FANON AND THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE

Towards a Material Linguistics of Colonial Subjection

“To read Fanon,” Homi Bhabha tells us, “is to experience the sense of division that prefigures—and fissures the emergence of truly radical thought that never dawns without casting an uncertain dark” (Bhabha 40). For however uncertain and dark Fanon's writing may be, there is little denying its fundamental importance for Anglo-American scholars in the late twentieth century. Black Skin, White Masks is a key text readily assimilated into literary curricula for its novel theory of the subject, which articulates a multi-layered corporeal schema at issue in colonial subject formation. 1 Indeed, for many, Fanon's racial and psychoanalytic theorization of what he terms epidermalization 2 resonates broadly for its shift from the base superstructure models long ago part of Marxist rhetoric towards a critical reading of a thousand details, stories, anecdotes (“milles détails, anecdotes, récits”) woven by the white man.3 With these issues in mind, Fanon can be seen to stage an astute anti-colonial critique that privileges aspects of culturally constructed knowledge over and above models of economic or historical determination. This distinctly cultural emphasis makes Fanon a curious harbinger for a constellation of Anglo-American critical writings that explore race, psychoanalysis and subject formation in the late twentieth century.

For all of the attention these various analyses accord to Fanon's cultural analysis and corporeal schema, a crucial aspect of Fanon's writing is forgotten in this selective remembering. What is striking is that, inadvertently or not, Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks not with a discussion of race per se , but with the problem of language. While certainly the gesture of reading Fanon's epidermal schema is important, I am concerned here with the conundrum by which this study of epidermalization begins not with recognition based on the speaker's skin, as one might expect, but with recognition based on the speaker's language. The immediate relation set forth, in the first chapter, is one that offers crucial insight into how Fanon critically interrogates key assumptions about the communicative function of language and its imbrication in the flesh. What is communicated in the process far exceeds the intentions of the speaker, and language as such comes to be understood as the intersubjective basis of colonial subjection. My essay, then, is not an effort to remember Fanon as a post-structuralist avant-la-lettre, nor is it guided towards a view of Fanon that simply challenges what would become post-structuralist thought. Instead, by looking closely at Fanon's analysis of language, I hope to explore those aspects of his work that enact an alternate linguistics, predicated on a close interaction between language and the body.

Following from a cautionary introductory note about the specificity of his argument, Fanon begins the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks with a bold declaration about the fundamental importance he attributes to the phenomenon of language (“phénomène du langage”):

Nous attachons une importance fondamentale au phénomène du langage. C'est pourquoi nous estimons nécessaire cette etude étude qui doit nous livrer un des éléments de compréhension de la dimensions pour-autrui de l'homme de couleur. Etant entendu que parler, c'est exister absolument pour l'autre (Fanon 13).

From this very first moment in his text, Fanon invokes language as a key dimension of the man of color's existence for the other (“la dimension pour-autrui de l'homme de couleur”), and further claims that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other (“Etant entendu que parler, c'est exister absolument pour l'autre”). What is crucial is that Fanon is not dealing with language in the abstract, with a body of possible phrases to be enunciated by a model speaker, but is rather framing language as speech already spoken between two speakers. His concern is thus not simply for the possibility of speech, so much as for the existence of speech in the world. What Fanon's introduction to language offers is ultimately nothing short of an ethics of speech, situated at once linguistically, but also culturally and racially in the first few pages of his book.

Most crucially, though, Fanon's text not only articulates a theory of language, but also performs it, weaving together various strands of argument into an analysis of colonial culture. On the one hand, Fanon frames the essay within the context of Sartre's Orphée Noir and questions raised by the discourse on African literature; on the other hand, he writes almost anecdotally, drawing together various stories of returning émigrés, coming back to the islands with refined French skills. Within this argumentatively eclectic style, Fanon verges occasionally towards a literary reverence, citing Valéry, Césaire and Leiris, and elsewhere towards passionate critique, engaging other towering figures of the French academy, most notably in this essay, Jean Paul Sartre. What we cull from the ebb and flow of this liberationist optimism and critical pessimism is a methodologically eclectic style, folding together stories from the local periphery and the colonial center, all in an ostensible analysis of language and colonialism.

If Fanon's essay both says and performs, then it also seems to engage itself in something of an egregious performative contradiction. Not only does Fanon employ the very literacy he critiques, but he also seems to suggest that language is that into which we are born, that anything from the colonial dominant implies a dislocation, even though he himself works through a number of examples drawn from a long line of colonial scholarship.4 We might wonder, for example, why Fanon turns to literary French and a scattering of academic references to discuss the weight of colonialism. Stated differently, if language is so closely imbricated in the weight of civilization, how might we understand Fanon's turn to writing, and what is at stake in his theorization of literacy through a seemingly hyper-literate study? In the quest to analyze a psychoexistential complex, Fanon could appear to enact precisely those practices he critiques, writing in French of the particular baggage of the colonial language. With these issues in mind, how could Fanon's politics be understood as anything but ironic?

