An Unfair Diagnosis: Revisiting Mayotte Capécia’s Work, Despite Frantz Fanon Few people, other than close-readers of Frantz Fanon, know the name Mayotte Capécia. Just after she won an impressive award for her first novel, Fanon sentenced her to social and literary ostracization with a harsh and unjust review of her work; resultantly, her work was largely erased from libraries and bookstores. Given contemporary interest in the diasporic experience (there is continuously more work being published contemporarily about Aime Césaire and Frantz Fanon), it is remarkable that Capécia –– a mixed race Martinican woman –– is ignored. Not only this, but Capécia’s female contemporaries have faced similar obstacles. Suzanne Césaire, a pioneer in the Black surrealism we are seeing a revival in today[1], is much less well-known than her husband, Aimé. Capécia is a symbol of a larger problem festering in Afro-Caribbean literature of the mid-twentieth century: Highly educated, Black men were able to publish their experiences, while female writers were not –– at least not in any serious, long-lasting capacity. Other mid-twentieth century Afro-Caribbean women writers have also been ignored and forgotten, which I will delve into more later in this essay. I will identify how Fanon successfully pushed Capécia out of the Afro-Caribbean diasporic literary canon by first, performing a close-reading of Fanon’s scathing review of Capécia; second, connecting Capécia’s experience to other female contemporaries of Fanon; and third, exploring how her female experience would have differed from Fanon’s. Throughout this process, I will bring in the work of other literary critics –– some of whom have fiercely defended Fanon, and some who have berated him, for his review of Capécia. The conversation is broad, and I’ve included all nuanced sides. I will position my thoughts with the scholarship Jennifer M. Wilks, Tracey Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gwen Bergner[2], and Jeremy Metz[3]. Wilks’ chapter on Fanon and Capécia in her book Race, Gender & Comparative Black Modernism[4] illuminates the explosive nature of Fanon’s critique, while Sharpley-Whiting’s defense of Fanon in Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms[5] brutally ignores Fanon’s damaging critique, and even worse, flattens the work of other female critics who had defended Capécia, such as Bergner. While all aforementioned scholars successfully make their argument for or against Fanon’s critique, I will do something unique: I will adopt Fanon’s own form of analysis against his own critique. Using Fanon’s psychoanalytic framework to explore why he was so compelled to critique Capécia in the first place, I will illuminate how this was so damning to her career as a woman. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon applies his psychological understanding of the inferiority complex to male writers and their protagonists, such as René Maran and his character Jean
Veneuse[6]. Meanwhile, he omits the Black female inferiority complex from his analysis. I suggest Fanon deploys Black Martinican author, Mayotte Capécia, as a tool to advance the narrative of Black men; she exists to play a part in the Antillean male inferiority complex –– Fanon’s inferiority complex. Meanwhile, her own psychological state is left untouched by Fanon’s analysis. Not only does Fanon fail to include female Martinican writer Mayotte Capécia in a parallel analysis with Maran, but he attacks Capécia for the substance of her writing. Fanon suggests that Capécia is nothing but a signifier of the larger problem of Black female desire, not a case study of a colonized subject who is “made to feel inferior.” Moreover, in the process of omitting and committing an assault on Capécia and her book, Fanon biographer David Macey argues that “were it not for Fanon’s very harsh criticisms of [Capécia’s] work, it is paradoxically, unlikely that the microfiche copies in the Bibliothèque National de France would find many contemporary readers.”[7] Capécia is only known as an accessory to Fanon, damned by his sexism and misogyny present in Black Skin, White Masks. In this essay, I will give Capécia the attention Fanon denied her as I retroactively read Capécia through a different lens than Fanon did. I will use a “Fanonian mode of analysis” to understand Capécia and her first novel. Instead of arguing that Capécia is part of the problem that leads to the Antillean male’s inferiority complex, I suggest that Capécia is a prime example of someone who, herself, has embodied the inferiority complex –– the very psychological state Fanon gives such ample amounts of attention to in Black Skin, White Masks. In Capécia’s two short novels, I Am a Martinican Woman[8] and The White Negress[9], she tells two similar stories of light-skinned, Black Martinican women who have children with white men.[10] The women, both entrepreneurs and economically independent, but both with a lack of social capital, live challenging lives in which they feel caught between their Blackness and the white world. Ultimately, the women are left to feel ostracized by both worlds, living lonely lives. Fanon gives a short, but biting review, of Capécia’s first novel in Black Skin, White Masks: One day, a woman by the name of Mayotte Capécia, obeying a motivation whose reasons are difficult to grasp, sat down and wrote 202 pages on her life in which the most ridiculous ideas proliferated at random…For us, there is no doubt whatsoever that I Am a Martinican Woman is a third-rate book, advocating unhealthy behavior.[11]
He initiates his critique by questioning her sensibilities (“obeying a motivation whose reasons are difficult to grasp”) and moves on to state that the “202 pages on her life” proliferate “the most ridiculous ideas” at “random.” He unjustly assumes the 202 pages she wrote were autobiographical,[12] and goes on to call her ideas ridiculous and random. Fanon proceeds to attack, identifying her book as “third-rate,” an ironic attack considering when Fanon was writing Black Skin, White Masks, Capécia had already become “the fourth Antillean and the first black woman to be awarded the renowned Grand Prix Littéraire des
Antilles”[13] for I am a Martinican Woman in 1949.[14] Her book was clearly widely renowned as award-worthy, further bringing to question why Fanon gave her work such as contemptuous review. His strong wording, such as “ridiculous,” also suggests Fanon is unable to view Capécia’s texts in an unemotional way. This hostile language is not used when Fanon speaks of others (men) throughout Black Skin, White Masks. W hen Capécia’s character chooses a white man as her partner, she rejects Black Martinican men: Fanon and all Black Martinican men are snubbed. Fanon is upset by her books; he takes them personally, suggesting that the threat Capécia poses to his own masculinity is part of what motivates him to conclude what he does about her work. In his biography of Fanon, David Macey notes that people were turned off by Black Skin, White Masks at first, and the text originally went “virtually unnoticed.”[15] The book was overlooked, Macey says, and he offers a possible explanation for why this was: “The real reason for its neglect was quite simply that it was so difficult to read: most reviewers spoke of the difficulty and indigestibility of Fanon’s psychoanalytic and philosophical references.”[16] This “neglect” must have been tough for Fanon, who had injected so much personal, autobiographical content into his book. At first when Black Skin, White Masks was published, his work was not widely celebrated the way Capécia’s was. The fact that she was a woman and that she was celebrated, in conjunction with the subject matter of her book, may have contributed to Fanon’s biting review of Capécia’s work. This is a logical and probable explanation as to why his critique appears emotionally driven, speaking to his own psychological conflict. Fanon continues: He asserts Capécia’s books advocate “unhealthy behavior.” It seems odd that Fanon, who spent his life studying psychology, would see unhealthy behavior as unreasonable or ridiculous as he suggests in his critique. He, in fact, fully dedicates many chapters[17] within his books to psychoanalysis. Furthermore, he chooses not to diagnose any male writer with the same level of conviction. In particular, he glosses over René Maran’s literary display of “unhealthy behavior” in Un Homme pareil aux autres.[18] In this novel, a Black man named Jean Veneuse claims he loves a white woman, but is actually using her as a means to enter the white world –– to be more widely accepted as human by the white world. [19] This plot maintains an uncanny resemblance to Capécia’s in I am a Martinican Woman. Another similarity: Maran achieved parallel literary success to Capécia when he won the Prix Goncourt[20] in 1921 for his novel, Batouala. While both Capécia and Maran were writing about the experience of interracial relationships, and while both achieved high levels of literary celebration, only Capécia received denunciation in Fanon’s text. Only the female writer promotes unhealthy behavior, while the male writer does not.
Despite Capécia and Maran both portraying characters with similar psychological tendencies, it is their gender that determines which diagnosis Fanon prescribes. For instance, while Fanon diagnoses Maran’s character with a “lack of self-esteem,”[21] and calls Maran himself “nothing more or less than a black abandonment neurotic,”[22] Fanon believes that Capécia “is striving for lactification,” that she is striving to “whiten” the race.[23] Maran is labelled with a petty psychological disorder as Capécia is harshly condemned. In Race, Gender & Comparative Black Modernism Jennifer M. Wilks explains how Fanon’s denial is a piece of a socio-historical phenomenon, one of repeatedly negating Black female agency. Fanon denies not only the agency of the woman of color, who, in his reading, can only be victimized by the white man, but also that of the white woman, who, in turn, can only love the black man. The resulting framework reduces all women-authored novels about women of color in relationships with white men to narratives of lactification and elevates all the male-authored texts about inverse relationships to narratives of true love.”[24]
Wilks calls Fanon’s critique of Capécia “a defining moment, a line of demarcation between imitation and innovation, self-hatred and self-acceptance.”[25] Fanon’s critique results in a “framework” which “reduces all women-authored novels” into one category, a damned one. Fanon, a Black, male, Martinican –– but French educated –– intellectual had the power to grant Capécia and her book praise or disavowal, and he chooses the latter, thereby denying all Black women collective agency in providing accounts of their experiences and perspectives. Capécia appropriates what should rightfully belong to Black men (i.e. Fanon) by creating a mulatto, Black-passing female protagonist who actively chooses a white man to be her sexual partner. Choosing to bring more white blood into her family lineage violates the role that Fanon sees as suitable for her, and for all Black Martinican women. Her mulatto status is significant in both the characters’ choices, but also in Fanon’s critique. Paulette Nardal calls the “question of mulattoes” on Martinique “a most unfortunate one.”[26] While “the white people feel much less prejudice against them,” which may lead to higher levels of economic gain, mulattoes “are primarily interested in becoming white, and in being assimilated.” According to Nardal, “the pure Negroes are very proud, and resentful of this.”[27] The very fact that Capécia’s character discovers her mulatto identity as a child (she has a white grandmother), triggers her psychological goal of assimilating with whiteness, and for that, she is shunned by the black community. Fanon is part of that ostracization as a “pure” Black Martinican. He resents her, not just because she is a woman, but because she is mulatto. He therefore remains blind to the valuable psychological information embedded in Capécia’s identity.
Fanon glosses over a larger problem indicated by Capécia’s protagonists’ desires: A gender-specific collective inferiority complex, experienced by colonized Antillean women. If we consider Capécia’s two novels semi-autobiographical, as Fanon did, we can extend the inferiority complex presented within her novels to her own psyche. Surprisingly, despite Fanon’s assumption that her work is semi-autobiographical, he does not analyze her psychological state; the possibility that she may be affected by an inferiority complex is not mentioned. He reserves this diagnostic attentiveness only for those he deems worthy of it, who are all male. Fanon quotes white male theorist Jean-Paul Sartre throughout Black Skin, White Masks, a choice that belongs to a larger textual, ideological pattern wherein Fanon privileges not only Black men, but also white men, over Black women. Fanon actually praises Sartre’s writings, despite the recognition that Sartre’s writing was not without problems. After quoting Sartre at length, Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks, “We had appealed to a friend of the colored peoples, and this friend had found nothing better to do than demonstrate the relativity of their action.”[28] This friend is Sartre. Fanon continues, plainly this time: “Jean-Paul Sartre has destroyed black impulsiveness. He should have opposed the unforeseeable to historical destiny.”[29] Fanon recognizes Sartre’s mistakes; but he does not denounce, berate, or condemn him. Fanon pardons Sartre, whereas Capécia’s mistakes are unforgivable. No female writers are quoted at length throughout Black Skin, White Masks, although there were prominent Black female Martinicans writing during Fanon’s contemporary moment; his omissions speak as loudly as his inclusions. Aimé Césaire’s wife, Suzanne Césaire, was one of Fanon’s contemporaries. She published seven essays in French in the span of four years.[30] Sisters Paulette (previously mentioned) and Jane Nardal, two Martinican writers and political commentators, have been considered the Negritude “movement midwives, rather than architects.”[31] Aimé Césaire, among other writers in the Negritude movement, credited the Nardals as being the “initiators” of Negritude in the 1930s; they brought the movement to life.[32] And yet, when Fanon points to Negritude throughout Black Skin, White Masks, Césaire (Aimé, not Suzanne) and Léopold Senghor are the only names mentioned, the only ones quoted. None of these Black, Antillean female writers who were making headway in the Negritude and Black Power movements were acknowledged in Fanon’s texts, and yet, Mayotte Capécia –– the only female writer even quoted at all –– is criticized at length. In I Am a Martinican Woman, the text Fanon picks at the most, Capécia’s main character Mayotte notices the dichotomy within her skin at a young age, and as she grows into a woman. In the first chapter, Mayotte hears from Loulouze –– an older, darker girl she admires –– that “Life is hard for a woman, you’ll see, Mayotte, above all for a colored woman.”[33] This sentiment is reiterated to Mayotte by her
