist system, of the permanent inequity of Western society. But it must be added that if it is prolonged, it will also be the explosive sign of the failure of the poor countries, of their crowded demography, of their political instability of an artificial economy. [ . . . ]
I know very well that I am going to seem more unrealistic. Since advanced industrial societies need a great labor force, and since underdeveloped countries ask for nothing better than to export the overflow of their population, how can one even suggest that this exchange be stopped, when it seems to be profitable to both parties? [ . . . ]
At least, let the meaning and price of this exchange of flesh and blood be seen. Capitalism has needed, in its first period, in order to grow and affirm itself, to sacrifice literally multitudes of men, women and children. It is thanks to this merciless exploitation, in part at least, that it was able to form those reserves of wealth which constitute its present power. Today it is perhaps necessary to its development that it use millions of “foreign” workers. [ . . . ] They are the last to be hired, the first thrown out, always at the bottom of the economic, social and professional scale. [ . . . ]
“You yourself, have you ever been a foreigner? Do you think you might ever be one?” Then he would discover that we are all, permanently, potential foreigners. It would be enough to remind him that humiliation, suffering and revolt are in differing degrees, under different forms, the fate of the large majority among us, so that he might understand what this is all about. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt. Then he will admit that the treatment inflicted upon a foreigner is a result of a conception, still barbarous and primitive, of human relationships, which authorize taking advantage of a position of strength.
In talking about women, I observe, with embarrassment and a touch of malice, that this time I am to be counted among the oppressors. [ . . . ] I am a man and have set myself up to investigate the emancipation of woman [ . . . ]
Today the whole outline of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist project is clear; it is certainly the most important ever to have been attempted. In the first volume of The Second Sex she defines woman as an oppressed creature and describes this oppression; in the second volume she proposes a theoretical solution for this real state of affairs; and in her memoirs she provides an illustration of her solution in the story of her own life. [ . . . ] Thus, this aspect of Simone de Beauvoir’s work, which will probably find a permanent place in the history of ideas, reveals its essential unity as the story of a single journey: one woman’s journey towards real emancipation. [ . . . ]
The outstanding feature of these memoirs is, [ . . . ] the author proclaims, [ . . . ] the life I have led in the light of an idea adopted very early in my career; I regret nothing, for I have accomplished my program. While remaining faithful to myself I have been able to take what the world could offer. [ . . . ] Simone de Beauvoir, a woman, and therefore oppressed, has, she would have us believe, successfully brought about her emancipation. [ . . . ] It is our job to weigh what this victory is worth; what is the meaning of this emancipation and at what cost is it achieved? In other words, whether this liberation really leads to freedom. [ . . . ]
Her work as a writer—which is the most important part of her—had really become the tool she used to free herself, as well as the account she renders of that liberation. Furthermore, this emancipation of a woman, as such, was brought about all along the line by means of her dialogue with one man, Jean-Paul Sartre. Her social and historical memoirs are after all built upon the private memoirs of the couple they formed. I believe her to be wholly sincere when she says, “In my life there has been one sure success: my relationship with Sartre.” This must be the starting point for an analysis of her work: did the couple Sartre–Simone de Beauvoir provide a workable solution to the oppression of the individual woman Simone de Beauvoir, and can it in a general way serve as a model solution to the oppression of the female sex as a whole? [ . . . ]
To be overmodest in dealing with Simone de Beauvoir [ . . . ] is [ . . . ] pointless, considering that The Second Sex is the most courageous venture ever successfully concluded by a woman on the subject of woman’s sexuality, and by extension of that of the couple. Yet we are told nothing, or scarcely anything, of the sexual relations of this particular couple. [ . . . ] We do not know whether their relations were harmonious; we do not know whether they had sexual relations. [ . . . ]
If they complain that this business is not really so very important, I shall repeat that they are not playing fair. How can you pretend that it is not important for the understanding of the relationship between a man and a woman to know whether they sleep together? It would be even more misguided in such a philosophy as that of Simone de Beauvoir to assert that the precise nature of their physical rapports, particularly in the case of the couple, is without significance. Perhaps the most that can be said is that the conclusion usually drawn is not the right one and that two people can form a perfect couple, while their physical lives remain separate. [ . . . ]
