The eye in Fanon

Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is a provocation. It strains at the boundaries of form, moving between psychological analysis, literary criticism, and dramatic narrative. It confronts the reader with the experience of racism and colonialism.  In its core, it makes me realize I read it as a white man, and imagine a white man as the reader Fanon is addressing--his very point is that deeply embedded within culture and history and human psychology are assumptions about who reads, who thinks, and who receives information.  Those structures are so pervasive, that I imagine Fanon shaking the bars of these psychic iron cages as the only hope of inciting people to break out of them. 

Fanon has been high on my list of things to read because it seems like he will take you into a core of seeing race and culture differently, and from there shaking loose even more restrictions.

One generative thread is the idea of being seen.  Fanon wants black people to be able to see themselves as themselves, not defined in a disadvantaged way relative to whiteness.  "The black man would like to be forgotten, so as to gather his force, his authentic force" (p 163)--I understand being forgotten to mean be forgotten as the way blackness was in counterpoise to whiteness, as a being defined by being "exploited, enslaved, and despised by a colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white" (p 178).  This requires an "eye" that serves a "correcting mirror" which enables us to "correct cultural mistakes." It reminds me of the eyes in Olson, and like Olson, Fanon sees the risk in universals: "How come I have barely opened my eyes they had blind-folded, and they already want to drown me in the universal?...We need to touch with our finger all the wounds that score our black livery." (p 163-164). 

Once alerted to the problem of black-ness, enlightened white society might suggest a quick fix--let's just get past race.  Fanon says not so fast.  There's a first step,"disalienation"--you've got to find a way for black people (and others as you extend this to other forms of domination) to come into possession of themselves and create themselves.  

For all Fanon's visceral confrontation of a white, colonial reader, he's very idealistic. "May the subjugation of man by man--that is to say, of me by another--cease.  May I be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be" (p 206).  I'm not sure I know what disalienation looks like, and I would hazard to say that it is not discernable from the outside--I can't say here is an occasion where a black person experiences disalienation--won't it be grounded in very specific, subjective experience.  I like to think that some of what is called Afro-futurism contains disalienating elements.  It seems to be present as I go through the history of the AACM so carefully recounted by George Lewis.  It is easily an act of imposition by me.  But that disalienation will be important to find as a more general phenomenon. 

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks translation Richard Philcox (Editions de Seuil 1952/Grove 2008)