Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon & Richard Philcox

Author:Frantz Fanon & Richard Philcox [Fanon, Frantz & Philcox, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: General, History, United States, Social Science, Ethnopsychology, Psychology, Black Race, Black Race - Social Conditions, African American Studies, Black Race - Psychology, Anthropology, Social Conditions, Ethnic Studies, Discrimination & Race Relations, Black Studies (Global)
ISBN: 9780802143006
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1967-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

on earth that is most earth

My blackness is no stone, its deafness

hurled against the clamor of the day

My blackness is no drop of lifeless water

on the dead eye of the world

My blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral It thrusts into the red fl esh of the sun

It thrusts into the burning fl esh of the sky

It hollows through the dense dismay of its own

pillar

of

patience.8

Eyah! the tom-tom chatters out the cosmic message. Only the Negro has the capacity to convey it, to decipher its meaning, its import. Astride the world, my strong heels spurring into the fl anks of the world, I stare into the shoulders of the world as the celebrant stares at the midpoint between the eyes of the sacrifi cial victim.

But they abandon themselves, possessed, to the essence of all things, knowing nothing of externals but possessed by the movement of all things

uncaring to subdue but playing the play of the world truly the eldest sons of the world

open to all the breaths of the world

meeting-place of all the winds of the world

undrained bed of all the waters of the world

8. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris, Présence Africaine, 1956), pp. 77–78.

Fanon 01 text 94

4/7/08 14:16:47

T H E FAC T O F B L AC K N E S S 9 5

spark of the sacred fi re of the World

fl esh of the fl esh of the world, throbbing with the very movement of the world!9

Blood! Blood! . . . Birth! Ecstasy of becoming! Three-quarters engulfed in the confusions of the day, I feel myself redden with blood. The arteries of all the world, convulsed, torn away, uprooted, have turned toward me and fed me.

“Blood! Blood! All our blood stirred by the male heart of the sun.”10

Sacrifice was a middle point between the creation and myself—now I went back no longer to sources but to The Source.

Nevertheless, one had to distrust rhythm, earth-mother love, this mystic, carnal marriage of the group and the cosmos.

In La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire, a work rich in perceptions, De Pédrals implies that always in Africa, no matter what fi eld is studied, it will have a certain magico-social structure. He adds: All these are the elements that one fi nds again on a still greater scale in the domain of secret societies. To the extent, moreover, to which persons of either sex, subjected to circumcision during adolescence, are bound under penalty of death not to reveal to the uninitiated what they have experienced, and to the extent to which initiation into a secret society always excites to acts of sacred love, there is good ground to conclude by viewing both male and female circumcision and the rites that they embellish as constitutive of minor secret societies.11

I walk on white nails. Sheets of water threaten my soul on fi re. Face to face with these rites, I am doubly alert. Black magic!

Orgies, witches’ sabbaths, heathen ceremonies, amulets. Coitus is an occasion to call on the gods of the clan.

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