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Fanon, the recovery of African history, and the Nekyia

2022; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ejop.12835

1468-0378

Komarine Romdenh‐Romluc,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

Black history is the study of the human past that focuses on people with black skin: the things those people have done, the past societies of Africa, world events from the perspective of Black people, and so on. Nowadays, the recovery of Black history is increasingly seen as important in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.1 People campaign for its inclusion in school curricula; there are documentaries exploring past African civilisations, and university research programmes devoted to it. The recovery of African history was also deemed important by the Négritude Movement (a Black consciousness movement developed in Paris), which was a central part of the intellectual context for Fanon's work. It is perhaps, therefore, surprising to find that Fanon is highly critical in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 2008), of négritude writers' attempts to recover African history. In this paper, I will argue that his critique can only be fully understood if we read his text as adopting an important idea from Césaire (1995) that, following Jung (2009), can be called a nekyia. As such, Fanon's text is a form of therapy. I will begin by briefly explaining what the Négritude Movement is, and why writers associated with it were concerned with African history, before presenting Fanon's explicit objections to their arguments. After this, I will offer a further reason from Fanon's text for recovering African history that is not defeated by his objections. The final part of the paper will present Fanon's nekyia and show how reading Black Skin, White Masks as therapy helps explain why Fanon dismisses attempts to recover African history in the text. The Négritude Movement was an anticolonial movement that emerged in Paris during the 1930s. One of its central themes was Black identity. The term 'négritude'—coined by Aimé Césaire, one of the movement's founders—means 'blackness' or perhaps 'black personhood'. The other two thinkers usually recognised as founding the movement are Léon Gontran Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. All three were from countries under French colonial rule. No movement is created out of nothing. Césaire, Damas, and Senghor were influenced by the Harlem and Haitian Renaissances, through which Rabaka (2015) traces the roots of the Négritude Movement to the thought of W. E. B. Dubois. The three men encountered these ideas at a 'salon' hosted in Paris by three sisters from Martinique: Jane, Paulette, and Andrée Nardal. Sharpley-Whiting (2000) observes that women's contributions to the Négritude Movement are usually overlooked, and Jane Nardal had already published an article in 1928 that set out many of the themes that later came to characterise it (Nardal, 2002). Different thinkers put forward different ideas under the banner of the Négritude Movement, but a central aim all négritude writers share is to develop a new black identity as an alternative to colonial conceptions of blackness. Colonial thought takes White people to be superior, civilised, rational, intelligent, and fully human. Black people are claimed to be inferior, primitive, uncivilised, less intelligent, less rational, and not fully human (the latter is sometimes couched as less evolved). Whiteness also has a special normative status—it is conceived as the standard state for humans. Black people are thus, according to colonial thought, not just different but also defective. At the time, people from the French Caribbean commonly thought of themselves as French rather than Black, taking colonial ideas to apply to Black people in Africa. This self-conception crumbled when they travelled to France and discovered that White people thought of them as Black, not French (Fanon, 2008). Against this, the négritude writers posited a common Africanized identity for all Black people, turning to the—at the time—largely unknown history of Africa as inspiration.2 'Africa […] is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit […] What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature' Hegel was far from unique in holding such a view, and similar ideas persisted, in at least certain quarters, into the 20th century.5 In the 1960s, the BBC broadcast a lecture series in which Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper from the University of Oxford notoriously stated that precolonial Black Africa had no history.6 Like Hegel, Trevor-Roper's claim was based on the idea that history 'is essentially a form of movement and purposive movement too […]' so a static society—like those supposedly existing on the African continent—that does not change and develop is not historical. Moreover, Trevor-Roper contends that 'we study [history] in order to discover how we came to where we are' (Trevor-Roper, 1965, p. 9). So history only concerns those societies that have contributed to the progress of the world more broadly. Since Trevor-Roper assumes past Africans have not contributed, it follows that studying Africa's past would merely be 'to amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe' (Trevor-Roper, 1965, p. 9).7 Chapter 8 of Black Skin, White Masks focuses largely on the question of recovering African history. Fanon makes three objections in this chapter. First, there are two broad lines of response available to the view that Africa has no history. One can contest the claim that African societies are static, primitive, and have had no influence on the world's development. Or, one may dispute the conception of history as only concerned with the rational development and progress of societies towards some end point, and the associated claim that having a history is the mark of being fully human. (These responses are not mutually exclusive.) The Négritude Movement's recovery of African history is an instance of the first response. Négritude writers countered the view of a primitive unchanging Africa by showing there have been past African civilizations, which played a central role in world events. Fanon argues that we should prefer the second line of response. The first debates colonialism on its own terms; as such, it accepts certain colonial ideas—that civilisation is the mark of being fully human; that Black and White people belong to fundamentally different races. But those ideas should be rejected. Fanon compares the situation with being invited to respond to a student article in Lyon that 'made jazz music literally an irruption of cannibalism in the modern world' (Fanon, 2008, p. 176).8 Rather than try to argue that jazz music is not a form of cannibalism, Fanon tells us that 'he rejected the premises on which the request was based' and we should do the same here (Fanon, 2008, p. 176). There is no good reason to think that only people who live in civilizations are fully human. 