Postcolonial Literature 1

Roushan Kumar Singh

Dr. Aqueel Akhtar

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13nd April 2020

The Negro and the Language

“To read Fanon,” Homi Bhabha tells us, “is to experience the sense of division that prefigures—and

fissures the emergence of truly radical thought that never dawns without casting an uncertain dark.” For

however uncertain and dark Fanon's writing may be, there is little denying its fundamental importance

for Anglo-American scholars in the late twentieth century. Black Skin, White Masks is a key text

readily assimilated into literary curricula for its novel theory of the subject, which articulates a multi-

layered corporeal schema at issue in colonial subject formation. Indeed, for many, Fanon's racial and

psychoanalytic theorization of what he terms epidermalization resonates broadly for its shift from the

base-superstructure models long ago part of Marxist rhetoric towards a critical reading of a thousand

details, stories, anecdotes (“milles détails, anecdotes, récits”) woven by the white man. With these

issues in mind, Fanon can be seen to stage an astute anti-colonial critique that privileges aspects of

culturally constructed knowledge over and above models of economic or historical determination. This

distinctly cultural emphasis makes Fanon a curious harbinger for a constellation of Anglo-American

critical writings that explore race, psychoanalysis and subject formation in the late twentieth century.

Fanon’s first chapter is a study of the black man’s language, and this reflection on the use of French

will be one of the initial sources of irony in his self-presentation. Beginning with the neutral voice of an

analyst, Fanon sums up his argument with the following statement which loosely translates as, “the

Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human

being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language”]. Parroting the colonial discourse of
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assimilation, Fanon performs the point of view of the coloniser in order to stress his distance from the

latter’s way of thinking. The use of the French language may be for Fanon an important tool for the

colonised to assert his equality as well as his resistance, but the coloniser’s belief that the colonised is

only a man if he masters the colonial language is one aspect of his dehumanising violence. Even more

perniciously, the coloniser’s sense of the superiority of his language infects the colonised, so that “in

any group of young men in the Antilles, the one who expresses himself well, who has mastered the

language, is inordinately feared.” The colonised Antillean, desperate to achieve the status of the

French, rolls his ‘r’s and attempts to speak like a Frenchman only to give away his local accent in the

next sentence, as emonstrated by the anecdote of the Martinican in Le Havre who orders “waiterr! Bing

me a beeya”. Nevertheless, Fanon himself also insists on the proper use of French and stresses the

damaging effects of “to talk pidgin nigger.” Turning now to an autobiographical idiom, he states that as

a doctor, “I make a point always to talk to the so-called bicots in normal French”, and laments that the

language of the “petit nègre” serves only to stereotype and pigeonhole him further. It means that the

black man continues to conform to the white man’s expectations of his inferiority and it hardens his

essence as subordinate. Fanon is performing a certain role here, however, and his own ironic use of the

derogatory term “bicots” indicates both his distaste towards such categorizations and the manner in

which the French litter their speech with slang, with their own version of “petit nègre.” The French

themselves do not always preserve the standard idiom, and Fanon is also mocking the coloniser’s

misuse and deformation of the French language (and of Creole). More recent supporters of the Créolité

movement such as Chamoiseau and Confiant reveal the difficulties associated with Fanon’s embrace of

the French language, though it should be remembered that they were writing at a time when attitudes

towards Creole would have been very different. It is also perhaps true that the celebration of local

idiom was less likely to be convincing as a symbol of resistance at the time of Fanon’s writing.

Nevertheless, the question of Fanon’s own attitude to and use of French remains a perplexed one: he
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denounces the violence of the coloniser’s assumption of superiority but himself upholds the use of a

good register of French. Yet the idiom of Fanon’s chapter on language is itself eclectic.

The chapter is peppered with quotations from French thinkers such as Sartre and Leiris, though Fanon

refines Sartre’s analysis of negritude poetry in “Orphée noir” by stressing the difficulty of inventing a

black poetic language. At the same time, Fanon frequently writes with the confidence of psychiatric

diagnosis, including categorical statements on the condition of all colonised peoples alongside his

literary references. Again, Fanon cites a French thinker, psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, and though he

will subsequently criticise Mannoni’s assumption that the dependency of the colonised predates

colonisation, in the chapter on the language he straightforwardly argues against the use of a black

pidgin with reference to Mannoni’s thesis.

Thus, rather than abandon colonial culture or the language against which he writes, Fanon engages it,

taking it on and reworking its assumptions. As he does so, he takes the figure of language, borrowed

though it may be, in order to apply it within the world. He takes it, then, to transform language as it is

known, re-entangling it with speech, the body and colonial politics.

The argument develops and underscores a crucial interrelation between what is heard, seemingly

privileged in the first analysis, and what is seen, integrally tied to the problem of appearance. Fanon

suggests that the continual insistence upon speaking “petit-nègre” imprisons him in an appearance for

which he is not responsible.

In making language visible, at once relating language to appearance, Fanon opens the terrain for a

series of looking relations between the speaker and his speech. The problem of appearance thus returns

us to another type of looking, overdetermined in the rest of this text: the possibility of being watched in

language. Not only is language something spoken, but it is also something to be watched over in

speaking. This rhetorical gesture to make language visible, subjecting it to being watched over,
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ultimately figures prominently in how Fanon stages the ethical relation between self and other, seeing

and being seen.

An examination of Fanon's theory of language brings to light some crucial reformulations of race and

colonial subjection. While Anglo-American criticism has resurrected Fanon, seeing within him a

cultural model for the analysis of race, it has, to a certain extent, remembered Fanon selectively,

leaving out the implications of the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks and its formulation of

language. In this chapter, Fanon drives not towards an abstract theory of language, divorced of the

world from which it springs; instead, he takes language within the world, in its integral relation to what

can be thought and to the cultural and racial positioning of the speaker. With this in mind, the theory

that emerges is by no means abstractly normative but revolves around situating language in relation to

its body in order to interrogate the status of dislocation. This emphasis on situating language, ethically

and culturally, in order to argue for its dislocation, ultimately grants gives Fanon's theory a critical

dynamic.