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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 157

to Joy, that allows itself to be conveyed by the worm-ridden
bawling of Césaire.
The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the problem of
Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes exploited,
enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that is only
accidentally white. You wonder, M. Salomon, what you would
do “if you had 800,000 Negroes in France”; because for you
there is a problem, the problem of the increase of Negroes, the
problem of the Black Peril. The Martinican is a Frenchman, he
wants to remain part of the French Union, he asks only one thing,
he wants the idiots and the exploiters to give him the chance to
live like a human being. I can imagine myself lost, submerged in a
white fl ood composed of men like Sartre or Aragon, I should like
nothing better. You say, M. Salomon, that there is nothing to be
gained by caution, and I share your view. But I do not feel that I
should be abandoning my personality by marrying a European,
whoever she might be; I can tell you that I am making no “fool’s
bargains.” If my children are suspected, if the crescents of their
fi ngernails are inspected, it will be simply because society will not
have changed, because, as you so well put it, society will have
kept its mythology intact. For my part, I refuse to consider the
problem from the standpoint of either-or. . . .
What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality?
I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French
civilization, the French people. We refuse to be considered
“outsiders,” we have full part in the French drama. When men
who were not basically bad, only deluded, invaded France in
order to subjugate her, my position as a Frenchman made it plain
to me that my place was not outside but in the very heart of the
problem. I am personally interested in the future of France, in
French values, in the French nation. What have I to do with a
black empire?
Georges Mounin, Dermenghem, Howlett, Salomon have all
tried to fi nd answers to the question of the origin of the myth of
the Negro. All of them have convinced us of one thing. It is that
an authentic grasp of the reality of the Negro could be achieved
only to the detriment of the cultural crystallization.

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