The Fact of Blackness by Frontz Fanon Summary

The
Fact of Blackness

by Camalita Naicker 

The Fact of Blackness,
the fifth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, is not an
answer or an explanation to the statement that is the title, rather it is an
insight into the inner turmoil and tense soliloquy that Fanon is experiencing.
The answer on what is The Fact of Blackness is exceedingly less
important that the question of it. If we take this as our starting point then
we begin to understand his angst in trying to locate his identity in a sea of
whiteness and white power. It is a conversation not unlike the ones we all have
with ourselves every now and again, if you’re a person of colour. His inner
rumination and contemplation is central to the chapter, it is the guide that
leads to the end of the chapter where Fanon finds himself in crisis. 

The chapter for me is epitomised by
the three words at the beginning, “Look, a Negro”. Those three words are the
genesis of the disembodying third person consciousness he experiences later
when he has come into contact with ‘the other’ and realises that he has to
construct his identity out of what has already been a much pre-determined path
for him. The mechanical disembodied feeling comes from having existed with
oneself for many years and then suddenly coming into contact with a white
world, which not only rejects you as person but bestows on you all kinds of
characteristics and histories that you must not only be burdened with but learn
to accept as one does an amputated limb. 

Fanon speaks about being trapped in
the historicity of being a Negro: he is a product of his ancestors who are
repeatedly described as cannibalistic savages. He is desperately trying to find
some framework through which to understand himself, and be proud of being
black. He attempts to reason with racism but finds “for a man whose only weapon
is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason”. 

Each time victory eludes him, every
time he thinks he has found the answer, using rationalisation theory, the
abstract acceptance of his existence as a person never seems to translate into
the literal and tangible realisation of it ( I’m sure this sounds familiar to millions of South Africans still
waiting for equality and freedom). 

He turns then, in angst and uncertainty
to negritude, a celebration of black culture and emotion through poetry and
art...“from the opposite end of the white world a magical negro culture was
hailing me”, and he answered. He tried to embrace this too, but he could not
accept that his culture and his people represented a reality stuck in time, a
period of time on the spectrum of development, his decidedly (by the shameful
science of the time) “typical of peoples that have not kept pace with the human
race”.

We see him reject over and over again
different theories designed to explain away the inferiority of black people,
some even designed to make it seem as if it truly represented that
“magio-social structure” and it was not just white people, it was black men
too. The scary part is we can still see these parallels in our society today,
the idea of being a product of history is not new by any standard, for it is
only ‘modern’ cultures which are allowed the privilege of developing and
evolving, whereas traditional cultures and religions remain fixed in time as
part of a pre-history, other cultures are denied their own internal struggles
and evolution. 

A call by African and Indian women
to emancipate themselves and others within African and Indian cultures is seen
as a manifestation of western cultural and liberal values into ‘traditional
cultures’, but we forget who makes the distinction between modern and
traditional cultures and we go along with it, happy to be “the human
sustenance” for the “corrupted souls of white people”. Yes, they will come for
a taste of the exotic, a cultural experience and they will be wowed by all the
bright colours and dancing and singing, and we will play along like show
monkeys without interrogating what it means to be traditional. Surely we should
be allowed to evolve and develop too, or is it only white culture that should
have this privilege? And yet we will laugh at the ridiculous television
advertisement caricatures of Indian (isn’t the fact that they still call us
Indian interesting? Shouldn’t that earn me an Indian passport?) with their bad
accents, clad in brightly coloured saris and traditional clothing ,which you never see any of us wearing on the street on a
daily basis, being cheap and looking either for the best deal or a marriage
proposal.

In an earlier chapter and in this
one, Fanon speaks about a mediated interaction with the negro he is supposed to
be, the one on TV and in the newspapers. Have any of these roles changed? Since
American’s still come here asking to see the Lions in our back yards, (but that
is the extreme) since people in this very country, students in the very same
class as I am, do not know the difference between Hindu and Muslim people
still. How is it that whiteness still allows us to be to relegated to the
peripheries, as a completely homogenous group of people who are in touch with
their emotions; spirituality; rituals; ceremonies and “the cosmic message” and
who have very traditional and cultural values (But I can’t tell you any of them
because really I have no idea what they are). It comes from the negritude that
Fanon eventually rejects but also in what has become the culturalist tradition
of political thought: the African scholars that still today believe Africa was
pre-colonial utopia, that we were “backward, simple, free in our behaviour” and
that this world was without the injustices of modernity. What they fail to see
is keep ourselves locked in this “infernal circle”, we cannot move
forward if we are to be kept within the bounds of such culturalists assertions.
For it is these culturalist assertions that make it possible for the Ugandan
government to attempt to pass a law enforcing the death as the punishment for
homosexuality, it is unAfrican isn’t it? Since by denouncing it as
western-import we are asserting our ability to chart what being African means?
And it certainly does not mean loving someone of the same sex as
yourself. 

This is precisely what Fanon
rejects, he does not want to use reason or unreason to defend or assert his
blackness, he does not want to convince people of his worth because his
ancestors were also clever like white men and they were taken away from Africa,
nor does he want a mistake in his diagnosis of a patient to be reduced to the
fact of his race (ahh maybe that is the fact of blackness?). Or maybe the fact
of blackness is that it is isn’t a fact at all, that it is as Stuart Hall
reminds us, a floating signifier, an unfixed, unfixable social construction
that is necessary only in its use for deconstruction. Fanon does not want
self-objectification, but rather to be free to exist freely in the world as he
is and not have to explain or defend himself at every turn. But in fact it is this
which we all seek. Since it is only the black politician and the black
businessman who will ever have to defend the purchase of their new Mercedes
Benz, and it is only black people who will have to enter an academic or social
debate and try twice as hard as the rest to sound well informed and make a
flawless argument, because if you slip up you will be judged not only on your
character but also on your race. Thus it is a constant burden to carry around,
forever fixed in an unequal relation to the white world, which sits in ubiquity
never examined, never having to make apologies or excuses, never having to
define what it is, it just is, and that is ultimately what makes Fanon weep at
the end of this chapter, his desire and paradoxical inability to just be.