In what follows, I would like to address the particularity of this citational politics: that is, the manner with which Fanon not only adopts literary figures from towering French writers, but through adoption, destructs much of what they analyze. What occurs in this process is not only the radical reformulation of linguistics, but also the bringing into sight of language in relation to the body. What appears, then, as a performative contradiction, is, in effect, closely tied to the project of de-universalizing reading, knowledge and the science of man. 5 If Fanon seems to be operating on the level of contradiction, performing precisely what he critiques, he does so only flirtatiously, taking the key texts he uses as a means of reworking some crucial assumptions. Over the course this first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon makes possible a line of critique that introduces the notion of literal language: language in the flesh. If, in beginning as he begins , Fanon points to language and the problem of recognition, then over the course of the chapter, language is folded upon itself to shine light on those aspects of linguistic analysis that not only radicalize the understanding of language, but also of race and colonial subjection.

In what might appear the most absurd of citations, Fanon invokes the name of one of the twentieth century's most esteemed French poets, Paul Valéry. The quotation comes at the conclusion of an exposition of the chapter, including, amongst a number of issues raised, the question of address and the role of colonial literacy. Fanon writes,

Un homme qui possède le langage possède par contrecoup le monde exprimé et impliqué par ce langage. On voit où nous voulons en venir: il y a dans la possession du langage une extraordinaire puissance. Paul Valéry le savait, qui faisait du langage « le dieu dans la chair égaré ».(Fanon 14)

This particular moment in Fanon's text, more than an oblique reference to yet another bourgeois poet, underscores a key challenge in reading some of the complex shadings of the language at play in Black Skin, White Masks . To begin with, Fanon employs the term “contrecoup,” which is glossed in the English translation as “consequently.” 6 The term, in French, does not so much connote a consequence as it does a ricochet, or an indirect consequence. The citation points, then, not only to the possession of language as the possession of the world expressed and implied by this language (“le monde exprimé et impliqué par ce langage”), but also to this possession by virtue of a ricochet or rebound (“contrecoup”). It is this sort of rebound that can be seen at play in the lines that follow and in the method of citation more generally. In this passage, Fanon goes on to quote Paul Valéry, incorporating him into the argument with a sort of radical ricochet, making him speak alternately, separate of an initial intent. Not only is Valéry recontextualized, but he is performed contrary to intent: French poetry, in Fanon's argument, comes to work against itself.

We might notice, then, that in addition to citing Valéry, Fanon borrows from him the very backbone of the chapter. The line draws attention to language as the god gone astray in the flesh (“le dieu dans la chair égaré”), and introduces a curious figure of language: the divine and its relation to matter (“la chair”). Paradoxically the fleshiness of language is literalized in Fanon's essay, in a manner only obliquely related to Valéry's remarks. If Fanon is reading Valéry, then he is doing so rebounding the literary implications of his argument, taking the flesh of language astray, into the consideration of race, the body and speech. Where Valéry writes of the hallowed status of the divine language of poetry, Fanon rewrites, driving Valéry's language and world into its colonial complex. Valéry is, we might say, welcomed into the flesh of the essay, into the darkened folds of Fanon reading the colonial power; and in this way, written language comes to speak against itself, rebounding in a citational ricochet.

To return to the appearance of a performative contradiction, we might say that the quotation of Valéry offers Fanon an alternate performance. Rather than abandon colonial culture, or the language against which he writes, Fanon engages it, taking it on and reworking its assumptions. As he does so, he takes the figure of language, borrowed though it may be, in order to apply it within the world. He takes it, then, to transform language as it is known, re-entangling it with speech, the body and colonial politics.

In addition to numerous literary allusions scattered throughout Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon also draws references to stories, anecdotes and, in a particularly illuminating manner, to American films. The importance of the cinematic medium, for Fanon, has to do with its mode of making language visible: speaker and body come together visually in the represented speech act. In the first chapter, Fanon alludes to various films, all of which are initially produced in English for American audiences. 7 Fanon, however, takes the films up in rebound, discussing the films in their French incarnation, that is, after they have been dubbed into the French language to be shown in France and the colonies. Similar to his opening remarks about the recognition of the speaker through speech, Fanon's study of films takes language in its material form of enunciation as a means of engaging the relation of language and the body. In film, after all, speech matters, both as a critical aspect of the cinematic text, but also as a discursive production of the stereotype.

