Review: Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my souls desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

page 89, Chapter 5, Black Skin, White Masks

Preamble

When I read The Wretched of the Earth last year, I already had put Black Skin, White Masks on my reading list as it was another one of Fanon’s important works. I picked up a paperback copy of Black Skin, White Masks later that year from a local book store and got around to reading it this month as one of the books by black authors I wanted to read for Black History Month.

The edition I have is the 2008 translation by Richard Philcox.

Let’s get into it.

The Book

For anyone who is familiar with Fanon’s work, it is not surprising to find that Black Skins, White Masks combines philosophy, sociology and psychology into a study of racism, colonialism and a critic of the Négritude movement. Processing and understanding this book required external resources specifically the following episodes of the History of Africana Philosophy – 105. Meeting the Gaze: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and 107. Lewis Gordon on Frantz Fanon.

I still find it hard to get a grasp on this book. I think it is because it covers so many things. To be quite honest, I found the aspects of the book that covered psychology and psychoanalysis to be ultimately not that interesting because I don’t find writing about psychology and psychoanalysis particularly compelling. That said, Fanon’s general thesis that racism and colonialism creates a series of neuroses and complexes within the oppressed is something that I find holds a lot of water in my experience of the world.

There is a section of the book that is literary critique, specifically of Mayotte Capécia’s book Je Suis Martiniquais that I found interesting. More specifically, while looking up who Mayotte Capécia was, I found this particular paper that is a critique of Fanon’s critique of Mayotte’s book and also presents a wider context of the book itself.

By now, Frantz Fanon’s (in)famous attack on Mayotte Capécia as a “mudslinging storyteller” who betrays her race with a white man has been widely criticized as revealing a troubling gender bias in his seminal work, Black Skin, White Masks. Susan Andrade states that Fanon’s anger at Capécia’s “whitening of the race” is merely “a mirror-reversal of the miscegenation anxieties of the colonial white men” (220); Gwen Bergner argues that Fanon treats women as commodities, the means of mediation between black and white men, ironically recreating “the structure of colonialist discourse” he seeks to deconstruct (83); and Jennifer Sparrow and Maryse Condé both argue that Capécia simply describes the social reality of the racial hierarchy prevalent in the Antilles and that Fanon punishes her for telling a culturally accurate, albeit disturbing, story—a story that reflects exactly the same insecurities and destructiveness that Fanon exposes in Black Skin, White Masks (Sparrow 180, Condé 131). In a similar context, critics also focus on the themes of racial identity and miscegenation in Capécia’s work, usually in relation to later writers such as Michèle Lacrosil, Jacqueline Manicom, and Maryse Condé.¹ What has been ignored, to date, is the importance of the specific historical context of Capécia’s novels, as Beatrice Stith-Clark acknowledges in the foreword to her recent translation of the novels (xi). The second half of Je suis Martiniquaise and all of La Négresse blanche are set during the Second World War when Admiral Robert, a Vichy naval officer, controlled the island; a full understanding of these historical details is crucial to any analysis of Capécia’s work. This time period, known in Creole as Tan Robé, was a critical moment in Martinique’s history that caused the shift away from the idealization of white culture toward the acceptance of the values of négritude. For the majority of the black population, this was a profound moment of community redefinition that exposed the lie behind the promise of assimilation—that black Martinicans were just as “French” as the “French French”—but, as seen in Capécia’s novels, for the woman of color, and particularly for a woman of color with children fathered by a white man, this change was somewhat more complicated than simply embracing one’s African heritage. The communal rejection Capécia’s heroines face for bearing the sons of white men mirrors Fanon’s condemnation of her, but, at the same time, her characters’ “punishment” is also a critique of négritude and of the gendered double standard so often seen in community-identity politics.

When One Drop Isn’t Enough: War as a Crucible of Racial Identity in the Novels of Mayotte Capecia by Cheryl Duffus

I don’t have any particular opinion on Mayotte’s book, I just found this use of literary critique and its later response interesting.

I don’t have much else to say about the philosophical subject matter of this book as understanding it requires a lot of context that I don’t have at this time. Namely, topics like French existentialism, Jean-Paul Sarte, Hegel, and of course Négritude. If you are interested learning more about Black philosophy the History of Philosophy podcast’s Africana section has a whole lot for you to listen to.

Structurally, this book wasn’t particularly difficult to read. However, I did find the use of extremely long footnotes (sometimes almost full page length!) to be tedious. I just don’t enjoy reading footnotes while also reading the main text itself, I find it distracting. This book doesn’t come with endnotes so its a *lot* of footnotes.

Conclusions

I’ll give the book this, it gave me a lot to think about even if I don’t particularly understand a lot of it. If you are someone like who has already Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, I think it is well worth reading this as well to flesh out your understanding of Fanon’s thought.

I like to end review of non-fiction books with a quote so here is one from the very end of this book.

At the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness.

My final prayer:

O my body, always make me a man who questions!

page 206, Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

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