Page 87 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

48 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

Andrée spiritually in Mme. Coulanges and physically in Clarisse. It is insane.
But that is how it is: I love Clarisse. I love Mme. Coulanges, even though I
never really think of either of them. All they are for me is an excuse that
makes it possible for me to delude myself. I study Andrée in them and I
begin to know her by heart. . . . I don’t know. I know nothing. I have no wish
to try to know anything; or, rather, I know nothing any more except one
thing: that the Negro is a man like the rest, the equal of the others, and that
his heart, which only the ignorant consider simple, can be as complicated
as the heart of the most complicated of Europeans. 5
For the simplicity of the Negro is a myth created by superfi cial
observers. “I love Clarisse, I love Mme. Coulanges, and it is
Andrée Marielle whom I really love. Only she, no one else.” 6
Who is Andrée Marielle? You know who she is, the daughter of
the poet, Louis Marielle. But now you see that this Negro, “who
has raised himself through his own intelligence and his assiduous
7
labors to the level of the thought and the culture of Europe,” is
incapable of escaping his race.
Andrée Marielle is white; no solution seems possible. Yet,
association with Payot, Gide, Moréas, and Voltaire seemed to
have wiped out all that. In all good faith, Jean Veneuse “believed
in that culture and set himself to love this new world he had
discovered and conquered for his own use. What a blunder he
had made! Arriving at maturity and going off to serve his adopted
country in the land of his ancestors was enough to make him
wonder whether he was not being betrayed by everything about
him, for the white race would not accept him as one of its own
and the black virtually repudiated him.” 8
Jean Veneuse, feeling that existence is impossible for him
without love, proceeds to dream it into being. He proceeds to
dream it alive and to produce verses:
When a man loves he must not speak;
Best that he hide it from himself.

5. Ibid., p. 83.
6. Ibid., p. 83.
7. Ibid., p. 36.
8. Ibid., p. 36.

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