Brown Skin, White Masks

Hamid Dabashi

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783713943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a a critical examination of the role that immigrant intellectuals play in facilitating the global domination of American imperialism. In his pioneering book about the relationship between race and colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon explored the traumatic consequences of the sense of inferiority that colonised people felt. Brown Skin, White Masks picks up where Fanon left off, and extends Fanon's insights as they apply to today's world. Dabashi shows how intellectuals who migrate to the West are often used by the imperial powers to misrepresent their home countries. Just as many Iraqi exiles were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, Dabashi demonstrates that this is a common phenomenon, and examines why and how so many immigrant intellectuals help to sustain imperialism.

1

Brown Skin, White Masks

The black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man…As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

When Americans inaugurated their first African-American president, Barack Hussein Obama, this prompted me to reread Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and to reflect on what it meant when it was first published, in 1952, and what it means now that a black man is in the White House.

I first read Fanon’s masterwork as a youth in Iran in the 1970s. Post-e Siyah, Suratak-ha-ye Sefid still sounds more elegiac to my ears than Black Skin, White Masks, even more so than its French title, Peau Noire, Masques Blanc. Since then I have read and taught Fanon’s now furious, now soothing soul book too many times to recall. I call to mind the quote “Don’t expect to see any explosion today. It’s too early … or too late”.¹ I feel that the span of my own life—the more than half a century of despair and delight that has passed between 1951, when I was born in Iran (two years before the CIA-engineered coup of 1953), and today, some years past the world-changing events of September 11, 2001—is summed up in those opening lines of Fanon’s. I grew up thinking it was too early for that explosion; I now live thinking it is too late.

I still have my youthful marginalia in the Persian translation of Black Skin, White Masks and my middle-aged comments in its English translation; they show none of the anger I now feel. More than anything else, it is Fanon’s calm and composure that commands my attention today:

I honestly think, however, it’s time some things were said. Things I’m going to say, not shout. I’ve long given up shouting…This book should have been written three years ago. But at the time the truths made our blood boil. Today the fever has dropped and truths can be said without having them hurled into people’s faces. They are not intended to endorse zealousness. We are wary of being zealous. Every time we have seen it hatched somewhere it has been an omen of fire, famine, and poverty, as well as contempt for man.²

I do my share of shouting in this book. And I too have postponed writing it, as it happens, for three years after I fired the first shots—and still I can only aspire to Fanon’s composure. There is also another, rather uncanny, similarity. What probably angered Fanon initially and compelled him into writing Black Skin, White Masks was the publication, in 1948, of a self-loathing novella, I Am a Martinican Woman, by his fellow Martinican Mayotte Capécia; what impelled me was the publication, in 2003, of a memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Capécia’s kindred spirit Azar Nafisi. Why are we always more incensed and troubled by someone who looks and sounds like us than by any other? Is it because we identify with them, or because the world—the white world—identifies us with them? Fanon had the wisdom and patience to wait until he published his Black Skin, White Masks to bare his thoughts on I Am a Martinican Woman; his scathing critique comprises the second chapter. I can boast no such wisdom and patience, even though I too sat on my review for three years. When Fanon wrote his book he was 27 years old, already battle-fatigued from thinking, reading, writing, and fighting against racism, and on the verge of joining the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). It is one thing to be angry and zealous at 27; it is something entirely different at 57. Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks in Algeria, the site of French colonialism; I write in New York, the commercial capital of a beleaguered empire. The world in Fanon’s time was squarely divided between the colonizer and the colonized—North and South, West and East. The world we live in today is no longer thus divided. Certainly, people continue to be colonized apace—”people”, as Fanon wrote, “in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave”.³ The powerful still invade, and occupy, and rule, and plunder, and the weak fight back and yield and defy and die and regroup—inside and outside Algeria. There is an Algeria in Louisiana (the reporting of Hurricane Katrina has made this better known), and the United States now has military bases all over the world—including one off the coast of Algeria.

