Page 85 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

46 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

fl ourishes in the heart of a folklore, it is because in one way or
another it expresses an aspect of “the spirit of the group.”
In analyzing Je suis Martiniquaise and Nini, we have seen
how the Negress behaves with the white man. Through a novel
by René Maran—which seems to be autobiographical—let us
try to understand what happens when the man is black and the
woman white.
The problem is admirably laid out, for the character of Jean
Veneuse will make it possible for us to go much more deeply into
the attitude of the black man. What are the terms of this problem?
Jean Veneuse is a Negro. Born in the Antilles, he has lived in
Bordeaux for years; so he is a European. But he is black; so he is a
Negro. There is the confl ict. He does not understand his own race,
and the whites do not understand him. And, he observes, “The
Europeans in general and the French in particular, not satisfi ed
with simply ignoring the Negro of the colonies, repudiate the one
whom they have shaped into their own image.” 1
The personality of the author does not emerge quite so easily
as one might wish. An orphan sent to a provincial boarding-
school, he is compelled to spend his vacations there. His friends
and acquaintances scatter all over France on the slightest pretext,
whereas the little Negro is forced into the habit of solitude, so
that his best friends are his books. At the extreme, I should say
there is a certain accusatory character, a certain resentment, an
ill-disciplined aggression, in the long list—too long—of “traveling
companions” that the author offers us: at the extreme, I say, but
it is exactly to the extreme that we have to go.
Unable to be assimilated, unable to pass unnoticed, he consoles
himself by associating with the dead, or at least the absent. And
his associations, unlike his life, ignore the barriers of centuries
and oceans. He talks with Marcus Aurelius, Joinville, Pascal,
Pérez Galdós, Rabindranath Tagore. If we were compelled to
hang a label on Jean Veneuse, we should have to call him an
introvert; others might call him a sentimentalist, but a sentimen-
talist who is always careful to contrive a way of winning out on

1. Un homme pared aux autres (Paris, Editions Arc-en-Ciel, 1947), p. 11.

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