Fanon: The Lived Experience of the Black Man

The following is based on Chapter 5 of Frantz Fanon’s book “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”:

Frantz Fanon wants to be a man. But in the white world in which he lives his skin colour becomes everything, more important than even his education and achievements. While his neighbour or his cousin might hate him for good reason, white people hate him without even getting to know him. They are irrational.

He is seen not as Dr Fanon but as a black man who is a doctor. Everyone is watching and waiting for him to make a mistake.

I was walled in: neither my refined manners nor my literary knowledge nor my understanding of the quantum theory could find favor.

White people do not see him, they see his body:

My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter’s day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.

Instead of being a person, a man, an individual, he is a black man, a Negro, an object, a thing that has value only in relation to whites.  Always a Negro, never a man.

Look how handsome that Negro is.
The handsome Negro says, “Fuck you”, madame.

Even though the Catholic Church and science admit that black people are every bit as human as white people – their hearts are on the same side! – and even though white people themselves admit that racism goes against all reason, they still do not want you to marry their daughter.

Seeing that reason does not work with white people, some make up their mind to shout their blackness, to secrete race. Cesaire and Senghor took this road with their philosophy of negritude: on the other side of the white world there lies a magical black culture. Blacks have rhythm, their sex is magical, “Emotion is Negro as reason is Greek” and so on. But this only feeds white stereotypes about blacks.

And then there is black history: blacks had empires, scholars, iron workers and all the rest. But that is a dead end too since currently whites have the most advanced civilization in the world. At best it allows them to see blacks as the childhood of the world.

Even Sartre, a supposed friend of blacks, saw negritude not as something in its own right but merely as a passing reaction to white supremacy.

Fanon:

A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of not existing. Sin is black as virtue is white. All those white men, fingering their guns, can’t be wrong. I am guilty. I don’t know what of, but I know I’m a wretch.

In the Hollywood film “Home of the Brave” (1949) a soldier hurt in the war says: “Get used to your color the way I got used to my stump. We are both casualties.”

Fanon: I refuse to accept this amputation.

See also:

• Frantz Fanon
• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks
• Leopold Sedar Senghor
• How white people think
• “whites are individuals”
• stereotype
  • magical Negro
• What this blog has taught me about white people
• Negro

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Fanon: The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized

The following is based on Chapter 4 of Frantz Fanon’s book “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized”:

Mannoni, a French psychoanalyst, wanted to understand the mind of the native and the white colonial based on his experience and study of Madagascar under French rule in the 1930s and 1940s. Himself  a white colonial, he wrote a book about it, “The Psychology of Colonization” (1950). Frantz Fanon, himself a native (not of Madagascar but of Martinique) spends this chapter tearing it to pieces.

French rule of Madagascar was cruel. They used Senegalese soldiers to strike fear into the hearts of natives. In 1947 the French put down an uprising, killing 80,000 natives. As if that were not enough, in the footnotes Fanon tells of the French practice of torture in Madagascar.

Fanon calls the use of black soldiers to force French rule on people of colour “the racial allocation of guilt”. He quotes Francis Jeanson:

And if, apparently, you manage not to soil your hands, it’s because others are doing the dirty work in your place. You have your henchmen, and all things considered, you are the real guilty party; for without you, without your blind indifference, such men could not undertake acts that condemn you as much as they dishonor them.

So with all that in mind, here is the picture that Mannoni paints:

• Most natives are content to put whites above them and be dependent on them because it fulfils a deep need in their hearts, one that was there long before whites showed up. Mannoni calls this a dependency complex.
• A few natives are unhappy because they suffer from an inferiority complex, which makes them want to be the equal of whites.
• Not all peoples can be colonized: only those who experience the need.
• European civilization and its agents of the highest calibre are not responsible for colonial racism. It comes from lower-level whites who blame their unhappy lives on the natives.
• When black men with guns appear in children’s dreams at night it is not because of the terror of French rule: no, the guns stand for penises.

The only part that Fanon feels Mannoni got at least part right:

• White colonials suffer from a Prospero complex. Just like the Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, they want to lord it over the natives. The colonies draw those whites who cannot accept others as they are, who do not want to have to take other men seriously but instead want to lord it over them.