Though written in an entirely different stage in the long history of colonialism—when the colonizers were white and they flaunted their guns in the streets of the world’s Algerias against colored populations who inconvenienced them—Fanon’s gut-wrenching text remains all too relevant to a colonialism that has now clothed its naked barbarism and entered a neocolonial stage of globalization, with native informers preaching that imperial adventurism is good for the world, and above all for the people targeted for invasion and salvation. There is a rude and remorseless matter-of-factness about the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and a barefaced vulgarity about Israel’s prolonged appropriation and occupation of Palestine and its repeated invasions of Lebanon that defies common decency—and yet these atrocities are committed with the straight faces of the morally benevolent. In Fanon’s time, the barbarism of French colonialism inspired a Jean-Paul Sartre to create an entire philosophical school out of his rousing condemnation of the French occupation. In my time, the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq have produced an Alan Dershowitz and a Michael Ignatieff to justify barbarity and defend torture—not despite the strictures of Western jurisprudence and human-rights discourse but, in fact, through them; and they are still aided by the native informers who are the central concern of this study.

HIS PROPHETIC SOUL

No matter how hard the native informer tries to hide behind a veil of anonymity, conducting himself as though he has always lived and worked in Washington, DC, he enters the capital city only too aware that Fanon has already seen through his pretense—for Fanon is a writer he used to read.

Central to Fanon’s view of the colonized mind is the significance of language in the alienation of the black person, an ugly colonial process Fanon aimed at reversing via disalienation. His primary frame of reference was autobiographical; he dwelled especially on the moment when the Martinican, having gone to France and perfected his French, returns to his homeland: “The black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod.”⁴ With this focus on language at the point where literary and cultural proximity to the white world enables and authorizes the colored person, Fanon anticipates the emergence of the native informer: “All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language, i.e. the metropolitan culture.”⁵ This remains true of the native informer whose circumstances have improved, as has her command of the colonizers’ language (though she still speaks it with an accent). She denigrates any notion of what Fanon calls “local cultural originality”, for true literature is of course Western literature, not what she scornfully dismisses, for example as the “so-called Iranian realism”. Everything back home lacks originality and is “so-called”—a simulacrum of the truth that can exist only in English (or French, or German and so on). She is very fond of the expression “so-called”, for it keeps her afloat where she is most comfortable: on the border of the decidedly undecided, where she can dodge bullets, run for cover, and call the police if someone rudely trespasses onto her property, the English language.

“The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis,” Fanon wrote, “the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become.”⁶ By “cultural values” Fanon mostly meant language and literature. But today assimilation into the cultural contours of the metropolis is no longer limited to command of the language (which will always come to a halt at the border of that nasty accent). At this stage of paramount visuality, when people’s minds are in their eyes, as it were, the native informer wants “to look like” her masters as well, and the cosmetic industry is there to help. She can bleach her skin, dye her hair blonde, have a quick nose job (of which she speaks very approvingly), maybe even invest in a pair of blue contact lenses. For all practical purposes she can become white—the existential destiny Fanon envisioned for her.

Fanon anticipates our native informer when he reports that “in the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of the Senegalese soldiers, the ‘native’ officers are mainly interpreters. They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master’s orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status.”⁷ With the aid of this prototype one can imagine some native compradors still doing their share for the white civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) facilitating others’ subjugation to a superior set of symbols. For, again as Fanon further noted, “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e. the closer he comes to becoming a true human being.”⁸

Here, of course, the remnant of an accent becomes seriously problematic, as Fanon notes in regard to the black Antilleans who try in vain to ape the Parisian accent. Whenever Fouad Ajami appears on American television to discuss “the mindset of these Arabs”, he never fails to include the phrase “we Americans”; but for the life of him he cannot quite get it through his head that the “A” in “Americans” is closer to a hamza than to an ’ayn. The accent at once alienates, exoticizes, and authorizes him to opine about “these Arabs”. Fanon again: “In France they say ‘to speak like a book’. In Martinique they say ‘to speak like a white man’… He will lock himself in his room and read for hours—desperately working on his diction.”⁹ But still when the native informer goes for a radio or TV interview the nasty accents accompanies him as an uninvited guest; and for this reason he prefers the silent pages of books and newspapers (The Wall Street Journal is a favorite venue) to public appearances—although they do pay awfully well.

Fanon also perceived the rivalry that persists among the colonized as to who is whiter: “We have known, and still know, Antilleans who get annoyed at being taken for Senegalese. It’s because the Antillean is more ‘évolué’ than the African—meaning he is closer to the white man.” ¹⁰ The same holds true for Iranians in their attitude toward Arabs—for the racialized theories of Orientalists have instructed them that they are “Aryan” and as such of the same superior stock as Europeans; only by some unfortunate accident of geography do they find themselves somewhere between the Arab lands and India. The Orientalists’ tales—about Cyrus the Great, Darius the First and Xerxes the Conqueror—continue to haunt them, generation after generation. The racism of Iranians runs viciously deep; they have a horror of being taken for Arab (though they would be delighted to be taken for Italian). The native informer speaks for the white-identified, transnational bourgeoisie that calls her “the voice of the modern Iranian woman”; here, as elsewhere, modernity is white.