'The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on me' (Fanon, 2008, p. 175). Moreover, the racial binary is not a fact of nature. Black-skinned and White-skinned people are not fundamentally different from each other; instead, race exists only to the extent that it has been socially constructed. 'The Negro is not. Any more than the white man' (Fanon, 2008, p. 180). 'My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values' (Fanon, 2008, p. 177). Since there is no real and important difference between people with black skin, and those with white skin, outside of the differences created by cultural ideas and social institutions, the existence of African history makes no difference to the sort of being that Fanon is. It is true that as someone whose ancestors came from Africa in the past few hundred years, there is a sense in which African history belongs to Fanon. But as a human being, the whole of human history belongs to Fanon too. 'I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass' (Fanon, 2008, p. 175). Fanon's second objection is that the Négritude Movement's ultimate goal is liberation from colonialism, which essentially includes ending the exploitation of the most downtrodden. But the recovery of African history will not help bring this about. Fanon remarks that whilst past African civilisations are of 'the greatest interest […] I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe' (Fanon, 2008, p. 180). There are two ways that the mistreatment of colonised workers could end: the colonisers might have a change of heart and stop exploiting them, or the colonised might fight for their own liberation (both could happen). Fanon argues that the recovery of African history will play no role in either route to liberation. One might suppose it will make a difference to the colonisers' treatment of the colonised. A common theme in colonial thinking is that the colonised are in some way less human, and this (partly) justifies poor treatment of them. Thus, for example, Aboriginal Australians were denied their right to land on the grounds that they lead a merely animal existence and so property rights do not apply to them (Banner, 2005). To show that there were civilisations on the African continent is to establish that Africans fulfil one of colonialism's criteria for being fully human. By colonial logic, this (partially) removes the supposed justification for their mistreatment. But Fanon remarks, 'I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to reason or respect for human dignity can alter reality' (Fanon, 2008, p. 174). Colonial ideas about colonised people are not grasped on a merely intellectual level. They also affect the way people both perceive and feel about others. These perceptual and affective phenomena are not easily dislodged simply through reasoning. Perhaps more importantly, conceptions of the colonised as inferior might help to grease the wheels of colonialism, but they are not what keep them turning. Colonialism is ultimately motivated by the accrual of wealth, and power (usually in the service of the acquisition of wealth), and the pursuit of these things will not be stemmed by alternative conceptions of the colonised. Indeed, the various ideas that apparently justify colonialism often look like rationalisations. This is an empirical claim, but there are many examples throughout history that bear this out—for example, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was presented to the public as aiming to liberate Afghan women from the Taliban. It is widely acknowledged that this was not the real motivation (Berry, 2003). Fanon then argues that the recovery of African history will not motivate the colonised to fight for their own liberation either. He offers two examples to illustrate this claim. First, he states that the few working-class people he knew in Paris 'never took it on themselves to pose the problem of the discovery of a Negro past' (Fanon, 2008, p. 175). Second, he points to the First Indochina War/Anti-French Resistance War, which was fought mostly in Vietnam along with parts of the surrounding region, including the French protectorates of Laos and Cambodia, and which was ongoing when he wrote Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon notes widely reported stories of the ferocity of the Viet-Minh in battle, and the 'serenity with which young Vietnamese of sixteen or seventeen faced firing squads' (Fanon, 2008, p. 177). He states that their motivation for fighting is not a dream of past cultural glory, but the present violence and brutality they experience at the hands of the colonisers. 