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130 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

what one has once grasped is soon met again. What is important
in phenomenology is less the study of a large number of instances
than the intuitive and deep understanding of a few individual
30
cases.” The question that arises is this: Can the white man
behave healthily toward the black man and can the black man
behave healthily toward the white man?
A pseudo-question, some will say. But when we assert that
European culture has an imago of the Negro which is responsible
for all the confl icts that may arise, we do not go beyond reality.
In the chapter on language we saw that on the screen the Negro
faithfully reproduces that imago. Even serious writers have
made themselves its spokesmen. So it was that Michel Cournot
could write:

The black man’s sword is a sword. When he has thrust it into your wife,
she has really felt something. It is a revelation. In the chasm that it has
left, your little toy is lost. Pump away until the room is awash with your
sweat, you might as well just be singing. This is good-by. . . . Four Negroes
with their penises exposed would fi ll a cathedral. They would be unable
to leave the building until their erections had subsided; and in such close
quarters that would not be a simple matter.
To be comfortable without problems, they always have the open air. But
then they are faced with a constant insult: the palm tree, the breadfruit tree,
and so many other proud growths that would not slacken for an empire,
erect as they are for all eternity, and piercing heights that are not easily
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reached at any price.
When one reads this passage a dozen times and lets oneself
go—that is, when one abandons oneself to the movement of its
images—one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis;
the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis. It is
easy to imagine what such descriptions can stimulate in a young
girl in Lyon. Horror? Lust? Not indifference, in any case. Now,
what is the truth? The average length of the penis among the

30. Karl Jaspers, Psychopathologie générde, French translation by Kastler and
Mendousse, p. 49.
31. Martinique (Pans, Collection Metamorphoses, Gallimard, 1948), pp. 13–14.

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