We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.

Ben Sweetland

My first experience living in a metropolitan country was at the tender age of 17 in New York City, NY. However, that experience and my lack of life experience at the time was very different to all that I am encountering now. My worldview was very different and I was focused on soaking up knowledge and completing my undergraduate degree. Fast forward to today and eight years later, I am living in London - rival metrople to New York across the Atlantic and I am working instead of being a student and have years of a variety of experience, personal and professional under my belt, and I see things and experience things from a whole different place.

A key example of this change in perspective is that fact that while at school in New York, I read Frantz Fanon's "Black Skins, White Masks, Peau Noir, Masques Blancs," but I have recently decided to read it again and I have seen it through new eyes and I would like to share some thoughts from this profound author.

Frantz Fanon is a Caribbean man or Antillean as he refers to himself. "Black skin, white masks" was first published in 1952 and has been touted as black liberationalist writing.

He was a French psychiatrist and revolutionary writer, whose writings had profound influence on the radical movements in the 1960s in the United States and Europe. As a political thinker born in Martinique, Fanon's views gained audience in the Caribbean islands along with Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams. Fanon rejected the concept of Négritude - a term first used by Césaire - and stated that persons' status depends on their economic and social position. Fanon believed that violent revolution is the only means of ending colonial repression and cultural trauma in the Third World. "Violence," he argued, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." Frantz Fanon grew up in Martinique amid descendants of African slaves, who had been brought to the Caribbean to work on the island's sugar plantations. Fanon's father Casimir worked in the customs service; he died in 1947. At the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where Fanon studied, one of his teachers was Aimé Césaire. In his teenage years Fanon became politically active and participated in the guerrilla struggle against the supporters of the pro-Nazi French Vichy government. He served in the Free French forces and volunteered to go to Europe to fight. After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris and Lyons.(excerpt from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/fanon.htm)

Another site ( http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html) says that "Black Skins, White Masks " is part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon's personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship is normalized as psychology. Because of his schooling and cultural background, the young Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the disorientation he felt after his initial encounter with French racism decisively shaped his psychological theories about culture. Fanon inflects his medical and psychological practice with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind the black man to his subjection to a universalized white norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological health in the black man.

For Fanon, being colonized by a language has larger implications for one's consciousness: "To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (17-18). Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French, which identifies blackness with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or "epidermalized" into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black man's consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from himself.
Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, "black." Neither exists without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest. Thus, Fanon locates the historical point at which certain psychological formations became possible, and he provides an important analysis of how historically-bound cultural systems, such as the Orientalist discourse Edward Said describes, can perpetuate themselves as psychology.

(pic on right from www.africamaat.com/ article.php3?id_article=38)

I would like to use this space to share some of the best quotations from Fanon's " Black Skin, White Masks"; comments that I find very pertinent and significant even in today's modern world and society:

" I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and as I was told by a friend who was a teacher in the United States, " The presence of Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of colour and ask them for a little human sustenance". At last I had been recognized, I was no longer a zero" (p.128)

"Once again I come back to Cesaire; I wish that many black intellectuals would turn to him for their inspiration. I must repeat myself too: "And more than anything, my body, as well as my soul, do not allow yourself to cross your arms like a sterile spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of sorrows is not a stage, for a man who cries out is not a dancing bear..." (p.187)

" We have just seen that the feeling of inferiority is an Antillean characteristic. It is not just this orthat Antillean who embodies the neurotic formation, but all Antilleans. Antillean society is a neurotic society, a society of comparison. Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a taint, it lies not in the "soul" of the individual but rather in that of the environment." (p.212)

" One day a good white master who had influence said to his friends, "Let's be nice to the niggers..." The other masters argued, for after all it was not an easy thing, but then they decided to promote the machine-animal-men to the supreme rank of men. Slavery shall no longer exist on French soil. The upheaval reached the Negroes from without. The black man was acted upon. Values that had not been created by his actions, values that had not been born of the sistolic tide of his blood, danced in a hued whirl around him. The upheaval did not make a difference in the Negro. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another. Just as when one tells a much improved patient that in a few days he will be discharged from the hospital, he thereupon suffers a relapse, so the announcement of liberation of the black slaves produced psychoses and sudden deaths." (p.220)

This excerpt comes from Fanon's conclusion in "Black Skin, White Masks" and is very poignant:

"The problem considered here is one of time. Thos Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalientaion will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive.

I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory and dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act.

In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of colour. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly recognized Negro civilisation. I will not make myself a man of the any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future....

If the question of practical solidarity with a given past ever arose for me, it did so only to extent to which I was committed to myself and to my neighbour to fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would a people on the earth be subjugated...

The black man wants to be like the white man. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. Long ago the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the white man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieveing a white existence.

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 colour do not havethe right to seek to know in what respect my race is superior or inferior to another race.

I as a man of colour 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 man of colour do not havethe 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 - I , 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 wight 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 recgonise that I have one right alone. That of demanding human behaviour 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 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, though 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 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 habve 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 a slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.

To many coloured 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 civilisation?

Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interested 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 live of the eight year old children who labour in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadelope.

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 colour 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 organise this dehumanisation rationally. But I as a man of colour, 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 colour want only this:

That the tool never posses 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 if 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 thr 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 attemtp to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?

Was my freedom not given to me then in orderto 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: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!"

(Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon - 226 -232)

What a mouthful of profound words and vision of a great Caribbean man. Too often we neglect he words, thoughts and actions of those who came before us. Let us reflect on these thoughts and contemplate where as individuals and as humanity we are today and how we are going to play our part to see that the world of the future is a better one. Peace & Love

Sean