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4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
In this book, Fanon delivers a powerful philosophical and psychological reflection on black subjectivity and identity in a white world. It has influenced international civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements.
In his phenomenology of black subjectivity, Fanon describes what it means for black consciousness to be objectified by the white dominating Gaze (that is, reduced to qualities that white people ascribe to black people). As the title suggests, people with dark skin color always have to wear a white mask in order to be tolerated by white-dominated society. With this Fanon means that black people are forced to conform to white rules, white hierarchies and white morals. Fanon eloquently and persuasively shows the psychological damage that ensues from this, exemplified not only by the psychological traumas stemming from colonialism and cultural assimilation, but also from other forms of violence and racism. Both colonized and colonizer are subject to its damaging effects. In this way, Fanon develops "a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with an account of the psychological harm that colonialism has produced" (Appiah in Fanon, 2008, p. viii).
Fanon's book reads as "a hopeful invitation to a new relation between black and white, colonizer and colonized: each [Fanon] says must "move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born" (ibid, p. x).
In his phenomenology of black subjectivity, Fanon describes what it means for black consciousness to be objectified by the white dominating Gaze (that is, reduced to qualities that white people ascribe to black people). As the title suggests, people with dark skin color always have to wear a white mask in order to be tolerated by white-dominated society. With this Fanon means that black people are forced to conform to white rules, white hierarchies and white morals. Fanon eloquently and persuasively shows the psychological damage that ensues from this, exemplified not only by the psychological traumas stemming from colonialism and cultural assimilation, but also from other forms of violence and racism. Both colonized and colonizer are subject to its damaging effects. In this way, Fanon develops "a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with an account of the psychological harm that colonialism has produced" (Appiah in Fanon, 2008, p. viii).
Fanon's book reads as "a hopeful invitation to a new relation between black and white, colonizer and colonized: each [Fanon] says must "move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born" (ibid, p. x).
ثقيل و متكلف الألفاظ (أكاديمي)، و مكدس بالتحليل النفسي لفرويد كما كانت صيحة ذاك الوقت، و متكرر. مع احترامي لفانون لأنه شخص مهم في الصراع ضد الاحتلال الفرنسي مع جبهة التحرير الوطنية في الجزائر و أفكاره عن الاستعمار مهمة، لا أظن أنني أستطيع إرغام نفسي على قراءة هذا الكتاب مرة أخرى. كلامه عن أن المُستعمَر يرطن بكلام المُستعمِر لينال الإعتراف ببشريته صحيح و أراه في استحقار العربية مقابل تعلم الفرنسية و الانكليزية. و يتكلم عن ظاهرة code-switching
تبديل الهوية بتغير الجمهور. ربما أقرأ له كتابه الآخر A Dying Colonialism
بعد هذا كونه سيستند على التاريخ أكثر من التحليل النفسي. لا أطيق فرويد يا جماعة.
تعديل: فهمت شيئًا الآن. لو كان الكاتب يرى أن الكلام يمنح الشخص احترامًا كما أسلف و يسمح له بتجاوز هويته العرقية، فلا عجب أنه يعوض ما يراه ظلما و نقصًا بهذا الأسلوب الأكاديمي البحت. الآن قرب لي لماذا يكتب هكذا.
تبديل الهوية بتغير الجمهور. ربما أقرأ له كتابه الآخر A Dying Colonialism
بعد هذا كونه سيستند على التاريخ أكثر من التحليل النفسي. لا أطيق فرويد يا جماعة.
تعديل: فهمت شيئًا الآن. لو كان الكاتب يرى أن الكلام يمنح الشخص احترامًا كما أسلف و يسمح له بتجاوز هويته العرقية، فلا عجب أنه يعوض ما يراه ظلما و نقصًا بهذا الأسلوب الأكاديمي البحت. الآن قرب لي لماذا يكتب هكذا.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Not easy to rate this book as some parts are difficult to swallow while other parts are eye-opening, especially considering when it was written. This is to come back to, and to look more closely at what he is trying to say, in conversation with other authors on the topics. I appreciated the constant references to Aimé Césaire, one of Fanon's teachers, as that made it less of a dry piece. Not because he references Césaire so much, but that Fanon is in conversation with other writers of the era. I don't think that he set this up to be gospel but to open up a debate. This also points to the need to discuss this book with others who have read it, something I hope to do once I'm back at uni next year.