Fanon:

I start suffering from not being a white man insofar as the white man discriminates against me; turns me into a colonized subject; … tells me I am a parasite in the world … So I will try quite simply to make myself white; in other words, I will force the white man to acknowledge my humanity. But, Monsieur Mannoni will tell us, you can’t, because deep down inside you there is a dependency complex.

See also:

• Manoni: Prospero and Caliban: the psychology of colonization – a preview at Google Books
• Frantz Fanon
• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks
• darkies
• The white lens
• drapetomania – slaves run away because they suffer from drapetomania!
• Tirailleurs Senegalais – more on the black soldiers that France used to rule their empire
• “My family never owned slaves”
• How to argue like a white racist

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Fanon: The Man of Colour and the White Woman

The following is based on Chapter 3 of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The Man of Colour and the White Woman”:

Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinique,  starts by saying of himself:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.

Yes, it gets worse:

Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Having lost half his readership, Fanon then turns to the case of Jean Veneuse, the hero of an autobiographical novel by Rene Maran, “Un homme pareil aux autres” (1947).

Jean Veneuse came to France from the Caribbean when he was three or four. He lost his parents and was brought up by boarding schools in France, the only black student in a sea of white. He has a lonely childhood. When the other students go home for the holidays he is left alone at school.  He withdraws into himself and into books: Aurelius, Tagore, Pascal and other writers become his only friends.

He grows up French and falls in love with a white woman. He wonders about his motives.

Maybe it is simply because he was brought up European and so desires European women just like any other man in Europe. Or, contrariwise, maybe it is because he is black:

the common mulatto and black man have only one thought on their mind as soon as they set foot in Europe: to gratify their appetite for white women.

Most of them, including those with lighter skin who often go so far as denying both their country and their mother, marry less for love than for the satisfaction of dominating a European woman, spiced with a certain taste for arrogance.

And so I wonder whether … I am unconsciously endeavoring to take my revenge on the European female for everything her ancestors have inflicted on my people throughout the centuries.

Yet when he works in Africa as a civil servant he proves to be just as bad as the whites, complete with the native girl in his hut. So maybe it is not revenge that he wants but to separate himself from his race or even somehow to become raceless.

But Fanon says that Veneuse’s troubles run much deeper than that: he was left alone in the world by his mother as a small boy and is hung up on that. So he is afraid to love and be loved. He holds everyone at arm’s length, even the woman he wants to marry. Therefore we cannot draw any general conclusions from Veneuse’s case.

I have not read the whole book – I post as I read – but at this point this chapter seems like a waste. But we shall see.

See also:

• Liberator magazine’s take on this chapter
• Frantz Fanon
• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks
• sexual selection and race
• race and dating
• internalized racism
• Is the White Goddess blog a satire?
• Who famous black men date

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Fanon: The Woman of Colour and the White Man

The following is based on Chapter 2 of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The Woman of Colour and the White Man” (men of colour and white women will be next week):

When women of colour go after white men and put down men of their own colour Fanon says the cause is just what many of us suspect: internalized racism.

Nor do these women truly love these white men: they just love their colour. They go with them not out of love but to deal with their own hang-ups about race.

Fanon:

It is because the black woman feels inferior that she aspires to gain admittance to the white world.

Secretly she wants to be white. Marrying white is her way of doing this. She looks up to white people and looks down on black people. Whites represent wealth, beauty, intelligence and virtue; blacks, on the other hand, are “niggers”, something to escape, to be saved from, something not to be. So they want to marry a white man even though they know full well that very few will marry them.

Their racism is so profound that it blinds them to good black men. They will say black men lack refinement – and turn away black men more refined than themselves. They will say black men are ugly – and grow impatient with you if you point out good-looking black men.

Fanon takes as his examples three women: Mayotte of Martinique and Nini and Dedee of Senegal. Mayotte is Mayotte Capecia who wrote a book about her life; Nini and Dedee are characters from “Nini” (1954), a story by Abdoulaye Sadji. All three are part white which makes them determined not to “slip back among the ‘nigger’ rabble”. (There was no the One Drop Rule.)

Nini is a silly typist. A man who is an accountant with the waterways company proposes marriage. She cannot believe it. What nerve this man has! There is talk of getting him fired. In the end they have the police tell him to stop his “morbid insanities”. Why? Because he is black and she is half white. He has offended her “white girl’s” honour.

