Here’s the problem with Black Skin, White Masks. In my study and read and reflection of Black Skin, White Masks and then The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism, and other works by Fanon, I find that the man who wrote Black Skin, White Masks is not the man who wrote The Wretched of the Earth. Why do I say that?
I say that because, you know, scholars have shown that Black Skin, White Masks was supposed to be his doctoral thesis. His advisors, who were doctors, who admired his remarkable brilliance, talked him out of that, and he did like a standard doctoral thesis on a medical problem and a psychological problem, right? But the man who wrote Black Skin, White Masks was a man wrestling with himself. He writes in that book, “What do I care about Black nationalism? That’s not me. I am a Frenchman. My culture is French. My language is French.” “France,” this is a quote, a direct quote, “France is my religion.” (Laughing)
I can hardly repeat that word, repeat that line without laughing because it’s so preposterous when you read The Wretched of the Earth, because he is another man when he writes The Wretched of the Earth. He is no longer a Frenchman. He speaks French, because that’s his, you know, the language of his youth and of his education. But in his mind he is a combatant against the French Empire. When he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, he was what he would call a colonized subject, right? He said, Martiniquens went to France, you know, almost like for them, it was almost like going to heaven. Except when they met French people, they learned that they weren’t who they thought they were, because the French are the French, and you’re either one of them or not. And if you’re coming from their colonial possessions, you are not regarded as French, especially if your skin is dark, or you’re brown, or Black, or Yellow, when you think about it.
So, the consciousness that wrote that was the tortured consciousness of a colonized subject. When he broke out of that, when he was on his way to medical school in Lyon, in France, on the French equivalent of the GI Bill, his mind was exploded by a child who looked at him, and the little boy looked at his mother and said, “Mama, Mama, oh NI$$r. Mama, Mama, a NI$$r,” and it blew his mind, and he was never the same. And he writes about that in Black Skin, White Masks. He said, “My body was shattered into a thousand pieces, and I tried to pull it all together, but it was a new me pulling it all together.” And he was traumatized, you know. His dream of what he thought France was, was not, and when he went to Algiers, and he saw how his fellow doctors and psychiatrists treated the Algerian people, he knew what side he was on, you know. He not only tried to transform that medical system in Algiers. He joined the FLN [National Liberation Front], and he worked underground, but he taught them how to survive torture. And you know, and he treated torturers. It’s in The Wretched of the Earth, you know, his medical files. So, this extraordinary man, you know, was not the same man. So, read Black Skin, White Masks with that knowledge, and that caution, and it will speak to you.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