"And for me bourgeois society is any society that becomes ossified in a predetermined mold, stifling any development, progress, or discovery. For me bourgeois society is a closed society where it's not good to be alive, where the air is rotten and ideas and people are putrefying. And I believe that a man who takes a stand against this living death is in a way a revolutionary" (p. 199)
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
The ending was electrifying!
'Have I no other purpose on earth, then, but to avenge the Negro of the seventeenth century?
In this world, which is already trying to disappear, do I have to pose the problem of black truth?
Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial conformation?
I as a man of color do not have the right to seek to know in what respect my race is superior or inferior to another race.
I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race.
I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master.
I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of my ancestors.
There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden.
I find myself suddenly in a world in which things do evil; a world in which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph.
I find myself, a man-in a world where words wrap themselves in silence; in a world where the other endlessly hardens himself.
No, I do not have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the white man. I do not have the duty to murmur my gratitude to the white man.
My life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me back on myself.
No, I do not have the right to be a Negro. I do not have the duty to be this or that.
If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that "sho’ good eatin" that he persists in imagining.
I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices.
I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world.
My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro values.
There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence.
There are in every part of the world men who search.
I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.
I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I· travel, I am endlessly creating myself.
I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it.
And, through a private problem, we see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this world, in a situation, "embarked," as Pascal would have it, am I going to gather weapons?
Am I going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century?
Am I going to try by every possible means to cause Guilt to be born in minds?
Moral anguish in the face of the massiveness of the Past?
I am a Negro, and tons of chains, storms of blows, rivers of expectoration flow down my shoulders.
But I do not have the right to allow myself to bog down. I do not have the right to allow the slightest fragment to remain in my existence. I do not have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined.
I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.
To many colored intellectuals, European culture has a quality of exteriority. What is more, in human relationships, the Negro may feel himself a stranger to the Western world. Not wanting to live the part of a poor relative, of an adopted son, of a bastard child, shall he feverishly seek to discover a Negro civilization?
Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.
No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free. The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions.
I am my own foundation.
And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom.
The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved.
The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally.
But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of color, want only this:
That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible.
Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation. At the beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child.
It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
Superiority?
Inferiority?
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?
Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
'
My final prayer: 0 my body, make of me always a man who questions!'
'Have I no other purpose on earth, then, but to avenge the Negro of the seventeenth century?
In this world, which is already trying to disappear, do I have to pose the problem of black truth?
Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial conformation?
I as a man of color do not have the right to seek to know in what respect my race is superior or inferior to another race.
I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race.
I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master.
I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of my ancestors.
There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden.
I find myself suddenly in a world in which things do evil; a world in which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph.
I find myself, a man-in a world where words wrap themselves in silence; in a world where the other endlessly hardens himself.
No, I do not have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the white man. I do not have the duty to murmur my gratitude to the white man.
My life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me back on myself.
No, I do not have the right to be a Negro. I do not have the duty to be this or that.
If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that "sho’ good eatin" that he persists in imagining.
I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices.
I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world.
My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro values.
There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence.
There are in every part of the world men who search.
I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.
I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I· travel, I am endlessly creating myself.
I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it.
And, through a private problem, we see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this world, in a situation, "embarked," as Pascal would have it, am I going to gather weapons?
Am I going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century?
Am I going to try by every possible means to cause Guilt to be born in minds?
Moral anguish in the face of the massiveness of the Past?
I am a Negro, and tons of chains, storms of blows, rivers of expectoration flow down my shoulders.
But I do not have the right to allow myself to bog down. I do not have the right to allow the slightest fragment to remain in my existence. I do not have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined.
I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.
To many colored intellectuals, European culture has a quality of exteriority. What is more, in human relationships, the Negro may feel himself a stranger to the Western world. Not wanting to live the part of a poor relative, of an adopted son, of a bastard child, shall he feverishly seek to discover a Negro civilization?
Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.
No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free. The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions.
I am my own foundation.
And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom.
The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved.
The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally.
But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of color, want only this:
That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible.
Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation. At the beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child.
It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
Superiority?
Inferiority?
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?
Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
'
My final prayer: 0 my body, make of me always a man who questions!'
challenging
reflective
slow-paced