As Fanon proceeds, he argues that, in the dubbing of American films, the various "Negro"8 characters are offered voices exemplary of what he terms, “petit-nègre.”9 He states:

Je suis pourtant persuadé que la version originale ne comportait pas cette modalité d'expression. Et quand bien même elle aurait existé, je ne vois pas pourquoi en France démocratique, où soixante six millions de citoyens sont de couleur, l'on synchroniserait jusqu'aux imbecillités d'outre-Atlantique (Fanon 27).

The argument develops and underscores a crucial interrelation between what is heard, seemingly privileged in the first analysis, and what is seen, integrally tied to the problem of appearance. Fanon suggests that the continual insistence upon speaking “petit-nègre” imprisons him in an appearance for which he is not responsible:

Le faire parler petit-nègre, c'est l'attacher à son image, l'engluer, l'emprisonner, victime éternelle d'une essence, d'un apparaître dont il n'est pas le responsible (Fanon 27).

There is far more at stake in this passage than an effort to overcome or critique the stereotype. In fact, what Fanon offers is a critical method by which to consider how language, through cinema, is made visible. To speak is to offer oneself up for recognition, or in this case, to offer oneself up for a recognition based on predetermined categories with which to be understood. The particularity of the marked speech, comprehensible through the dialect dubbed into the French version, attaches the “Negro” to his image (“l'attacher à son image”) and makes of him the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible (“victime éternelle d'une essence, d'un apparaître dont il n'est pas le responsible”).

In making language visible, at once relating language to appearance, Fanon opens the terrain for a series of looking relations between the speaker and his speech. The problem of appearance thus returns us to another type of looking, overdetermined in the rest of this text: the possibility of being watched in language. As Fanon writes at the beginning of his essay,

Oui, il faut que je me surveille dans mon elocution élocution , car c'est un peu à travers elle qu'on me jugera…On dira de moi, avec beaucoup de mépris : il ne sait même pas parler le français (Fanon 16).

This particular passage is glossed in the English translation, which takes away the status of being watched in language, substituting instead: “I take great pains with my speech, because I shall be more or less judged by it” (Markmann 20). The use of the self-reflexive in the French (“je me surveille”) is ultimately critical for the visual relation to language set forth. Not only is language something spoken, it is something to be watched over in speaking. This rhetorical gesture to make language visible, subjecting it to being watched over, ultimately figures prominently in how Fanon stages the ethical relation between self and other, seeing and being seen.

Later Fanon repeats his concern for being watched in language, suggesting a conflation of various types of being seen:

Et naturellement, de même qu'un Juif qui dépense de l'argent sans compter est suspect, le Noir qui cite Montesquieu doit être surveillé. Qu'on nous comprenne : surveillé dans la mésure où avec lui commence quelque chose (Fanon 27).

Language thus emerges, in either of these two passages, as something to be seen and watched over and as the possibility of being recognized in the world. In the first instance, it is through speech that one is judged; and in the second, speech is grounds for an entire apparatus of cultural and racial associations. Like the character onscreen in a film, watched from afar and known in advance, the “Negro” in the world is understood through the language that speaks him. Language is thus watched, not only in the sense of being visualized figurally as flesh or as film, but in the sense of being watched over, monitored, for the purposes of self-censorship.

It is striking that numerous Anglo-American critics, many of whom draw attention to the visuality of Fanon's text, overlook the manner by which language is made visible in the first chapter. The use of filmic texts in Fanon's study is far from haphazard. What the films make visible is language not in the abstract, but in the material form: language to be seen, watched over and reread by the particularity of the dislocation from which Fanon writes. This particular manner of seeing language ultimately grants Fanon's project with its novel importance. In the cinematic relation of speech, screen and body, language folds together with the racial stereotype. What is brought into sight is an awareness of the interrelation of race, speech and the politics of being seen and heard.

An examination of Fanon's theory of language brings to light some crucial reformulations of race and colonial subjection. While Anglo-American criticism has resurrected Fanon, seeing within him a cultural model for the analysis of race, it has, to a certain extent, remembered Fanon selectively, leaving out the implications of the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks and its formulation of language. In this chapter, Fanon drives not towards an abstract theory of language, divorced of the world from which it springs; instead, he takes language within the world, in its integral relation to what can be thought and to the cultural and racial positioning of the speaker. With this in mind, the theory that emerges is by no means abstractly normative, but revolves around situating language in relation to its body in order to interrogate the status of dislocation. This emphasis on situating language, ethically and culturally, in order to argue for its dislocation , ultimately grants gives Fanon's theory a critical dynamic.

