How can one be deaf to the voice rolling down the stages of history: "What matters is not to know the world, but to change it." This matters enormously in our lifetime. Here is objective evidence that expresses reality.īut when one has taken cognizance of this situation, one considers the job completed. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjection is beyond question… No one would dream of doubting that its major artery is fed from the heart of those various theories that have tried to prove that the Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey into man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man's comprehension of the dimension of the other. I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. We shall see that this attitude, so heroically absolute, renounces the present and the future in the name of a mythical past….įrom Chapter One: The Negro and Language. And it is with rage in his mouth and abandon in his heart that he buries himself in the vast black abyss. Or more rarely he wants to belong to his people. Then he congratulates himself on this, and enlarging the difference, the incomprehension, the disharmony, he finds in them the meaning of his real humanity. The educated Negro, slave of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro myth, feels at a given stage that his race no longer understands him. I shall demonstrate elsewhere that what is often called the black soul is a white man's artifact. White civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on the Negro. I seriously hope to persuade my brother, whether black or white, to tear off with all his strength the shameful livery put together by centuries of incomprehension…. Those who recognize themselves in it, I think, will have made a step forward. However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. The white man is sealed in his whiteness. In the course of this essay, we shall observe the development of an effort to understand the black-white relation. The white man slaves to reach a human level. I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself…. The black is a black man that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antimony that coexists with him. Man is a yes! that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. In most cases, that black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. What does a man want? What does the black man want? At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. Toward a new humanism… Understanding among men… Our colored brothers… Mankind, I believe in you… Race prejudice… To understand and to love…. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said…. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances. By Frantz Fanon as Translated from the 1952 French Original by Charles Lam Markmann in the Grove Weidenfield edition, published New York, 1967.
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