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 Re: عبدالحميد البرنس يحذر من استغلال ماحدث ضد كل ماله صلة بالمكون العربي-الاسلامي! (Re: Khalid Kodi)
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From Black Skin, White Masks
--Frantz Fanon, 1952
"Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look, a Negro!"
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.
As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society [. . . .] In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology--once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside--does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man [. . . .] His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.
[ . . .] 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 [. . . .]
For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for "denegrification"; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction. . .
"Look, a Negro!" It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
"Look, a Negro!" It was true. It amused me.
"Look, a Negro!" The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
"Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity [ . . .] Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person [. . . .] I occupied space, I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile, but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea . . .
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "Sho' good eatin'."
On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men [. . . .]
Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?
"A Martinican, a native of 'our' old colonies."
Where shall I hide?
"Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro! . . . Hell, he's getting made . . . Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we . . . "
My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in 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, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up.
All round 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 . . .
I sit 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?
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.
"Look ho handsome that Negro is! . . . " "Kiss the handsome Negro's #######, madame!"
[Fanon discusses Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, asserting that Jews are overdetermined from within, whereas Blacks are overdetermined from without--the slave of their own appearance to the white world and, thus, to themselves.]
Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these statements were false. There was a myth of the Negro that had to be destroyed at all costs. . . . We had physicians, professors, statesmen. Yes, but something out of the ordinary still clung to such cases. "We have a Senegalese history teacher. He is quite bright. . . . Our doctor is colored. He is very gentle."
[Fanon revisits Sartre, and psychoanalysis, concluding that racial hatred is traumatizing because "for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason." He also concludes, provisionally, that to be an anti-Semite is to be anti-Negro. He then turns to Negritude as a possible solution, or cure, for dehumanizing racism and the ubiquitous white gaze. Continuing the metaphor (?) of being turned into an insect-like specimen, Fanon writes:]
Little by little, putting out pseudopodia here and there, I secreted a race. And that race staggered under the burden of a basic element. What was it? Rhythm! Listen to our singer, Léopold Senghor:
it is the thing that is most perceptible and least material [. . . .] It is the first condition and the hallmark of Art [. . . .] This is rhythm in its primordial purity, this is rhythm in the masterpieces of Negro art, especially sculpture [. . . . ]This is how rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, tyrannically, to make us penetrate to the spirituality of the object, and that character of abandon which is ours is itself rhythmic.
Had I read that right? I read it again with redoubled attention. From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?
I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I. Our of the necessities of my struggle I had chosen the method of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational. And now how my voice vibrates!
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass
Those who never learned to conquer steam or electricity
Those who never explored the seas or the skies
But they know the farthest corners of the land of anguish
Those who never knew any journey save that of abduction
Those who learned to knell in docility
Those who were domesticated and Christianized
Those who were injected with #######y
[Fanon asserts brotherhood with "Those" interpellated by Césaire, and then quotes more of Notebook, including the end of the poem which we have in the RR. His tone is by and large satiric, mimicking an exaltation in blood, savagery, emotion, dance, magic. He also quotes more Senghor, emphasizing Senghor's essentialism {"Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek"}.
I had soon to change my tune. Only momentarily at a loss, the white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development: "Your properties have been exhausted by us. We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach. Study our history [. . . .] " Then I had the feeling that I was repeating a cycle. My originality had been torn out of me [. . . .]
I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took away my breath. In his book, L'abolition de l'esclavage Schoelcher presented us with compelling arguments. Since then, Frobenius, Westermann, Delafosse--all of them white--had joined the chorus: Segou, Djenné, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran). All of that, exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historic place. The white man was wrong. I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago. [Fanon here quotes Césaire on African civilization.]
I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank, "Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone." I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably. . . . I had won. I was jubilant.
Lay aside your history, your investigations of the past, and try to feel yourself into our rhythm. In a society such as ours, industrialized to the highest degree, dominated by scientism, there is no longer room for your sensitivity. One must be tough if one is to be allowed to live. What matters now is no longer playing the game of the world but subjugating it with integers and atoms. Oh, certainly, I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children -- to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world. You are so real in your life -- so funny, that is. Let us run away for a little while from our ritualized, polite civilization and let us relax, bend to those #########, those adorably expressive faces. In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves."
Thus my unreason was countered with reason, my reason with "real reason." Every hand was a losing hand for me. I analyzed my heredity. I made a complete audit of my ailment. I wanted to be typically Negro -- it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white -- that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented [by Sartre, in Orphée Noir, his 1948 preface to an anthology of African poetry -- and Sartre was a friend of Fanon's, as well as a major intellectual/philosophical influence] that my effort was only a term in the dialectic:
But there is something more important: The Negro, as we have said, creates an anti-racist racism for himself. In no sense does he wish to rule the world: He seeks the abolition of all ethnic privileges, wherever they come from; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of all colors. At once the subjective, existential, ethnic idea of negritude "passes," as Hegel puts it, into the objective, positive, exact idea of proletariat [. . . .] In fact, negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression: The theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is insufficient by itself, and the Negroes who employ it know this very well; they know that it is intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.
When I read that page [by Sartre], I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, "The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven." Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing [. . . . ] Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable. I needed to lose myself completely in negritude [. . . .]
The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, my black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower.
[Fanon quotes from a poem by Jacques Romain and two poems by the Senegalese poet David Diop, both anthologized in the volume for which Sartre wrote the preface consigning negritude to a necessary stage in a Hegelian/Marxist dialectic] What is certain is that, at the very moment when I was trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered by last illusion. [Fanon quotes from Césaire's Notebook again, the passage about 'my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral.'] [W]hile I was shouting that, in the paroxysm of my being and my fury, he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term. In all truth, in all truth I tell you, my shoulders slipped out of the framework of the world, my feet could no longer feel the touch of the ground. Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man. Between the white man and me the connection was irrevocably one of transcendence.
But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.
My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro. . . .
http://copland.udel.edu/~braham/fanon-black-white.doc
قراءه ممتعه يابشاشا.
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Khalid Kodi
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست