Brown Skin, White Masks

Long before Edward Said persuasively alerted us to the complexities and enduring legacies of Orientalist strands and hierarchies within the panoply of colonialism, Black Skins, White Masks (1952) by Frantz Fanon had laid the foundations of inquiry into the psychosomatic impact of this uneven relationship. More like Gandhi, Mandela and several others sharing a broad- based ‘nationalist’ ethos aimed at political sovereignty for their respective communities, Fanon had minutely analysed a dire self-belittling by the colonized elite or intermediaries whose own identity crisis vacillated between total kowtowing and partial appeasement of the colonizers. The culture, complexion and class-based complexes often spawned their own bleak sense of self-elevation, which would invariably emanate from the stolid denigrations of their respective communities. Currently known as racism-in-reverse, such a tendency to link and identify with the powerful hegemons concurrent with a sneering patronization or sheer dismissal of their own indigenous counterparts is surely symptomatic of a wider malaise, which Fanon as a trained psychologist from Martinique, noticed both in France’s ‘metropolis’ as well as in its ‘peripheries’. Enthused by the liberal and leftist critique of colonialism and then confronted with its devastating effect on the colonized, irrespective of their class background, Fanon stood both for self-determination as well as for a total transformative empowerment of the former. Eventually, for him, a rebellious Algeria offered both a test case and a liberationist role model. And while he died at the early age of 38, Fanon willed to be buried near the soil of a future independent state that was already bleeding to its worst due to France’s intransigence. Algeria in the early 1960s was the Vietnam of the Maghreb, more like what has been visited upon Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Pakistan and several other Muslim polities in the decade since 9/11.