Simone de Beauvoir accepts and attempts to justify the absence of children in her life. It had been observed with regard to The Second Sex that children were accorded scant attention in this theory of the emancipation of woman. In this life, presented to us as a pattern, they are virtually ignored. Simone de Beauvoir scarcely speaks of them; a line or two, a hint here and there. [ . . . ] But to sidestep all this in the enterprise under discussion is to throw doubt on its value as a prototype. How can one write of the couple without writing of children? [ . . . ]
I do not make a virtue of childbearing nor consider abstinence from it as worthy of blame. I do not look upon it as a duty, but as a right—more precisely, as woman’s right. And, naturally, since one always has the power not to claim one’s rights, no one should blame Simone de Beauvoir for not having wanted children in her life. [ . . . ] Everything concurs to make us feel that one of the constant conditions of success for this exemplary couple was that they should be childless. [ . . . ]
I have been struck by the ultimate consistency of these two lives. [ . . . ] Simone de Beauvoir discovers that the married woman is subject to the worst kind of oppression: an oppression permitted by law. In order not to fall a prey to this, she decides once and for all not to marry. [ . . . ] Observing that a child is a weighty material, moral and metaphysical responsibility, she decides not to have children. [ . . . ] Unattached, and financially undemanding, they are relatively independent of history and of geography and even of the society in which they live. [ . . . ]
The need to block all routes against oppression leads this particular couple towards a kind of abstraction. Their interest in politics and the attitudes they adopt are almost always theoretical. [ . . . ] She speaks of the “de-reality” of her life, and of Sartre’s also, in spite of his efforts to combat it. In order to remain free, he does not marry, does not found a family, begets no children. [ . . . ] But the resulting personality is something more abstract. [ . . . ] As he becomes famous this unreal quality clings closer to him. [ . . . ]
If, as I believe, not to have children is, for a woman especially, a kind of self-mutilation, the candidate for freedom will find emancipation on these conditions set at too high a price. Is there only this choice left for the female half of these distinguished couples, the male half of which seems at last to be granting his companion complete equality, the choice between freedom and the sacrifice of an essential part of her nature? If I may use a phrase already employed in my account of the evolution of oppressed beings, I should say that in the case of Simone de Beauvoir we again find ourselves faced with self-rejection. [ . . . ] But she has to pay for her success by this one great privation; on one capital point she has to continue to reject herself. For to reject maternity is to reject one’s essential femininity. And I think I have already proved sufficiently that to deny one’s own nature is never a valid solution. [ . . . ]
Is a free woman then also necessarily a woman without a partner and without children? To how many women might one present such an ideal, and with what hope of success? This is liberty at too high a price, above all of too rare a quality, ever to be subject to generalization.
In short, it is debatable whether this emancipation is really one at all. Unrivaled in her description of the oppression of women, Simone de Beauvoir fails, it appears, in trying to find a suitable way out. [ . . . ]
But is the couple presented to us by Simone de Beauvoir a true couple? A couple whose members do not make love, have no children, do not even live together? [ . . . ]
How many couples could be content with such a life? Happy in their togetherness, while traveling apart from each other and making love separately? [ . . . ] How many couples and how many women would find here their fulfillment?
For fulfillment, surely, is the essential aim. We have been able to verify in the case of most other kinds of oppression that revolt cannot be an end in itself; that at a certain moment the subject must strike out beyond that and form a new relationship with the world; that it was probably that moment that marked the end of “liberation” and the beginning of liberty. [ . . . ] Of course, it would be easy for Simone de Beauvoir to reply, “But how many women achieve fulfillment under the present conditions of cohabitation, childbearing, and faithfulness?” [ . . . ]
It is for her very femininity that woman is oppressed, just as it is for his Negritude that the black man is persecuted and for his Jewishness that the Jew is victimized. The particular point at which oppression is concentrated on a woman is in her relations with men and children. I need hardly repeat that woman is the victim of the whole of society too and oppressed in all her acts. [ . . . ] For the liberation of the female sex, new relations must be established in the domain of love and maternity.