The native informer has internalized his white masters’ manner of talking to the natives. Fanon pointed out the difference between the ways a white physician talks to white and black patients:

Twenty European patients come and go: “Please have a seat. Now what’s the trouble? What can I do for you today?” In comes a black man or an Arab: “Sit down, old fellow. Not feeling well? Where’s it hurting?” When it’s not: “You not good?¹¹”

Likewise, the native informer considers the niceties of Western literature and culture too refined for the colored populations, though she may even deign to teach them English literature. “When a black man speaks of Marx,” Fanon observed, “the first reaction is the following: ‘We educated you and now you are turning against your benefactors’.”¹² The native informer finds brown people’s Marxism crude and outdated and does not consider herself political at all. The black man who dares to speak—as did Fanon, Said, Malcolm X, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire—is called anything from passionate to angry, but never “reasonable”. He may have a point, he is repeatedly told, but he is so angry he defeats his own purpose. Reason and composure, of course, are white.

WHITE MEN SAVING COLORED WOMEN

In his psychoanalytic unpacking of the colonized mind, Fanon turns his attention to the relationships between “the woman of color and the white man” and “the man of color and the white woman”, and in so doing provides an uncannily apt critique of Reading Lolita in Tehran more than half a century in advance. Reading Fanon now makes it clear that colonialism really has only a few devices in its ideological arsenal to keep recycling. His actual target is I Am a Martinican Woman (Je suis Martiniquaise)¹³, in which Mayotte Capécia does just what her Iranian counterpart will do decades later: she demonizes colored men and rests the salvation of colored women on the generosity of the white men who will rescue her and her sisters from bondage. And she was almost as celebrated as Nafisi, winning France’s Grand Prix Littéraire des Antilles in 1949.

The literary merit of I Am a Martinican Woman was of course determined by the politics of its vindication of the French colonialists; in the voice of Capécia they had found the perfect ally. “I would have liked to marry, but with a white man,” Fanon quotes Capécia’s protagonist, “only a colored woman is never quite respectable in the eyes of a white man—even if he loves her, I know well”.¹⁴ He continues, “Mayotte loves a white man unconditionally. He is her lord. She asks for nothing, demands nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life.”¹⁵ Paramount in the mind and soul of Mayotte is this truth: “I am white; in other words, I embody beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of day.”¹⁶ A little later he argues, “Mayotte is striving for lactification. In a word, the race must be whitened; every woman in Martinique knows this, says this, and reiterates it.”¹⁷ Capécia, he notes, “imagines herself a pink-cheeked angel”.¹⁸

Turning his attention to Capécia’s next novella, The White Negress, Fanon notes that every black man she describes “is either a scumbag or a grinning Y a bon Banania”.¹⁹ And he adds these premonitory words: “Moreover, and this is already an omen, we can safely say that Mayotte Capécia has turned her back to her island. In both books only one course is left for her heroine, i.e. leave. This island of blacks is decidedly cursed.”²⁰ Nafisi, too, has moved to the Paris of her time, Washington, and has done much better than her Martinican predecessor in courting the powerful—even while talking about “this strange institution (in Derrida’s phrase) ‘called literature’”.²¹

WHITE WOMEN SAVING COLORED MEN

Fanon balances his analysis of the colored woman and the white man with a psychoanalysis of the colored man’s fantasies of the white woman (but not vice versa): “I want to be recognized not as black, but as white. But—and this is the form of recognition that Hegel never described—who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me, she proves to me that I am worthy of the white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.”²² This is as true in the erotic zone as in the political, where the native informer enjoys the approving gaze of the white woman cast upon his services in the imperial capital—I speak with your president, advise your vice-president and the Congress, and appear regularly on national TV. For the native informer the famous salvo with which Nietzsche opens Beyond Good and Evil—“Suppose truth is a woman, what then?”—takes on a racial tinge: truth becomes a white woman who will mother his children and breed the black out of his posterity. She will make their future bright—and white.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Informing Empires
• 1. Brown Skin, White Masks
• 2. On Comprador Intellectuals
• 3. Literature and Empire
• 4. The House Muslim
• Conclusion: Confusing the Color Line
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index