Meanwhile another man with a good government job proposes to Dedee but this time it is a dream come true. Why? Because he is white:

Gone was the psychological depreciation, the feeling of debasement, and its corollary of never being able to reach the light. Overnight the mulatto girl had gone from the rank of slave to that of master. … She was entering the white world.

But a white man cannot make you white, not even in effect: Mayotte, the third woman, had an affair with a married white man. One time she asked him to take her to the white side of town. He does, taking her to a friend’s house for the evening.  But the white women there made her feel so out of place, so unworthy of him, that she never went back to the white side again.

See also:

• Frantz Fanon
• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks
• Why some black women prefer not to date some white men
• internalized racism
• The white club
• growing up Nezua
• One Drop Rule
• sexual selection and race

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Vogue does blackface

The October 2009 issue of French Vogue has a 14-page spread of Lara Stone, a white model. In five of the pictures her skin is coloured dark brown. This comes on the heels of Madrid Fashion Week which used at least two blackface models in September.

Jezebel.com accused Vogue of “cultural insensitivity”. SOS Racisme in France said it was “tactless”.

Note that this was French Vogue, not Italian Vogue which had that all-black issue last year.

So was French Vogue being racist?

Maybe not:

• Stone also appeared in whiteface in the same spread: in two of the pictures her skin is coloured snow white.
• France does not have America’s history of black slaves and blackface entertainment.
• Even in America blackface was used to stereotype blacks and make them a laughingstock. That is not being done here.
• It is the whole Christ-in-piss thing to sell more magazines. Vogue’s sales are falling. They do stuff like this to get people talking and presumably sell more magazines. In one past issue they showed two women kissing with blood coming out of their mouths.

Maybe so:

• Not a single black model appears in the issue. Unfortunately that is not uncommon. Huge parts of the fashion industry still seem to live in the 1950s.
• The photographer, Steven Klein, is American. Even if the French editor is “benevolently clueless” about blackface (which I doubt) he certainly is not.
• France has 2.5 million blacks. It used to rule large parts of Africa and had black slaves in the Caribbean.
• Stone appeared in dark skin before: in the February issue she had dark skin and was dressed to look like an African savage.
• If they simply wanted to make Stone look strange and striking to draw attention, why pick dark brown of all colours? What is wrong with pure black or even, you know, purple?
• If dark brown skin made the clothes look best, then why not use a black model?
• It seems like white people feel they can be more openly racist these days ever since Obama became president. This spread falls a little too well into that pattern.

What I think:

1. Even apart from this, Vogue is a racist magazine. I mean, what? No black models at all? Come on. I am not saying Vogue is cross-burning Klan but they seem to have little regard for black people.
2. The editor and photographer knew full well what they were doing. They knew it would be taken as blackface. Vogue is not some gardening magazine in Romania which truly might not know better.
3. It was a cheap shot to sell magazines.

They are little better than Rush Limbaugh in that they do not regard blacks as part of their customer base and so if a bit of racism will get them more customers, why not?

One of the excuses fashion designers use for not using black models is that their looks draw attention away from the clothes. If that were true, then why is Lara Stone coloured dark brown?

See also:

• blackface
• black fashion models
  • The most beautiful black female models
• Black France
• all-black Vogue
• Are most white people benevolently clueless?
• purple people

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The education of Angela Davis

Angela Davis went from Brownie to Communist, from bookworm to black revolutionary. To her it seemed natural.  To accept American society the way it is would be to accept that there is something wrong with black people.

She grew up under Jim Crow in the American South in the 1950s in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents taught her to think for herself. The black schools in Birmingham were in terrible shape, but they did teach her black pride and black history. What she did not learn at school she made up for by reading books.

In 1959 at age 15 she won a scholarship to study at a private high school in New York: Elisabeth Irwin High School. It was where all the teachers who were too left-wing for public schools went to teach. Her school did not turn her into a communist, but it did make communism a respectable opinion.

She got another scholarship, this one to Brandeis University. She was almost the only black person there. She largely kept to herself – it was easier that way – and so she read and read, read books of French and books of philosophy – and books of French philosophy.

In 1963 she went abroad to study a year in France. She was barely in France when news hit that four black girls were killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church. She knew two of them. From growing up in Birmingham she knew bombings were used to keep blacks in line by fear and terror.