'I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny […] I am endlessly creating myself' 'The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions' Let us accept Fanon's three objections for the sake of argument here. Still, they are not sufficient to explain his rejection of attempts to recover African history in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon's appeal to a Sartrean notion of freedom indicates that he interprets one strand of négritude philosophy as holding that African history is important to black identity because what has happened in the past determines what a person does in the present. But other parts of Fanon's text suggest a different connection between history and identity, which does not look vulnerable to his three objections. Fanon argues that colonialism is not just a system of exploitation, it is one that is essentially premised on ideas of race. We saw earlier that colonial thought takes White people to be superior, civilised, rational, intelligent, and so on, whilst Black people are inferior, uncivilised, less intelligent, less rational, less intelligent, etc. These racial categories reinforce the structuring of society into a group who exploit, and the group who are exploited. In other words, colonialism is partly defined by an ideology, that is, a set of ideas that represent people's places in the colonial world. One of Fanon's tasks in the text is to identify and analyse how these ideas are spread. For example, Fanon talks about the impact of children's magazines, pointing out that '[t]he Tarzan stories, the sagas of twelve-year-old explorers, the adventures of Mickey Mouse […] In the magazines, the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians' (Fanon, 2008, pp. 112–113). 'the welfare queen constitutes a highly materialistic, domineering, and manless working-class Black woman. Relying on the public dole, Black welfare queens are content to take the hard-earned money of tax-paying Americans and remain married to the state[…] [This image was used to help] mask the effects of cuts in government spending on social welfare programs that fed children, housed working families, assisted cities in maintaining roads, bridges, and basic infrastructure, and supported other basic public services. Media images increasingly identified and blamed Black women for the deterioration of US interests. Thus, poor Black women simultaneously became symbols of what was deemed wrong with America and targets of social policies designed to shrink the government sector' One important source of a culture's shared meanings is history. Our grasp of the past is only ever partial. We do not know—either individually or collectively—everything that has happened. What we do know is always known and/or interpreted from a particular perspective. Since the history books are usually written by the powerful, our grasp of the past often embodies their perspective. Unsurprisingly, history is sometimes the source of controlling images. One good example is the recent Windrush scandal. The 'Windrush generation' were people who emigrated to Britain from its Caribbean colonies, encouraged to come by the British government as sorely needed labour after World War II. However, as former colonial subjects, these people's status as British citizens was, and continues to be, ambiguous. Despite being ruled by Britain, people living in the British colonies did not enjoy the same rights as British citizens living in the United Kingdom, and were subject to a complex system of different forms of citizenship, further complicated when those colonies achieved independence.9 Legislation passed in 1971 meant that only those Windrush migrants who had arrived prior to 1973 would automatically be given indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom. In 2010, the British government destroyed a large archive of landing cards, which recorded the date of Windrush arrivals to the United Kingdom. The government was reportedly warned by immigration caseworkers that this information was not stored anywhere else, but the archive was destroyed regardless (Gentleman, 2018). Many people who had lived and worked in the United Kingdom for decades were suddenly unable to prove that they had the right to be there. They lost their jobs, their homes, and access to healthcare. Some were deported to countries they had left as little children. Others were stranded for years outside the United Kingdom after going on holiday and being refused re-entry (Gentleman, 2020).10 Campaign groups11 argue that this scandal was partly facilitated by a lack of knowledge about the history of Britain's colonies and associated migration to the United Kingdom, amongst the general population. Widespread ignorance made it easier for the whole mess to be thought of by many members of the general public as a series of unfortunate bureaucratic errors coupled with the failure of individual victims to keep their paperwork in order, rather than the latest move in a long series of actions gradually curtailing the citizenship of people from Britain's former colonies. The amorphous idea of 'red tape' can be thought of as a controlling image that acted as a sort of smokescreen obscuring the responsibility of individuals holding British state power who actively destroyed the lives of many elderly British-Caribbean people and their families.12 Since a skewed perspective on the past can give rise to controlling images, recovering the history of the less powerful can serve to combat them, providing people with a set of hermeneutical resources with positive effects. This leaves us with a puzzle: given Fanon's concern with the controlling images generated by colonial thought, why does he seemingly not recognise that the recovery of African history could help counteract them? The answer, I think, lies with the fact that Fanon's three objections do not capture all his reasons for dismissing attempts to recover African history in Black Skin, White Masks. There is an important line of thought missing from our account so far: Fanon's adoption of a central idea from Césaire's négritude philosophy, which—for reasons I will explain shortly—I will call the Césairean nekyia. Fanon holds that colonialism produces unhealthy psychic phenomena in the minds of the colonised. Liberation partially involves restoration of good mental health. This is one of the goals of Black Skin, White Masks. 