THE NEGRO &

LANGUAGE

Frantz Fanon

From Fanon’s Black Skin And White Masks

« …To speak is to exist absolutely for the other »

Speaking is one of the ways how the colored man imposes and expresses his existence for the other.

Frantz fanon

“...To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the

morphology of this language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support

the weight of a civilization”

The act of speaking is a set of several points that the black man carries to his own culture and personality.

Frantz fanon

« The black man has two dimensions. One with his follows, the other with the white man… »

Frantz fanon

The psyche of the black man is dividing society into 2 categories, the people of the same colour ( blacks) and the white man (colonizer), this division is going to effect his thinking and behaviour and create a kind of a gap between the two categories

Hybridity

the outcome of the mixture to the culture of the colonizer that produces a person with no fixed cultural marks, and he is in between of the two cultures as he is neither accepted by the one or the other

«…the negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter- that is , he will come closer to being a real human being-... » Frantz fanon

Even in the black society itself the negro is dividing the other negro into 2 categories those who are negro and those who began to be white, those who became more civilized and more human.

Frantz fanon

“Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is with the culture of the mother country...”

Frantz fanon wanted to say that all nations that have been colonized, have killed their local culture, customs, language, incautiously they adopted the colonizer language and culture, that led to the decline of their mother land culture and created a complex of inferiority

Frantz fanon

The black has developed a mechanism that allows him to renounce his blackness a , in order to make up for the lack in his personality, the lack created by the inferiority complex that he has inconsciously developed, and as a result he has buried his own culture.

“..The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle...”

« ..The black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation… »

Frantz fanon

Here Frantz fanon shows the degree of the change that accrue on the black men, once he is in the colonized country, and how his personality has changed; as Fanon said “they’ve completed the cycle”. And they have added what was missing or lacking . As if the colonizer’s country’s visit is kind of cure for their inferiority complex

“...The middle class in the Antilles never speak Creole except to their servants. In school the children of Martinique are taught to scorn the dialect. One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid the use of Creole, and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it”

Frantz fanon

Here in this passage, the representation of the inferiority complex in language is obvious, and the fact of speaking about the middle class means that this phenomenon is wildly spread and needless to speak about the upper class, when the mother in the house and the teacher in the classroom teach the children that speaking Creole is forbidden and an ashamfull act, the children will see this language inferior and scorn the whole culture.

Frantz fanon

“In any group of young men in the Antilles, the one who expresses himself well, who has mastered the language, is inordinately feared; keep an eye on that one, he is almost white. In France one says, <he talks like a book>, in Martinique, <he talks like a white man>...”

Here in this passage we notice that language is power, and language gives power to those who master it well, when we say language that does not mean Creole language No, BUT the colonizer language; that makes the idea of inferiority clearer and shows the importance given to the language by society, and the power that language offers , and how language civilizes a negro and makes him white.

Frantz fanon

Here in this passage we can notice a further step in the development of the inferiority complex concerning the use of the colonizer language at the point of dismissing their own native language, and taking the other language as the original one just after spending few months in the whiteman’s country (France).

“The new-comer reveals himself at once; he answers only in French, and often he no longer understands Creole.....he no longer understand the dialect, he talks about the Opéra...”

« …The negro adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a separation… »

Frantz fanon

The fact of learning the colonizer’s language will lead to a dislocation and a break from the original culture , and this is because the negro sees his own culture and language inferior .

Frantz fanon

“The Negros’ inferiority complex is particularly intensified among the most educated, who must struggle with it unceasingly...”

In this passage, Fanon shows the category most affected buy the inferiority complex and justify the reason behind this unceasingly struggle.

Professor D. Westermann, in The African Today (p.331)

Frantz fanon

Here fanon quote from an other professor that dealt with the same subject and mentioned the things than the Negro does in order to have some equality with the European.

“...The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style; using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the Native language with the European expressions; using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing a European language; all these contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievements”.

Professor D. Westermann, in The African Today (p.331)

Frantz fanon

“...the Antilles Negro is more “civilized” than the African, that is, he is closer to the white man; and this difference prevails not only in back streets and on boulevards but also in public services and the army...”

Here we have again a clear illustration about the division of the Negro, how the African negro see the Antilles negro as civilised not only in the social side but even officially in the army and other sectors.

“...In the Antilles, as in Brittany, there is a dialect and there is the French language. But this is false for the Bretons do not consider themselves inferior to the French people. The Bretons have not been civilized by the white man...”

Frantz fanon

Fanon compares the French imperialism in Africa with the period when the French ruled England, and tried to find out why the Bretons were not civilized and did not have inferiority complex like Africans did.

Frantz fanon

Here we have the rejection of Darwinism and how fanon has rejected this theory

“It has been said that the negro is the link between monkey and man, meaning of course white man.............”

“...It is laid down in the bible that the separation of the white and the black races will be continued in heaven as on earth, and those blacks who are admitted into the kingdom of heaven will find themselves separately lodged in certain of those many mansions of our father that are mentioned in the new Testament.... We are the chosen people look at the colour of our skins, the others are black or yellow: that is because of their sins”

We have a religious reason behind inferiority complex

Sir Alan Burns

Thank you