She noticed that the French saw the Algerians like how whites saw blacks back home. The Algerians were fighting a war to free themselves from French rule.

After Brandeis she studied philosophy in Germany under Theodor Adorno and then under Herbert Marcuse in San Diego in America. Of all the schools of philosophy she thought Marxism was the closest to the truth.

One summer she went to Cuba with friends, helping to cut sugar cane and seeing first-hand how communism had overturned racism.

Then back in America she saw first-hand how the Los Angeles police tried to wipe out the Black Panthers.

The police ruled the ghetto by fear and terror, not law and order. Shooting a man in the back they called “justifiable homicide”. They would break up protests by blacks, not allowing them the right of peaceful assembly. They would break into houses without a warrant and start shooting.  In the prisons it was even worse. The police and the prisons did whatever they wanted to black people –  the courts and the press did not care.

The only way to make them care was to stage mass protests. She helped to do this first as part of SNCC and then the Communist Party. She joined the Communist Party in July 1968 by paying 50 cents in dues. From her study of philosophy she found they had the best-grounded ideas and from her experience of Cuba they were the only ones who proved they could overthrow racism.

See also:

• Angela Davis
  • 1944-1959: The girlhood of Angela Davis
  • 1970: The arrest of Angela Davis
• black ghetto
• the police
• Jim Crow
• Marx
• fellow black bookworms:
  • Frantz Fanon
  • Leopold Senghor
  • Malcolm X
• From the Wikipedia: Brownie, SNCC

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burka

The burka – or burqa as some write it – is the head-to-toe covering that some Muslim women wear over their clothes when they go out in public. Sometimes all you can see is their eyes, but sometimes even their eyes are covered (with a netting that they can see through).

Burkas are mostly seen in Afghanistan and South Asia – Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. In India only one Muslim woman in 20 might wear it; in Afghanistan under the Taliban all women were forced to wear it. In Pakistan it used to be quite common, but it has been dying out, especially in the big cities.

Even though some will argue it is not in the Koran, in most of the Muslim world hijab, or modest dress, is understood to be a religious duty or virtue for women (and, to a lesser degree, for men).

The form that hijab takes is different from place to place. The burka is the most extreme form.

In Iran women wear a chador, which covers everything but their face, hands and feet. In some Arab countries women wear the abaya which does the same thing. In other places, like Turkey, women wear just a headscarf. And some Muslim women dress in a completely Western fashion, though with more of their body covered than Western women.

Burkas, abayas and chadors are just for going out in public. They are something women wear over their clothes. When they are at home they take them off and you find out that they are not dressed quite so plainly. When Neda died during the election protests in Iran in 2009, for example, we found out that under her chador she was wearing  blue jeans!

Governments sometimes force women to follow hijab, like the Taliban or Iran under Islamic rule. Yet others  have forced women to do the opposite, like Iran under the shah.

In France it has been against the law to wear a burka to public school since 2004. And now they want to go even further and outlaw it altogether. In 2009 President Sarkozy said:

The issue of the burka is not a religious issue, it is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity. The burka is not a religious sign, it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women. I want to say solemnly that it will not be welcome on our territory… I tell you, we must not be ashamed of our values, we must not be afraid of defending them.

This only makes sense to me as a piece of xenophobia: Muslims make him feel uncomfortable.

For many Muslim women it is in fact a matter of religion. And keeping themselves covered up from the eyes of men is a matter of dignity. Even in the West, modest dress was seen as part of a woman’s dignity until the 1900s.

Your religion – or even a lack of religion – is part of who you are. To be told you cannot express it when you are hurting no one goes against one’s freedom and dignity.

See also:

• Neda Agha-Soltan
• Taliban
• Islam
• Koran
• Wahhabis

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Fatou N’Diaye

Fatou N’Diaye (1980- ) is a French actress and model who was born in Senegal. She is not the dancer of the same name. Since 2001 she has appeared in both French film and television. Her best film to date is probably “Nha fala” (2003) though “A Sunday in Kigali” (2006) seems to be better known.

She was born in Saint-Louis in Sengal. Her native language is Wolof. When she was eight she left Senegal with her mother to live in France.

