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Extra Credit Annotation Project:
The Fact of Blackness

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by Franz Fanon

3. BEING BLACK
 
4. “Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments; but the jeers don’t stop for all that; only, from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defense, but it is also the end of the story. The self is disassociated, and the patient heads for madness.”
 
5. —Sartre: Prologue to “The Wretched of the Earth,” by Franz Fanon
 
6. The following excerpt is from ‘The Fact of Blackness’ Black Skin, White Masks (1952) (trans. Charles Lam Markmann) London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.
 
7. The Fact of Blackness: by Franz Fanon
 
8. The Black Man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely, with American Negroes. Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world. In the Antilles there was also that little gulf that exists among the almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic. And then...
 
9. And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are n the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. I does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world-definite because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world. ...
 
10. ‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
 
11. ‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me.
 
12. ‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
 
13. ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! Now there were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but the laughter had become impossible....
 
14. My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger is going to eat me up.
 
15. All around me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me...
 
16. I slid down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?
 
17. Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of my being. I was about to be angry. The fire was long since out, and once more the nigger was trembling.
 
18. ‘Look how handsome that Negro is!...” ‘Kiss the handsome Negro’s ass, madame!’
 
19. Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free from my rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh.
 
20. The field of battle having been marked out, I entered the lists.
 
21. What? While I was forgetting, forgiving, and wanting only to love, my message was flung back in my face like a slap. The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man—or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged.
 
22. They would see, then! I had warned them, anyway. Slavery? It was no longer even mentioned, that unpleasant memory. My supposed inferiority? A hoax that is was better to laugh at. I forgot it all, but only on condition that the world not protect itself against me any longer. I had incisors to test. I was sure they were strong. And besides...
 
23. What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from the inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.
 
24. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre says: ‘They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype...We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside’ (1965:95).
 
25. All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hope, one waits. His actions, his behavior are the final determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed. He belongs to the race of those who since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough, one has only not to be a nigger. Granted, the Jews are harassed—what am I thinking of? They are hunted down, exterminated, cremated. But these are little family quarrels. The jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am given a new chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.
 
26. I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genius. Why, it’s a Negro!
 
27. As I begin to recognize that the Negro is symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad—since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the color of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that other have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal. When the Negro dives—in other word, goes under—something remarkable occurs.
 
28. Listen again to Césaire:
 
29. Ho ho Their power is well anchored Gained Needed My hands bathe in bright heather In swamps of annatto trees My gourd is heavy with stars But I am weak. Oh I am weak. Help me. And here I am on the edge of metamorphosis. Drowned blinded Frightened of myself, terrified of myself Of the gods...you are no gods. I am free.
 
30. (Césaire 1946: (144)
 
31. THE REBEL: I have a pact with this night, for twenty years I have heard it calling softly for me...
 
32. (Césaire 1946: (122)
 
33. Having again discovered that night, which is to say the sense of his identity, Césaire learned first of all that ‘it is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint. ...’
 
34. The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on me. Like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment.
 
35. The situation that I have examined, it is clear by now, is not a classic one. Scientific objectivity was barred to me, for the alienated, the neurotic, was my brother, my sister, my father. I have ceaselessly striven to show the Negro that in a sense he makes himself abnormal; to show the white man that he is at once the perpetrator and the victim of delusion.
 
36. There are times when the black man is locked into his body. Now, ‘for a being who has acquired consciousness of himself and of his body, who has attained to the dialectic of subject and object, the body is no longer a cause of the structure of consciousness, it has become an object of consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 277).
 
37. The Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past. None the less I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass. Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the time cannibalism. A few years ago, the Lyon branch of the Union of Students From Overseas France asked me to reply to an article that made jazz music literally an irruption of cannibalism into the modern world. Knowing exactly what I was doing, rejected the premises on which the request was based, and I suggested to the defended of European purity that he cure himself of a spasm that had nothing cultural in it.