Page 183 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

144 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

always a servant
always obsequious and smiling
me never steal, me never lie
eternally ‘sho’ good eatin’. . . .
The Negro is universalizing himself, but at the Lycée Saint-
Louis, in Paris, one was thrown out: He had had the impudence
to read Engels.
There is a drama there, and the black intellectuals are running
the risk of being trapped by it.
What? I have barely opened eyes that had been blindfolded,
and someone already wants to drown me in the universal? What
about the others? Those who “have no voice,” those who “have
no spokesman.” . . . I need to lose myself in my negritude, to see
the fi res, the segregations, the repressions, the rapes, the discrimi-
nations, the boycotts. We need to put our fi ngers on every sore
that mottles the black uniform.
One can already imagine Alioune Diop wondering what place
the black genius will have in the universal chorus. It is my belief
that a true culture cannot come to life under present conditions.
It will be time enough to talk of the black genius when the man
has regained his rightful place.
Once again I come back to Césaire; I wish that many black
intellectuals would turn to him for their inspiration. I must repeat
to myself too: “And more than anything, my body, as well as
my soul, do not allow yourself to cross your arms like a sterile
spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of sorrows is not a
stage, for a man who cries out is not a dancing bear. . . .”
Continuing to take stock of reality, endeavoring to ascertain the
instant of symbolic crystallization, I very naturally found myself
on the threshold of Jungian psychology. European civilization
is characterized by the presence, at the heart of what Jung calls
the collective unconscious, of an archetype: an expression of
the bad instincts, of the darkness inherent in every ego, of the
uncivilized savage, the Negro who slumbers in every white man.
And Jung claims to have found in uncivilized peoples the same
psychic structure that his diagram portrays. Personally, I think

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