In concluding, then, we might consider some of the importance of this theory of language and its emphasis on language in the flesh. At a time when language was being abstracted, when sign was wrenched from signifier, and when language was being described as a system, Fanon brings language into the world as something ethically meaningfull y , with matter, with fleshy literalness. While I am not arguing that Fanon be canonized as a linguist, I do suggest that the looking relations set forth within language offer us a curious counterpart to an abstracted theory without attention to the speaker, the body or race. Fanon offers us a language that matters and that refigures the terms within which the ethical speech act takes place. Not simply the instrument of interlocution, language emerges as an overdetermined site of colonial politics.

If Fanon takes up language differently, then he also enacts it with an insistence on its critical potential. Rather than emptying out the relation of language and the world, Fanon draws them together, providing language with a literal richness not only for what it names, but for how. There is, then, an importance attributed to the site of speech: that is, both the question of from where one speaks and towards whom. What ultimately matters is how language takes place in the world. It is this taking place of language that makes possible a ricochet between here and there, between the citation of colonial culture (be it references to Sartre, Valéry or Leiris) and the local enunciation of a radically re-oriented future.

Michael Allan is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on the relationship of secularism and literacy, focusing on Islamist critiques of liberalism and the cultivation of secular reading practices (legal, literary and cinematic). He currently serves on the editorial board of Qui Parle .

Notes:

1 I refer here to a range of literary scholars working in the United States and Britain for whom Fanon draws together race, psychoanalysis and subjectivity; amongst a wide possible listing, I am thinking in particular of Diana Fuss, Isaac Julien, Kaja Silverman, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Mary Ann Doane, and Kobena Mercer.

2 See Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs , (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952), p8. English translations are drawn from Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Markmann (trans.), (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

3 In this oft-cited passage, Fanon writes, "J'avais créé au-dessous du schéma corporel un schéma historico-racial. Les éléments que j'avais utilisés ne m'avaient pas été fournis par <<des résidus de sensations et perceptions d'ordre surtout tactile, vestibulaire, cinesthésique et visuel>>, mais par l'autre, le Blanc, qui m'avait tissé de mille détails, anecdotes, récits" (90).The emphasis on a thousand details, anecdotes, stories (“mille détails, anecdotes, récits”), as opposed to any scientific truth, helps to situate the grounds of Fanon's analysis in culture produced by the other. His project, then, cast in a post-structuralist light, can be seen as an effort to read and analyze this discourse, and ultimately, by analyzing it to destroy it (“En l'analysant, nous visons à sa destruction”) (9).

4 I refer here to “un langage différent de celui de la collectivité qui la vu naître” (19).

5 We might recall that, in the study's first few pages, Fanon raises the crucial question of address, urging the reader to consider why the book is written and for whom the book is destined. In a line of self-questioning, Fanon asks, “Pourquoi écrire cet ouvrage? Personne ne m'en a prié. Surtout pas ceux à qui il s'adresse” (5). The book opens, then, with a de-universalization of the reading practice, suggesting the possibility of various readers having differing relations to the text. This motif is repeated later in the text with a discussion of various audience reactions and identifications in the cinema, depending upon whether the film is shown in Europe or the colonies. See Footnote 15, p124.

6Le Petit Robert offers the following definition: Contrecoup: 1 . ( 1560) de contre- et coup ; Vx Répercussion d'un coup, d'un choc. ricochet . 2. (1665) Mod. Événement qui se produit en conséquence indirecte d'un autre. conséquence , contrechoc , effet , réaction , suite .

7 The specific films cited by Fanon include Duel au soleil , Réquins d'acier and Sans Pitié . See Frantz Fanon. p27.

8 I quote here from the English translation of the text, which employs the term, “Negro,” as a translation of “nègre.” See Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Markmann (trans.).

9 In defining “petit-nègre,” Fanon offers the following situation: "Ce que nous affirmons, c'est que l'Européen a une idée definie du Noir, et il n'ya rien de plus exaspérant que de s'entendre dire: <<Depuis quand êtes-vous en France? Vous parlez bien le français.>>On pourrait me repondre que cela est dû au fait que beaucoup de Noirs s'expriment en petit-nègre. Mais ce serait trop facile. Vous êtes dans le train, vous demandez:

--Pardon, monsieur, voudriez-vous m'indiquer le wagon-restaurant, s'il vous plait.

--Oui, mon z'ami, toi y en a prendre couloir tot droit, un deux, trois, c'est là.

Non, parler petit-nègre, c'est enfermer le Noir, c'est perpétuer une situation conflictuelle où le Blanc infeste le Noir de corps étrangers extrêmement toxiques "(28).

Works Cited:

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture . New York: Routledge, 1994.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans Charles Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire masques blancs . Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952.