Frantz Fanon, poet: pleasure of the text, power of the text

ABSTRACT

Frantz Fanon’s writing represents a productive embrace of the political and the poetic. His ideas have had such a long afterlife, they live on in us, I submit, precisely because the language of their articulation, image-filled and rhythmic, is compelling. This article examines three elements of Fanonian poetics in Black Skin, White Masks: the use of metaphor and, in “By Way of Conclusion,” an ambiguous/multiple “I” as persona, and, finally, what Brent Edwards has called “anaphoric poetics,” the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Skin
• White Masks
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Audre Lorde
• Ousmane Sembène
• James Baldwin
• Aimé Césaire
• Richard Wright
• Achille Mbembe
• Haitian Revolution
• French Revolution
• Ferdinand De Saussure
• Wretched Of The Earth
• Octave Mannoni
• Brent Edwards
• Gayatri Spivak

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All translations are mine.

2. A comparable perception of a technology in its “pure” state, unburdened by the violence of racial and social hierarchies, seems to motivate this observation about the train in Ousmane Sembène’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960, 127): “la machine … elle, n’a ni langage, ni race” [“the machine …, for its part, has neither language, nor race”].

3. In Psychologie de la colonisation, published in 1950, psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni subscribed to the view that the enslaved had a predisposition for enslavement. Fanon argued, on the contrary, that enslaved people, black people specifically, were not born, but made by social and material conditions.

4. That interest has intensified with the rage and ongoing protests fuelled by countless murders of young black men and women by white citizens and, above all, police. Denouncing the multi-faceted racial violence of the United States and seeking justice for its victims, the Black Lives Matter movement, established in 2013, has sparked protests not only across the United States but around the world.

5. “[L]iterature … displays that the truth of a human situation is the itinerary of not being able to find it” (Spivak 2012, 103).

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Notes on contributors

Eileen Julien

Eileen Julien is professor of comparative literature, French, Francophone and African studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Among her publications are African Novels and the Question of Orality (1992), Travels with Mae: Scenes from a New Orleans Girlhood (2009); and the co-edited Locations and Dislocations of African Literature: A Dialogue Between Humanities and Social Science Scholars (2016), and she is the Africa Regional Coordinator for Literature: A World History, forthcoming from Blackwell. Julien was president of the African Literature Association (1990–1991), founding director of the West African Research Center (Dakar, Senegal, 1993–1995) and co-founder of the New Orléans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival (2008–2012).