In 1997 at age 17 she was discovered by photographer Oliviero Toscani, who is famous for the United Colors of Benetton ads. He urged her to become a model. She is tall, thin and pretty

She is 5 foot 10 inches tall (1.78 m) and her measurements are 31.5-23-35 (80-58.5-89 cm), giving her a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of 0.66.

She did do some modelling, but her heart was set on acting. She wanted to go to drama school,  but then director Daniel Vigne asked her to play the lead in a made-for-television film he was making – even though she had no acting experience!

She spent  a few days with an actress who taught her the tricks of the trade and then did her best.

The film was “Fatou la Malienne” (2001). It was the true story of a woman from Mali who lived in France but was forced to get married. It got her noticed: 8 million people in France saw it.

After that she worked with the famous French actor Charles Aznavour. She loves jazz and he was able to tell her about all the jazz greats that he once knew.

In 2002 she had a small part in “Astérix et Obélix : Mission Cléopâtre”, starring Monica Bellucci. It was her first experience of a big film production.

In 2003 she starred in “Nha Fala” (“My Voice”), directed by Flora Gomes. It is a Portuguese-French-Luxembourger musical comedy (yes) set in France and Cape Verde.  It is in both French and Portuguese Creole.

She plays a mixed-race character who comes from a family where the women die if they sing. When she leaves Cape Verde for France she promises her mother that she will not sing. Not only did she forget her promise, she became a singer! People were amazed at how well she could sing. She came back to Cape Verde to prepare for her funeral – but she did not die!

N’Diaye says the film is about expressing yourself. Some see it as a metaphor for colonialism, about how trying to be white goes against being your true self – which is why her being mixed-race is important.

In 2006 she played the female lead in a French-Canadian film, “Un dimanche à Kigali” (“A Sunday in Kigali”). It is abouat a man who comes to Rwanda and falls in love with a woman there. Separated by the genocide he tries to find her.

Her next leading part was in “Tropiques amers” (2007), the first French television series about slavery in the French Caribbean. It is a historical drama set in Martinique in the late 1700s.

See also:

• Aissa Maiga
• Black France
• black actresses

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Aissa Maiga

Note: Some of this post might not be strictly true: most of what is written about her is in French and my French is not very good! So corrections are welcomed.

Aïssa Maïga (1975- ) is a French actress who was born in Senegal. She is not just charming, beautiful and talented, she is also the highest-paid black actress in France and a regular at Cannes.

Some of her films:

• “Les Poupées Russes” (2004) made her name in France. She plays the lover of Romain Duris.
• “Paris, je t’aime” (2005) – she starred in this. See below for a bit of it I found on YouTube. Watch all the way to the end.
• “Il faut quitter Bamako” (2006) showed that she can write and direct as well as act.
• “Bamako” (2006), almost the same name as her own film, is probably her best performance to date. She played a bar singer, who always seems to be pictured as crying. Danny Glover was an executive producer, by the way.

As beautiful as she is, she is almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world. She does not even have an article in the English Wikipedia as of June 2009. I had seen her face before on the Internet, but I had no idea who she was until a commenter on this blog, Asha, brought up her name. Thanks, Asha!

Maiga was born in Dakar in Senegal. Her father, a journalist, came from Mali. Her mother is half Senegalese, half Gambian. The family moved to France when she was four. Her father died when she was eight.

After high school she did not know whether to study sociology or theatre. But then one night she saw “L’important c’est d’aimer” with Romy Schneider and knew she wanted to be a comedienne. So she chose theatre. A few months later, though, she dropped out of school and became a waitress. She thought the courses were heavy on theory, light on practice.

Her aunt, it turns out, was a comedienne and was able to train her. At 17 Maiga was acting in a musical comedy, “La nuit la plus longue”, something she did for three summers.

In 1996 she got her first part in a full-length film, “Saraka Bo”. It is a police drama that takes place in a black part of Paris. That led to parts in police dramas on television, something she did for years, but it also got her noticed by directors, like Claude Berri.

In 2005 she appeared in “French Beauty”, a television show that asked some of the great beauties of French film, like Bardot and Deneuve, what it is like to be a beautiful French woman.

Blacks in French film: Just like in Hollywood, most of the few parts there are for blacks play to stereotypes. But on top of that blacks are often seen as foreigners in France even when they grew up there, just like Asians in America.

She lives in both France and Senegal. She has two sons by her one-time boyfriend, Stephane Pocrain.

See also:

• Black France
• The most beautiful black women – I have her at #7, after Naomi Campbell but before Lela Rochon.
  • The most beautiful black actresses – at #4, after Gabrielle Union but before Lela Rochon.
• black actresses
• Senghor

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Coumba Gawlo: Pata Pata

Remarks:

That is Senegalese singer Coumba Gawlo singing Miriam Makeba’s first hit song, “Pata Pata”. The song has been done many times (click on the following links to hear them on YouTube):

• 1967: Miriam Makeba, South Africa
• 199?: Daude, Brazil
• 1998: Coumba Gawlo, Senegal/France
• 2000: Thalia, Mexico
• 2004: D’jaa, Germany

I am surprised that no one in America has made a hit song out of it.

I like Gawlo’s version the best. I love that guitar at the beginning. It went to #2 in France in 1998. The words are in Xhosa. Xhosa is a South African language that has clicks in it and you can hear that in Makeba’s version.

Gawlo does some talking in her version. It is not Xhosa nor does it sound like French, so I am guessing it is Wolof.

Lyrics:

Saguguka sathi beka
(Nantsi, pata pata)
Saguguka sathi beka
(Yiyo, pata pata)
Yi yo mama yiyo mama
(Nantsi, pata pata)
Yi yo mama yiyo mama
(Yiyo, pata pata)

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Senghor: Aux Tirailleurs Sénégalais morts pour la France

Remarks:

A French poem by Senghor about the Tirailleurs Senegalais, the African soldiers who fought for the French Empire, particularly in the two world wars of the 1900s. Slam poem Manu performs.

Part of this translated into English (by M.A. Yemane):

Listen to me, Senegalese sharpshooters, beneath the solitude of the black earth and of death
In your solitude without eyes, without ears, more than my dark skin in the depths of the French provinces
without even the warmth of your comrades sleeping next to you
like the old days in the trenches
like the old days in the village under the baobab tree
Listen to me, black-skinned Senegalese sharpshooters, albeit without ears, without eyes
in your triple enclosure of night.

The whole thing in French:

Aux Tirailleurs Sénégalais morts pour la France

Voici le Soleil
Qui fait tendre la poitrine des vierges
Qui fait sourire sur les bancs verts les vieillards
Qui réveillerait les morts sous une terre maternelle.
J’entends le bruit des canons—est-ce d’Irun ?—
On fleurit les tombes, on réchauffe le Soldat Inconnu.
Vous, mes frères obscurs, personne ne vous nomme.
On vous promet 500 000 de vos enfants à la gloire des futurs morts, on les remercie d’avance, futurs morts obscurs
Die schwarze Schande !

Ecoutez-moi, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, dans la solitude de la terre noire et de la mort
Dans votre solitude sans yeux, sans oreilles, plus que dans ma peau sombre au fond de la Province
Sans même la chaleur de vos camarades couchés tout contre vous, comme jadis dans la tranchée, jadis dans les palabres du village
Ecoutez-moi, tirailleurs à la peau noire, bien que sans oreilles et sans yeux dans votre triple enceinte de nuit.

Nous n’avons pas loué de pleureuses, pas même les larmes de vos femmes anciennes
Elles ne se rappellent que vos grands coups de colère, préférant l’ardeur des vivants.
Les plaintes des pleureuses trop claires
Trop vite asséchées les joues de vos femmes comme en saison Sèche les torrents du Fouta
Les larmes les plus chaudes trop claires et trop vite bues au coin des lèvres oublieuses.

Nous vous apportons, écoutez-nous, nous qui épelions vos noms dans les mois que vous mourriez
Nous, dans ces jours de peur sans mémoire, vous apportons l’amitié de vos camarades d’âge.
Ah ! puissé-je un jour d’une voix couleur de braise, puissé-je chanter
L’amitié des camarades fervente comme des entrailles et délicate, forte comme des tendons.
Ecoutez-nous, morts étendus dans l’eau au profond des plaines du Nord et de l’Est.
Recevez le salut de vos camarades noirs, Tirailleurs Sénégalais

MORTS POUR LA REPUBLIQUE !

See also:

• Tirailleurs Senegalais
• Leopold Sedar Senghor

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Tirailleurs Senegalais

Tirailleurs Senegalais (1857-1960) is French for “Senegalese sharpshooters”. It sounds like “Tear-a-year Senegalay”. It was the name for the French Empire’s black army from West Africa. You do not hear about them much, but about 200,000 of them fought in both world wars of the 1900s. They were at Gallipolli and the Somme, for example. They also fought for the empire in Morocco, Vietnam, Syria and Algeria. Despite the name, most were not from Senegal. Many came from what is now Mali and Burkina Faso.

Two-thirds of the French troops who fought to free France from Nazi Germany in 1944 were in fact black, mainly from the Tirailleurs Senegalais. The Americans, however, kept them from entering Paris. They thought it would be “more desirable” if Paris was freed by an all-white army division. They got their way.

Unlike the French and the British, the Americans still had an army separated by race. De Gaulle had to take his mixed army divisions and create an all-white division out of them to suit White American ideas about history. As it was, many of the soldiers who marched into Paris and seemed to be white Frenchmen were in fact Spanish and Middle Eastern.

The Tirailleurs Senegalais were not just robbed of their hero’s welcome: after they got back to Africa they protested about back pay. That led to a massacre by the French on December 1st 1944 at three in the morning at Camp de Thiaroye (there is a film by that name about it).

And there is more: most of the soldiers sank into poverty. After 1959 the French would no longer increase their pension to keep up with rising prices as they did for those  in France.

The Tirailleurs Senegalais were formed in 1857. Most were slaves at first. France did not have enough men to keep and hold its empire. It forced its foreign subjects to fight for the empire too. About half the Tirailleurs Senegalais stayed in West Africa while the rest were sent abroad to extend the empire and keep its peace.

In 1910 the book “La Force Noire” by Charles Mangin came out. Mangin argued that West Africa had a nearly bottomless supply of young men who could fight for France. Not only could blacks be trained to be good soliders, he said, but unlike white people blacks were not as worn out by work nor did they feel pain as much.

None of it was true, but the French jumped on it: they were in fear of the Germans who outnumbered them. So conscription became common in French West Africa. In Senegal about a third of the young men were forced to join the army.

When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940 the Tirailleurs Senegalais suffered huge losses, about 17,000, because after the Germans won they killed many of them as savages while letting the white Frenchmen live.

Many of the soldiers were Muslim. The language of command was pidgin French and Bambara.

At least 47,000 died for France and its empire, but to this day no monument stands in Paris to honour them.

See also:

• BBC: Paris liberation made ‘whites only’
• Black France
• Frantz Fanon

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Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is a leading thinker of postcolonialism. Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Steve Biko read him. Fanon is best known for two of his books, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), about internalized racism, and “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961), about casting off colonialism.

Fanon, like Che Guevara and Malcolm X, was born in the 1920s and died young in the 1960s. And like them he fought and wrote against white power, which has ruled much of the world, at first directly through colonial empires in the 1800s and early 1900s, and then through its control of world banking, trade, television, education and so on.

For Fanon, gaining physical independence – kicking the white rulers out of your country – was only the first step. Because whites did more than simply rule – they also spread their language and thought and way of life. So even if you kick the white man out of your country, he is still in your head telling you that you are not as good as he is, that you are not whole, that there is something wrong with you, that you must become more like him. The colonized mind.

Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a colony of the French empire. He grew up in a well-to-do family and received a French education. At 17, during the middle of the Second World War, he ran away from home and sailed across the sea to fight  against Hitler with the French Resistance.

He fought in North Africa and later France itself. They would not let him cross into Germany – because he was black. They wanted to make it seem like only white soldiers won the war. And, even though he had fought for France, its white women would not dance with him – because he was black.

He won a scholarship and studied medicine and psychiatry in France. In 1953 he became the head of the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria, which was then ruled by France.

At the hospital he saw how the white French doctors looked down the Arabs and would not give them proper care. He also found that helping one patient at a time was like trying to empty the sea with a spoon. Their “disease” was not anything he learned at school: it was colonialism.

And so, being the good doctor that he was, Fanon joined the FLN to fight against the French. He later edited its newspaper and talked to African leaders on its behalf.

Fanon did not live long enough to see the FLN win in the end. But while he laid on his deathbed in Bethesda, Maryland, dying of leukemia, he wrote his last book, “The Wretched of the Earth”, by speaking into a tape recorder. He said that since colonialism was built and maintained by violence then only by violence could it be destroyed. And violence not by the middle-class, which is too brainwashed by their masters, but by the poor.

