TITLE OF BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK

NAME: PATEL KAVITA B.

ROLL NO: 11

CLASS: M. A.

SEM: III

ASSIGNMENT: EC-305 POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE

TOPIC: TITLE OF BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK

YEAR: 2011-2012

SUBMITTED TO: DR. DILIP BARAD,

                               DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,

                               BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY,

                               BHAVNAGAR

       BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK

        
    The opening gambit of Black Skin White Mask ushers us towards an imminent experience. There is a little point, in accusing fanon sexism and gender bias. It is indeed true, as Bart Moore – Gilbert suggests that Black Skin White Mask “discriminates pointedly between the experience of men and women of colour.” Fanon can be used both attack and defend European humanism. That’s because European humanism does have a few redeeming features along with its totalizing tendencies. Fanon is critical of European universalism yet uses the discourse of psychoanalysis to reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes because one can distance oneself from certain varieties of universalism and get closure to certain other notions of universal thoughts and values.

        “I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the white world the man of colour encounters

Difficulties in the development of his bodily schema… I was bettered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, and intellectual deficiency. I took myself far off from my own presence, what else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?  

            With Fanon that “Since the racial drama played out in the open the black man has no time to make unconscious” but that is a provocative thought. In occupying two places at once or three in Fanon’s case- the depersonalized, dislocketed colonial subject can become an incalculable object, quite literary, difficult to place.

        The demand of authority cannot unify its message nor simplify its strategy. For the strategy of colonial desire is to stage the drama of identity at the point at which the black slips to reveal the white skin. Fanon writes about…

        Towards the humanism…

         Understand among men…

         Our coloured brothers…

         Mankind, I believe you…

         Race prejudice…

         To understand and to love…

           What does a man want? What does a white man want? The white man called as a ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him. Every time it has burst out somewhere, it has brought fire, famine, misery and contempt for a man.

           The black man wants to be white man .The white man slaves to reach a human level. In this essay Fanon talks about black and white people’s relation. The white man is sealed in his whiteness. And black man is sealed in his blackness. There is another fact: black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. They constantly thinks, how do we extricate ourselves?

            Fanon believe that the fact of juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistencial complex. Many Negroes will not find themselves in what follows. It is equally true of many whites.

            The black Man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and also with another Negroes. The objective evidence that express reality is the Negro is a stage in the slow evaluation of monkey into a man.

              A men who has a language consequently possesses the world express and I am killed by the language, mastery of the language afford remarkable power.

            The title itself suggests something negative. Black skin white mask. Skin shows something original and masks shows something duplicate. Black skin white mask shows something negative. White shows the beauty, intelligence and money. While black colour shows nothingness. The title suggests Whiteman’s aggressiveness and Blackmans positiveness.

           Black skin white mask. Skin we have, while mask we brought. Blackman have a desire to be a white. Everyone wants to be white. It means they want to get beauty, money and power over the humankind. When the white lady call the black lady as a Negrees, she replies,

   “Me a negrees? … Mention niggers to me.”

           Thus even black person doesn’t like that someone calls her/him as a black person. They are just slaves and workers of the white masters. For example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In this book, Uncle Tom and the other slaves are works in the farm, for their master. Some of them are pitiless and cruel.

           To conclude my point, I would like to say the title suggest two colors white and black. The white is a symbol of goodness and black is for something bad.