Page 8 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

FOREWORD TO THE 2008 EDITION vii

fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination
of the Western civilization in particular.
This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut
reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and
equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience,
painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and refl ection.
As such, it is a guarded anger, directed at a specifi c, long term
desire. The desire itself is grounded in self-consciousness: when it
encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes
the experience of desire—the fi rst milestone on the road that
leads to dignity. Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular
defi nition of dignity. Dignity is not located in seeking equality
with the white man and his civilization: it is not about assuming
the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat
at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities,
systems and contradictions of one’s own ways of being, doing
and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. Black Skin,
White Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his
dignity through an interrogation of his own Self—a journey that
will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure
western civilization.

1. I was born in the Antilles
Frantz Omar Fanon, born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France,
in the French colony of Martinique, was a complex fi gure, with
multiple selves. He was, as he tells us, from Antilles but he ended
his life thinking of himself as an Algerian. His parents belonged
to the middle class community of the island: father a descendant
of slaves, mother of mixed French parenthood. In Fort-de-France,
he studied at Lycée Schoelcher, where one of his teachers was
poet and writer Aimé Césaire. Césaire’s passionate denouncement
of colonial racism had a major infl uence on the impressionable
Fanon. As a young dissident, he agitated against the Vichy regime
in the Antilles and traveled to Dominica to support the French
resistance in the Caribbean. Soon afterwards, he found himself in
France where he joined the resistance against the occupying forces

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