Critique on the three chapters of “Black Skin White Mask”

Assignment Paper15-E-E-305

Topic- Critique on the three chapters of “Black Skin White Mask”

Dabhi Ashvin P

M.A. Part – II

SEM- III

Roll No -06

Year – 2011-12

Department of English

Submitted to Dr. Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University

  

Introduction:-

                 

This book “Black Skin White Masks” is written by Frantz Fanon. It is published in 1952. This book is about the mindset or psychology of racism by frank fanon a psychiatrists. The book looks at the condition which goes through the minds of black and white people. A distinguished French Caribbean African psychiatrist and writer negritude group but soon rejected their philosophy and developed his own theory of racial and colonial theory.

              

The title “Black Skin White Masks” suggests lots of things. It is very symbolical. The black people are inferior and the white people are superior. The black people want to be white. They suffer a lot being black. Being white they want to be superior and they want to be a good man. The black man wants to marry with the white woman because he wants to be superior. Though he does not love her, he wants to marry with the white woman because he wants to be superior for marring with her. The white people hate the black people. They suffer a lot. The black people also known as Negro. There are eight chapters in the present book. Let’s discuss regarding the some of the chapters of the present book.

Chapter 1:- The black man and language:-

                  

If you do not learn the white man’s language than you are unintelligent and if you learn it properly than your mind will be wash away by their universe of racist ideas. The white man always considers black man fully unhuman. There is no matter how much education they have or well they act. White people, feels fear of the black people as they viewed the black as mindless, violent & animal. White man thinks that they will take white women from them. Fanon says that he has only one duty and one right; he has a right to demand human behavior from the other. He has a duty that he never lets his decision renounce his freedom. Fanon cannot accept the fact that ever possible in France between white and black. Fanon is talking about behavior he says they have to need to be free from that obsession being black in the mental condition. They think that the language can make you white. With the globalization you need to preserve old houses, thing and idea etc. nowadays we can see the local culturality disappear.

               

 Frantz fanon, a French writer, published “black skin. White masks” as his first treatise on the effects of racism and colonialization both a memory and a political treatise, “black skin white masks” is a work illustrating the marginalization and servitude of the black experience in the western world. About his experience in Lyon as a member of the French resistance, this book discusses how language is itself a dominating force against equal racial relations. He argues that language has become a testimony for the power imbalance and resentment of difference in society. By speaking the language of the colonizers, the colonized continue to allow for their own enslavement through a kind of cultural imprisonment. Fanon greatly influenced the later workings of Michel Foucault and his discussion of hegemonic power in language and culture. Fanon speaks of how the ‘Antilles negro’ should reject the language and cultural traditions of their ogresses (France) and find their own culture which is separate from that of the colonial middle class’s limitation of their French equivalent keeps the anticlines and other Caribbean native culture oppressed through their own lukewarm attempt at emulating French society. According to fanon, the colonized intellectuals will never empower themselves until they break from the valorization of French language and culture and begin to separate themselves from it. This chapter is captioned “The Black Man and language” and looks at the “colonialist subjugation” of the Negro. Fanon seems to acquiesce to the dominant linguistic philosophy of his day when he boldly declares that “a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.” This is just a theory.  Many other factors come into play. If the theory held true independently, then consequently, the Negro would not be placed in the weak position of possessing an inferiority complex because he would possess the world of the white colonizer and share co-equal status. This first colonizers and share co-equal status. This first chapter of only seventeen pages does not present the critic with an “eclaircisement” of the language dichotomy, for the author, a self confessed medical fractioned. Is evidently no trained person in the field of sociolinguistic and thus proffers only his layman’s perspective. Probably in his day, linguistics wasn’t as detailed as it is in this modern dispensation with separate branches of sociolinguistics and a combination of European and African language available among others.

                 

 Here we can take help of the ‘untouchable’ which is written by Mulk raj anand. In this book there are some characters that are from minority class means Harijen (untouchable). In India they were untouchable people. They could not go to temple. There were so many problems with them. They had to accept Christian religion because in this religion there was no section or untouchability.

Chapter 2:- The woman of color and the white man:-

                

The second chapter deals with “the woman of color and the white man.” There is a physis here that has grown to almost mythological proportions. It has been represented numerous times in film and text. Since historical times and during slavery in the plantation system in the new world there has existed the sexual attraction between the two races, so that “physis” has almost become “nomos”. Here we can see the thought process of black woman towards two races. The black woman wants to marry with white people because she wants to be “white” or superior. She thinks being a black woman she is inferial. Inferiority complex and representation of white and black community are also there. A black woman secretly wants to be white because of white man’s skin, looks up to white people and looks down on black people. The vision and dream of black woman is towards the white to achieve forbidden values of being white.

                 

  This black woman does not truly love this white man but she loves his color. She goes with him not out of love but to deal with her own emotional problems about race. It is because the black woman feels inferior that she hopes to obtain admittance to the white world. Here we can see how secretly she wants to be white. Marrying white is her way of doing this. Whites reflect prosperity, beauty, intelligence, and moral value and in other side blacks represents, something to escape, to be saved from, something not to be. So they want to marry a white man even though they know full well that very few will marry them. The white people will say black men lack refinement. They will say black men are ugly and grow impatient with you if you point out good looking black men. Here Fanon takes as his examples three women: Mayotte of Martinique and Nini and Dedee of Senegal. Mayotte who wrote a book about her life and Nini and Dedee are characters from “Nini” a story by Abdoulaye Sadji. They are part white which makes them determined not to “slip back among the ‘nigger’ rabble.” The character Nini is a silly typist. A man who is and accountant with the waterways company, proposes marriage but in the end they have the police tell him to stop his “morbid insanities” because he is black and she is half white. He has offended her honor. Meanwhile another man with a good government job proposes to Dedee but this time it is a dream come true because he is white. Mayotte was entering the white world but a white man cannot make you white. Mayotte, the third woman, had an affair with a married white man. Once she asked him to take her to the white women there made her feel so out of place that she never went back to the white side again.

Chapter 3:- The man of color and the white woman:-

             

 Fanon is a black psychiatrist from Martinique. He starts this chapter by saying of himself: I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Here Fanon gives the example of Jean Veneuse, the hero of an autobiographical novel by Rene Maran. Jean Veneuse came to France from the Caribbean when he was three or four. He lost his parents. He was brought up by boarding schools in France, the only black student in a sea of white. He has a lonely childhood. When the other students go home for the holidays, he is left alone at school. He grows up French and falls in love with a white woman. He wonders about his motives. May be it is simply because he was brought up European and so desires European women just like any other man in Europe. When he works in Africa as a civil servant he proves to be just as bad as the whites. May be it is not revenge that he wants but to separate himself from his race or even some how to become race less.  

           

 But here Fanon says that Veneuse’s difficulties go much deeper. He was left alone in the world by his mother as a small boy. He is hung up on that. So he is afraid to love and be loved. He holds everyone at arm’s length, even the woman he wants to marry. Therefore we cannot take any general conclusions from Veneuse’s case.    

Conclusion:

                   

 In conclusion I would like to say that there is no Negro mission or there is no white burden. I find myself suddenly in which things do evil. There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence.