By Daniela Gomes and Marianela Muñoz
Our debate this week will engage with Frantz Fanon’s work, Black Skin White Masks and Achille Mbembe reading of it presented in his article Metamorphic Thought: The works of Frantz Fanon.
1. Revisiting Theory: Approaching to Black Skin White Masks in terms of Performance
In order to examine Fanon piece from a performance approach, we propose a second read to the work of De Certau, The Practice of Everyday Life and Carlson, Peformance a critical introduction. Both works present some key ideas that may frame our discussion such as:
2. Black Skin White Masks
A reading of Black Skin White Masks under the perspective of the performance studies, involves the comprehension that Fanon writes from his own experiences, from his practices and from his frustrations. Presenting the masks as a kind of character that black people need to create in order for being accepted in the society, Fanon tries to approach different explanations to the relationship between blackness and whiteness and the unhealthy fascination that one have for another.
His analysis engages with his own practice as a Psychiatrist and the cases that he heard from his patients, but also narrates his own experiences as someone from Martinique who moved to France thinking about himself as equal and realizing what was his real condition as son of the middle class in his country who spent his whole life wearing the white masks. His masks only is removed when a child, which can be considered a bearer of the truth look at him and define him as a “negro”, exposing him to his blackness and helping him to understand what that involves. From this moment, he decides to embrace the image of the scary black man that the child is afraid of and use his anger to perform blackness as the freak show expected by the society.
It is possible to read Fanon under the perspective of different scenarios and scenes presented over the book; as well as a group of characters that are put together to illustrate his concept of “negrophobia”. Furthermore, Fanon also engages in conversation with different art expressions, such as poetry, intending to present veracity to his words and to problematize the scope of being, embodying, and performing blackness and whiteness.
3. Césaire’s Poetry and Fanon
As suggested, literary sources are part of Fanon effort for comprehend the psycho-existential complex derived from the juxtaposition of the black and white races (2008: xvi). One of the figures that inspired Fanon works is Aimé Césaire, not only as an intellectual and political leader of the Negritude movement in Martinique, but also as a poet. We include an extract from Return to My Native Land, and a performance of one of his poems. The poem echoes Fanon analysis of the lived experience and psychopathology of black man.
“In a tram one night, facing me, a Negro.
He was a Negro tall as a pongo who tried to make himself very small on a tram seat. On that filthy tram seat he tried to abandon his gigantic legs and his starved boxer’s trembling hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose was like a peninsula off its moorings; even his negritude was losing its colour through the effects of a perpetual tanner’s bleach. And the tanner was Poverty. A great sudden long-eared bat whose claw-marks on that face were scarred, scabby islands. or perhaps Poverty was a tireless workman fashioning some deformed cartridge. You could see how clearly the industrious malevolent thumb had modelled the lump of the forehead, pierced two tunnels -parallel and disturbing- through the nose, drawn out the disproportion of the upper lip, and by a masterstroke of caricature had planned, polished, varnished the smallest, neatest little ears in all creation.
He was an ungainly Negro without rhythm or measure. A Negro without shame, and his big smelly toes snigered in the deep gaping lair of his shoes.
Poverty, it has to be said, had taken great pains to finish him off.
She had stretched the empty space between the solid hinge of the jaws and the bone of an old, worn cheek. On this she had planted the shiny little bristles of several days’ beard. She had maddened the heart and bent the back.
And the whole thing added up perfectly to a hideous Negro, a peevish Negro, a melancholy Negro, a slumped Negro, hands folded as in a prayer upon a knotty stick. A Negro shrouded in an old, threadbare jacket. A Negro who was comical and ugly, and behind me women giggled as they looked at him.
He was COMICAL AND UGLY.
COMICAL AND UGLY, for a fact.
I sported a great smile of complicity…” (Césaire, 1969 Transl. 68-69)
4. Black Skin White Masks – Documentary
In order to complement our readings we propose to watch in class the documentary Black Skin White Masks. The fifty minutes documentary bring scholars, artists and relatives presenting different perspectives of Fanon’s work and life experiences and will help us to have a better comprehension of the book. If you are not able to watch the whole documentary, we strongly recommend you try Video 2 of 5.