Le noir et la recherche de l'identité selon Fanon

BLACKNESS AND THE QUEST FOR SELF-IDENTITY

According to Fanon (1986), one of the importances of 'The Fact of Blackness' is that it portrays the Negro face to face with his race. In it we ‘observe the desperate struggles of a Negro who is driven to discover the meaning of black identity’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 16). Since this was an ontological problem which had to do with the essence or the nature of being of blackness, it was natural for Fanon, as Macey (2000) also notes, to make use of the existentialist phenomenology of Sartre, the negritude of Cesaire and fragments of psychoanalytical theory in his attempt to diagnose and prescribe a remedy to the problem of blackness. To Fanon (1986), the problem started as early as when he came to the world imbued with an inquisitive mind. He came with a quest that led him to realise that he was an object in the midst of other objects. Like a child, modeling from his/her parents and siblings in the process of identity-formation, Fanon turned to his own blacks and their attention temporarily liberated him from this crushing objecthood. An objecthood which had suddenly sealed him into nonbeing. It was a temporary liberation because when Fanon reached the other side, that is the whites’ side, the glances of the other fixed him there: ‘Look, a Negro!’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 109)

The above white gaze problematises the whole notion of ontology as far as a black man is concerned. Although Fanon accepts that there are some exceptions, he states that there is no room for a black man to experience his being through others when he is among his fellow blacks. But the black man Fanon was writing about was living in a colonised and civilised society which was characterised by the above-mentioned gaze. A society which, according to Fanon, makes every ontology unattainable. According to Fanon, this is so because in the worldview or schema of the colonised people there is an impurity or flaw, which makes it impossible for one to have any ontological explanation. Since it is very crucial here to understand what Fanon is saying, it is worthwhile to allude to the classical definition of ontology. The Chambers’ 21st dictionary defines it as the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature and essence of things or of existence. Thus, when Fanon talks about the limits of ontology in explaining the being of the black man, he simply means that ontology can only explain the being of the black man if and only if it deals with his existence as a black man per se and not as black man in relation to a white man. But this is unattainable because a colonised black man is Manicheanly constructed or brought into being in relation to an opposite, that is, a white man. Without a white man there is no black man. As far as skin colour is concerned, a black man can indeed be ontologically brown or even posses a skin shade that can make him pass for white as history has shown us. But a black man in Fanon’s time was not brown or white because the white gaze had ensured that he must not only be black, but he must be black in relation to the white man: ‘Look A Negro!’ ‘Dirty nigger!’

Since ontology leaves the existence of a black man aside, the quest for his self-identity becomes a painstakingly task because it does not permit him to understand his being. This is so because the ‘black man has not ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 110). This white gaze leaves a black man ontologically disturbed for overnight he is given two points of references within which he has to simultaneously position himself while going on with his quest for self-identity. This is aggravated by the fact that the black man’s customs and the source that they were based on were wiped out. Fanon tells us that this was so because these customs were in conflict with the white civilisation that he, the black man, did not know and that imposed itself on him. Even though Fanon was aware of this, he, like many other black intellectuals of his time, were allured by the concept of negritude, which tried to trace the residues of these customs as an attempt to seek a black identity and a black ontology. Fanon, knowingly or unknowingly, alluded to one of the pitfalls of negritude inherent in its advocates when he stated that the ‘black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 110). Moreover, Fanon alluded to another pitfall when he noted in his observation the little difference that existed among the almost-white i.e. the mulattos and the nigger in the Antilles. This observation in relation to his identity was not dramatic until he met the white man’s eyes: ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’

This encounter with the white man’s eye made it difficult for Fanon and his fellow men of colours to develop their bodily schema. The consciousness of his body became what he calls a solely negating activity since it makes a black man have a third-person consciousness in relation to his self and the world. Negating because the structuring of one’s self and the world creates what he calls a real dialectic between one’s body and the world. Here it should be reiterated that the world Fanon is referring to is a Manichean world whereby the corporeal or bodily schema implies that a black body is bad. This is a world, which according to Fanon, had some of it’s laboratories spend several years trying to produce a serum for ‘denegrification’ so as to whiten the miserable Negro and thus save him from his burden of corporeal malediction. Keeping faith with his quest for self-identity, Fanon sketched below this corporeal schema as a ‘historico-racial schema’ but as we have noted above, the sources of black man’s custom and thus, his authentic history were virtually wiped out. The implication of this is that Fanon relied on elements provided for him by the other i.e. the white man such as Jaspers who had woven Fanon, a black man out of numerous legends, anecdotes, stories and historicity. Thus, in order for Fanon and any black man of his time to construct his self-identity, it was not enough to just construct a physiological self or to balance space and localise sensations. And Fanon realised this painfully in that train when he couldn’t laugh at the fact that whites were afraid of him. He couldn’t laugh for his corporeal schema, being assailed at various points, crumbled.

Fanon tells us that this crumbling resulted in the corporeal schema being replaced by a ‘racial epidermal schema’. Thus, Fanon’s self-identity formation process entered another phase i.e. from a phase where he was aware of his body in the third person he entered a phase where he was aware of his body in a triple person. In a tone of someone who has discovered himself, he exclaims, ‘I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the

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