He died at age 36.

See also:

• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks
• domestic violence – raise your hand if you noticed the parallels with colonialism
• Malcolm X
• All blacks are racist
  • colourism
• Black France
• The Arab world

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Black Orpheus

“Black Orpheus” (1959), also known as “Orfeu Negro”, is a French-made, Portuguese-language film that tells the old Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice but set in black Rio at the time of the Carnival. While it does present blacks as childlike, you do get to see Carnival and hear music by bossa nova great Tom Jobim.

The film won a Golden Palm at Cannes, an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

Like “Carmen Jones” (1954) it uses an all-black cast and music to tell an old story.

The story (spoiler alert) appears in Ovid, Plato, Rubens, Titian, Monteverdi, Cocteau and even Neil Gaiman. In both the Greek story and the film, Orpheus plays amazing songs on his stringed instrument (lyre, guitar). He falls in love with Eurydice but then she is killed (by a snake, the electric current of a tram line). Orpheus goes to get her back from the dead (Hades, voodoo woman) but he is told that if he looks back at her before he leaves he will lose her forever. He looks back. Orpheus carries her body and is killed by some women who have gone mad.

Eurydice was played by Marpessa Dawn, who is not from Brazil at all but Pittsburgh! Although she is a light-skinned black American woman, in some of the posters she is pictured as a white woman. Not sure how they got away with that. She died in 2008 just 42 days after Breno Mello, who played Orpheus (and is from Brazil).

The film comes up in Barack Obama’s book “Dreams from My Father”. When he was going to Columbia University his mother and sister came to visit. One night “Black Orpheus” was showing. It was an old film that his mother loved, so they went.

His sister thought it was “kind of corny. Just Mom’s style”. Barack could not stand the way it pictured blacks and wanted to leave. He was about to get up and go but then he saw his mother:

But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

“Black Orpheus” had come out just before she met his father at the University of Hawaii.

Obama concludes:

The emotion between the races could never be pure, even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

See also:

• Ovid
• Brazil
• Obama at Columbia
• film
• exotic women
• Carmen Jones: Dat’s Love

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Black France

Black France is made up of all the people who live in the European part of France (as opposed to the French Caribbean) who are at least part black African by blood. Just like Black America is made up of the black people in America.

Sounds simple except for one thing: it is an American way of looking at France.

Sure, there are black people in France. In fact, France has more black people than any other country in Europe, even more than Britain, something like 2.5 million. So in that sense there is a Black France.

But unlike most blacks in America, they do not have a common culture of their own. They do not even have a common history: some come from Africa, some from the Caribbean and some grew up in Europe. Some are mixed and do not see themselves as black. And even if you just take those who come from Africa, they think of themselves mainly as Cameroonian or Malian or whatever, not as “black”.

All of which is a bit strange because the idea of “negritude”, of blackness as being something good and powerful and true, started in France in the 1930s.

It has only been since about 2005, when the black ghettos of Paris burned,  that some blacks, mainly the young who grew up in France, have begun to see that despite whatever country their parents came from, they share a common black experience and destiny shaped by the racism of France.

On paper France is not racist. Few talk about race or blackness. The government does not even count people by race. France is supposed to be above all that, colour-blind, universal and post-racial: so long as you speak French and take on French ways you are French. It does not matter what you look like or where you came from. Like Josephine Baker. Culture comes first, not the colour of one’s skin.

It sounds good, but in practice it does not always work out like that.

For example, about 37% of the French have a university degree, but among blacks it is 55%. Yet while 34% of the French are working class, 45% of blacks are. So French society is clearly racist against blacks – even if more hatred is directed against Arabs.

Or: despite the two million or so blacks who live in European France, the only blacks in the National Assembly are those from overseas, from places like Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Or even take Josephine Baker herself. She felt accepted and at home in France in a way she never could in the land of her birth, America. And yet think about how she became famous: by dancing wild and free and almost completely naked. She was acting out a stereotype that whites had about blacks as exotic, naked savages, even though she herself was a washerwoman’s daughter from St Louis in the middle of America.

• blogs:
  • Black Girl in Paris
• France
• Josephine Baker
• black ghetto – the ones in America, that is
• black

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