Thando Skenjana

Psychoanalysis and Lit.

Prof.J.Chwalibog

Fanon Chapter 5: The Fact of Blackness

(Quotations in Black, Observations in Red.)

“For not only must the black man be black; he must be

black in relation to the white man.” -82

“The Negro has been

given two frames of reference within which he has had to place

himself.” -

83

“Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third person

consciousness.” -83

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened!

Now they were beginning to be afraid of me.” -84 (Who is it they are afraid of, him?

Surely only the idea of him based on externalised gimmicks.)

hence…”Then, assailed at various points, the

corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal

schema”- 84

“ In the train it was no longer a question of being aware

of my body in the third person but in a triple person”

“I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race,

for my ancestors. “-84

“My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted,

recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day”- 86

“All round me the white man,All this whiteness that burns me. . . .”-86

“I sit down at the fi re and I become aware of my uniform. I had

not seen it. It is indeed ugly.”-86

(A uniform he had no part in choosing, however much like a uniform it is not a mark

of permanence in that Fanon was aware of in born desires and estimable

characteristics when he entered the world that in line with the conceptualisation of his

skin colour being subjugated to artificial judgements, the very nature of his own

interiority, known only to him was much the same prostituted and discarded as being

conceivable on the basis of what all could only see externally.

“I came into the world imbued with the will to fi nd a meaning

in things, my spirit fi lled with the desire to attain to the source

of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst

of other objects.” -82

“ I was expected to behave

like a black man—or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to

the world and the world slashed away my joy.” -86

The segregation and defragmentation exists everywhere, without and within. He

exists as both a black man and a nigger. The world that slashed away his joy is not

the world as Earth itself but rather a conceptualisation of the Earth that has been

moulded to exclude him.

“I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea”

that others have of me but of my own appearance.” : Although not physically

enslaved he is, the extent of the preconceived notions that surround his existence on

the basis of his skin colour, have contributed to an overdetermination from both the

inside and the outside…his appearance is something he could never hope to escape

thus enslavement as such is eternal

“I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer

for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being

dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fi xed. Having

adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my

reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is

not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new

genus. Why, it’s a Negro!” -86

“The presence of the Negroes beside

the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When

the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn

to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance.”

At last I had been recognized, I was no longer a zero.”

Seeking value of a human nature as a means of justification towards and against

those considered inhumane(white people) in thought and deed. But is not to use

inherent human qualities as a repost, merely playing into the already established

dehumanising paradigm?