by GONZALO ARMUA & JEAN JORES PIERRE
When in March 1945 the Allied Army was preparing to cross the Rhine River, advance on Germany and thus give the final blow to Nazism, among the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and colonial troops was a young West Indian. He wore a Croix de Guerre medal for his bravery and daring in the Battle of Alsace, but neither he nor many others were able to enter Berlin with the victorious armies. The troops were to be “whitened” for the eyes of the world. His skin and his origin “did not allow him”, racism did not allow him, the colony showed him all its contempt. It was civilization in all its glory.
Perhaps in those days Frantz Omar Fanón was beginning to germinate the ideas and phrases that would mark his revolutionary work and practice; perhaps he collided head-on with that reality, with that barrier that was, and is, being one of the “wretched of the earth”.
Almost 60 years after his death and on a new anniversary of his birth, his reflections are still valid. If the Wretched of the Earth provides insights into the process of decolonization, Black Skin, White Masks allows us to think about how the ruptured psyche of the colonizer and colonized subjects functions. For Fanon, both the colonizer and the colonized are subjected to a process of alienation that degrades their entire humanity.
In a reality of our America, permeated by coups d’état, racism, political projects that perpetuate hatred, large swaths of societies mobilized around the sense of equality and the defense of privileges, even of their oppressors, it is necessary to revisit Dr. Fanon in order to understand and transform our variegated societies of white masks.
A civilized Antillean against fascism
Frantz, the youngest of eight children, was born in Fort de France, on the island of Martinique, in 1925, in a family that was not so badly off and, like many, as geographically distant from the French metropolis as it was from the local language and culture, Creole. His childhood was spent in a colonial society, where skin colour and “good speech” were measured against a white French stick. Later on, in one of his works, he would say that: “the bourgeoisie of the Antilles do not use Creole, except in their relations with the domestic staff”. [i]
At the age of 18, he left his family home clandestinely to join the Forces de Libération de France and fight for “freedom” and “his” metropolis, culture and civilization in the face of fascist barbarism. His feeling of full humanism also weighed on him: “Every time a man causes the dignity of the spirit to triumph, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subdue his fellow man, I feel solidarity with his act”. His daughter, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, would say that this decision was the trigger for Fanon’s political conscience [ii].
Once in the war, young Fanon was confronted with the “colonial system revealed”,[iii] his side, the Allies, and the Nazis were enemies, but they shared a civilization and an otherness. No matter what army those “others” fought in, they would always be “inferior”. He had fought “for an obsolete cause,” he wrote in a letter to his relatives. This is the letter of someone who was disappointed in his aspirations for recognition by “civilization”.
Aimé Cesaire, teacher of Fanon and all peoples fighting against oppression, in his Discourse on Colonialism[iv] also reflected on this war:
“…in the end, it is not the crime of Hitler that is not forgiven, a crime against humanity which is not the humiliation of humanity itself, but the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the application of colonialist procedures to Europe against which only the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the blacks of Africa have so far stood up.”
The white masks
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