'I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it' (Fanon, 2008, p. 5). Fanon reads Césaire's epic poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1995), which he quotes extensively in Black Skin, White Masks, as offering a particular method for doing this. The poem does not merely describe the method; it carries it out. The method in question is that of the waking dream13—a psychotherapeutic technique for accessing the unconscious. The patient allows mental images to arise, which are taken to be a guide to unconscious psychic phenomena. Different versions of the waking dream method have been developed by different therapists.14 Jung uses the idea of the nekyia as a metaphor for an inner journey into the unconscious to face aspects of oneself, including what is painful or uncomfortable, which one must accept in order to develop. Nekyia is a classical Greek term referring to communication with the dead, usually to obtain information from them. A second term—katabasis—refers to a journey to the Underworld of Hades. Jung used the term nekyia to encompass both. His reference to Greek myths of journeying to the Underworld indicates not only the hidden nature of the unconscious, but also that the inner voyage is difficult and dangerous. It carries the risk of madness since what one finds may overcome the rational conscious mind. Césaire's epic considered as a therapeutic exercise clearly fits the Jungian idea of nekyia.15 In Césaire's poem, the journey inwards is to search for what it means to be Black in a colonial world. For the therapy to have its intended effect, he must confront and accept all that this means—all the psychic residue associated with blackness contained in the hidden recesses of the mind, particularly that which is most awful—in order to move forward and develop his négritude (his Black identity). For Césaire, this is not some fixed essence, but a continually rewritten way of existing in the world as a person with black skin, which is inseparable from working towards liberation. 'So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered in death's heads' 'My memory is circled with blood. My memory has its belt of corpses' 'From the hold I hear shackled curses rising, the gasps of the dying, the sound of one thrown overboard, the baying of a woman giving birth… the scraping of fingernails groping for throats… the sneer of the whip… the crawling of vermin among tired bodies…' 'Because we hate you, you and your reason, we invoke dementia. praecox flamboyant madness tenacious cannibalism. Treasure, let us count: the madness that remembers. the madness that screams. the madness that sees. the madness that is unleashed' 'I have looked and looked at trees and so I have become a tree and this long tree's feet have dug great venom sacs and tall cities of bone in the ground. I have thought and thought of the Congo and so, I have become a Congo rustling with forests and rivers' 'I have worn parrot feather and musk-cat skins. I have tried the patience of missionaries' '(niggers-they are-all-alike, I tell you every-vice-every-conceivable-vice, I'm telling-you-the-smell-of-niggers, it-helps-the-cane-grow. remember-the-old-saying: beat-a-nigger, feed-a-nigger)' 'Overall it was the picture of a hideous nigger, a grumpy nigger, a gloomy nigger, a slumped nigger, his hands together prayer-like upon a knotty stick. A nigger shrouded in an old threadbare jacket. A nigger who was comical and ugly, and behind me women were looking at him and giggling. He was COMICAL AND UGLY. COMICAL AND UGLY, for sure. I exhibited a wide smile of connivance…' 'I accept, I accept all this […]. And suddenly, strength and life charge me like a bull' 'Negridom with its smell of fried onions rediscovers the sour taste of freedom in its spilt blood. Negridom is standing' 'Do you understand? Césaire has come down. He is ready to see what is happening at the depths, and now he can go up […] But he does not leave the black man down there. He lifts him to his own shoulders and raises him to the clouds […] What he has chosen is, to use the expression of Gaston Bachelard, a psyche of ascent' 'rise, Dove. rise. rise. rise' In summary, Fanon understands Césaire's poem as offering a therapeutic method for healing the colonised person's stunted sense of self. He takes Césaire to propose a certain kind of waking dream therapy: an ascensional nekyia. One must descend to the depths of the unconscious to confront all the worst colonial residues of race, and make peace with what one finds there. Through acceptance, the colonised person's self-identity is transformed. She can then rise up in an imagined ascent that brings positive feelings with it, and provides her with a new appreciation of her freedom. From this point, she is ready to work for liberation from colonialism. 'I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took my breath away […] Ségou, Djenné, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran) […] The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago' 'Every hand was a losing hand for me' (p. 101). 'I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again' (p. 106). 'The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother 'Resign yourself to your colour the way I got used to my stump; we're both victims'. 'Nevertheless, with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation […]' 'Blackness, darkness, shadow, shades, night, the labyrinths of the earth, abysmal depths, blacken someone's reputation; and, on the other side, the bright look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly light' In laying bare these uncomfortable truths, Fanon accomplishes the same thing as Césaire: he journeys to the depths of the Underworld and unearths colonial ideas of race that are most difficult for the Black person to face. By making these ideas explicit, they can be acknowledged. Through acceptance, they begin to lose their power. By hitting rock bottom, the transformation of the self can begin. In this paper, I have considered Fanon's critique of the Négritude Movement's attempt to recover African history. I have argued that the explicit objections that Fanon makes in chapter 8 of Black Skin, White Masks are not his only reasons for dismissing the recovery of African history in the text. Instead, Fanon takes up Césaire's suggestion that the psychic wounds inflicted by colonialism can be healed with an ascensional nekyia. The colonised person must undertake an inner journey to face the worst ideas of race that colonialism has lodged in the unconscious. Moreover, Fanon does not just write about the method; like Césaire, he employs it in the text. Clinging to noble ideas of past African glory hinders completion of the nekyia. Thus Fanon sets them aside in Black Skin, White Masks. Only in facing that which is most painful, will the colonised person be able to transform his self-identity and rise, ready to progress towards liberation.19