When I speak of love here, let it be clearly understood that I do not only refer to mere sexual desire, which would be a simple question of give and take, the man and woman concerned finding equal satisfaction. I am thinking of a deeper, more firmly rooted sentiment, which is perhaps at the origin of the couple relationship. [ . . . ] I intend, too, the whole complex of exchanges and reciprocal needs between man and woman. [ . . . ] Women have for centuries been starved of erotic satisfaction; it is normal therefore that they should attack this particular oppression. But subsequently, the whole of woman’s love-life must be recreated, and, I might add, man’s too. [ . . . ] No, our common problem is this: how to satisfy the need of woman for man and of man for woman, after sexual emancipation, and all other kinds of emancipation? [ . . . ]
On reflection the reader realizes with astonishment that all Simone de Beauvoir’s writings center around the problem of the couple. What else is She Came to Stay but the story of a triangular relationship where murder is perpetrated by the heroine on the person of her rival? The theme is resumed in The Mandarins and stressed by being presented from two different points of view. It is more important still in the memoirs and in The Second Sex. A preoccupation so constant, vaguely labeled “the relation with the other.” [ . . . ]
The problem is, how. For this purpose we must not shirk investigation into the details of domestic organization. [ . . . ] For, after all, women form more than the half of society, which up to now has always been conceived with the aim of satisfying the desires of the male sex. The principle of this reorganization is clear too: woman is exploited because of her function as a bearer of children. [ . . . ]
Her intention was to show how she became a free woman and how any woman can be free. Her experience and her demonstration are of capital importance. [ . . . ] She asserts that between Sartre and herself there was the equal intercourse of two free creatures, each respectful of the other’s liberty. Certainly, but to obtain this, she had had first to forgo the normal demands of her freedom. [ . . . ]
Simone de Beauvoir gives us proof that woman cannot achieve emancipation so long as her relationship with the masculine world remains as it is. [ . . . ]
I have acknowledged that through the emancipation of woman I was also seeking the emancipation of man, and therefore that of the couple. This is because it does not seem to me possible, for the moment at least, to envisage any emancipation that is not founded on a new kind of association between man and woman, a change not only in the economic aspect of the association or in its institutions but a total reform of the whole, passion included. I beg to remind the reader that I also warned him that the foregoing pages were likely to be no more than a tyrant’s plea.
My Dear Sally N’Dongo,
I greatly appreciate the token of friendship you have extended by asking that I preface Le livre des travailleurs africains en France (The Book of African Workers in France). I shall decline, however, for your collective work is hardly in need of my input: its invaluable distinction is that the interested parties speak for themselves, and express better than anyone else what they are suffering, and what they hope for.
Therefore, let readers browse, unprompted by any emotional appeal at the outset, and discover for themselves this sobering account, for you yourself have exercised considerable restraint, when one thinks what these descriptions, these facts and figures, must signify in terms of daily hardship, humiliation and suffering, and in some cases, death. Perhaps it is better that way, and persuasion of this sort will prove more effective and long-lasting. And anyone who looks away will do so with equal composure, for that person, deep down, agrees that this oppression should endure.
For the raw, unembellished stories do speak for themselves, the appalling living conditions, where health, legal and political rights, not to mention their sex life and family arrangements, all testify to tremendous suffering. [ . . . ] It is a wonder how the rest of us have been able to go about our lives in the midst of such injustice. [ . . . ]
The exploitation is so pervasive that the entire dominant population profits. [ . . . ] European workers benefit globally, as members of a globally exploitative society, from the labor of foreign workers. [ . . . ]
One has to believe that there are huge profits being made from this illegal immigration we hear so much about, a form of exploitation not unlike prostitution. [ . . . ]
There will never be a definitive solution until the whole world consolidates into a global society, where the interest of any one person will be considered as worthy of respect, as legally legitimate as any other person’s. Where no single group can take advantage of another by hiding behind laws of their own invention. In other words, when there will finally exist a truly universal set of laws. [ . . . ]
Foreign workers, in France and in Europe more generally, are no longer the unwilling subjects of European nations. They are subjected to restrictions, bullying, and in extreme cases, deportation. Although the poverty in their native country is usually what compelled them to leave in the first place, if they accept the risk of returning home, they can distance themselves from the foreign governments and dare to speak out, denouncing the administrative scheming, the legal impediments and basic injustices, either tolerated or sponsored by their exploiters.
I am also pleased to see Le livre des travailleurs africains en France speak its mind to African leaders. For the problem today is complicated: it is no longer enough to denounce neocolonialism, if that denunciation of the continuous drive by world powers to regain a foothold in former colonies were to serve as an alibi to some deal-making or other with the new ruling classes, often incapable of emerging from the impasse of their own fledgling nations.