Paper no: - 11.Discuss Frantz Fanon’s way of looking toward The Man of Color and the White Woman.

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Name: - chintavan bhungani

Course: - M.A. English

Semester: - 3

Batch: - 2015-2017

Enrolment no: - PG15101006

Submitted to: - Smt. S.B.Gardi Dept. of English MKBU

Email id: - cnbhungani7484@gmail.com

Paper no: -   11.the postcolonial literature 

Topic: -  Discuss Frantz Fanon’s way of looking toward The Man of Color and the White Woman.

ANS.

INTRODUCTION:-

 Frantz Omar Fanon was a Martiniquais-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. Black Skin, White Masks is one of Fanon's important works. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon psychoanalyzes the oppressed Black person who is perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world that s/he lives in, and studies how navigates the world through a performance of White-ness. Particularly in discussing language, he talks about how the black person's use of a colonizer's language is seen by the colonizer as predatory, and not transformative, which in turn may create insecurity in the black's consciousness He recounts that he himself faced many admonitions as a child for using Creole French instead of "real French," or "French French," that is, "white" French. Ultimately, he concludes that "mastery of language [of the white/colonizer] for the sake of recognition as white reflects a dependency that subordinates the black's humanity"

Fanon is best known for the classic analysis of colonialism and decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon's three books were supplemented by numerous psychiatry articles as well as radical critiques of French colonialism in journals such as Esprit and El Moudjahid.

Ø Fanon's writings

o   Black Skin, White Masks (1952), (1967 translation by Charles Lam Marksman: New York: Grove Press)

o   A Dying Colonialism (1959),

o   The Wretched of the Earth (1961),

o   Toward the African Revolution (1964),

The book is divided in 8 chapters. In these eight chapters, Fanon talks about psychology of white colonizers and black people’s desire to be like white men. He talks about issue of language, marriage between white and black and psychology behind it, white mindset of ruling, 

1. The Black Man and Language
2.  The Woman of Color and the White Man
3. The Man of Color and the White Woman
4. The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized
5. The Lived Experience of the Black Man
6. The Black Man and Psychopathology
7. The Black Man and Recognition
8. By Way of Conclusion

 The Man of Color and the White Woman

The following is based on Chapter 3 of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The Man of Color and the White Woman”:

Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinique, starts by saying of himself:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … Who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.

Yes, it gets worse:

Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Having lost half his readership, Fanon then turns to the case of Jean Veneuse, the hero of an autobiographical novel by Rene Maran, “Un homme pareil aux autres” (1947).

“By loving me she [white woman] proves to me that I am worthy of a love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.”

Jean Veneuse came to France from the Caribbean when he was three or four. He lost his parents and was brought up by boarding schools in France, the only black student in a sea of white. He has a lonely childhood. When the other students go home for the holidays he is left alone at school.  He withdraws into himself and into books: Aurelius, Tagore, Pascal and other writers become his only friends.

He grows up French and falls in love with a white woman. He wonders about his motives.

Maybe it is simply because he was brought up European and so desires European women just like any other man in Europe. Or, contrariwise, maybe it is because he is black:

the common mulatto and black man have only one thought on their mind as soon as they set foot in Europe: to gratify their appetite for white women.

Most of them, including those with lighter skin who often go so far as denying both their country and their mother, marry less for love than for the satisfaction of dominating a European woman, spiced with a certain taste for arrogance.

And so I wonder whether … I am unconsciously endeavoring to take my revenge on the European female for everything her ancestors have inflicted on my people throughout the centuries.

Yet when he works in Africa as a civil servant he proves to be just as bad as the whites, complete with the native girl in his hut. So maybe it is not revenge that he wants but to separate himself from his race or even somehow to become race less.

But Fanon says that Veneuse’s troubles run much deeper than that: he was left alone in the world by his mother as a small boy and is hung up on that. So he is afraid to love and be loved. He holds everyone at arm’s length, even the woman he wants to marry. Therefore we cannot draw any general conclusions from Veneuse’s case.