mother in chapter four: “You must take advantage of your first communion…Life is hard for a woman.”[34] Mayotte is attracted to social capital that is born from being perceived as white. From a young age, she is advised by two older Black women she looks up to, and this sets in stone for her two things: That her life will be hard as a woman, and it will be even harder as a colored woman. She knows that the whiter her blood is, the closer she lies to being perceived as French, an impression that would grant her more opportunities and rights societally.[35] I have no intention to argue with Fanon on his point that Capécia’s character is “striving for lactification,” because, by in large the characters decisions are based on wishing she were whiter; it is inarguable that the character makes decisions about who she sleeps with based on whiteness. However, the desire to be whiter is exactly what Black Skin, White Masks is exploring. Nowhere does Fanon include a psychoanalysis of Capécia’s characters the way he does for Maran’s Jean Veneuse, which Fanon justifies as being about inferiorization. Mayotte, Capécia’s character, chooses to wear the “white mask,” and by extension has a son who is whiter than she was. This is glaringly a result of the character’s deeply internalized belief that she (and particularly her skin color) is subordinate, which Fanon fails to apply to Capécia or her character. I argue that Capécia’s gender actually only increases the likelihood of this inferiority complex becoming a pervasive factor in how she chooses to live her life. In the overlooked “West Indians and Africans,”[36] written shortly after Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon breaks down the different stages of West Indian identity formation, both in relation to Europe and Africa. He insists that before Martinique gained independence from France, Martinicans felt the need to distinguish themselves from Africans; they felt the need to assert their “quasi-metropolitan”ism, as Fanon calls it.[37] Applying this “quasi-metropolitan” self-identity to Capécia is useful in understanding her desire for “lactification.” Fanon writes, “Before 1939, there was not on one side the Negro and on the other side the white man, but a scale of colors the intervals of which could readily be passed over. One needed only to have children by someone less black than oneself.”[38] However, after independence is gained in 1945, this desire to “have children by someone less black than oneself” is null, according to Fanon. He identifies a shift in West Indian identity in 1945 as a result of Césaire’s rise to popularity as well as the end of the war: As Negritude forms on the island, there is pride in being a Black. However, Fanon does not consider the unique experiences a Black woman in Martinique would have both during the war and post-independence. I am a Martinican Woman was published in 1948, however, dates given to us by Capécia indicate the novella is a period piece.[39] Macey also emphasizes this in his biography of Fanon, reminding us that “Capécia’s novels have to be read in context. It is important to recall that they are about wartime
Martinique.”[40] Wartime Martinique would present unique challenges for a woman, and particularly a mulatto woman. While men were away at war, becoming economically independent would be a condition Martinican women would have dealt with during the war. Capécia’s protagonist fits into Fanon’s framework of pre-independence quasi-metropolitanism, but also post-war, Mayotte would still be dealing with the negative social repercussions of having once made the decision to have a lighter-skinned child. The role of childcare is not placed on men, and Capécia’s character must therefore make a long-term decision for herself and her child; the distinction between 1939 and 1945 is not as relevant for her, as someone raising a child for 18 years. Fanon, once again, has contradicted himself by refusing to integrate gender into his analysis of the Martinican experience. Fierce defender of Fanon’s ignorant critique, Tracey Sharpley-Whiting, asserts, “For this woman of color in a patriarchal, anti-black culture, who is presently the subject of our feminist inquiry, the white male stands as the ultimate purveyor of value.” [41] She continues later in the chapter: “Because Capécia cannot be a white woman, she can at least have the love of a white man, which she believes will liberate her from the black female body, endow her with value, and thus ultimately allow her to exist as a human being.”[42] Sharpley-Whiting’s claim that “the white male stands as the ultimate purveyor of value,” and that Mayotte only wants to “exist as a human being,” is at the core of Fanon’s inferiority complex theory. Yet, both she and Fanon substitute moral judgement for compassionate analysis; instead of treating Capécia as a human with a complex, conflicted psyche, Sharpley-Whiting and Fanon deem her to be one-dimensional and calculating with an anti-Black agenda. The belief that being whiter will lead to more opportunity, to more human interactions, is what guides Capécia’s characters to choose to have sexual relations with white men. Mayotte’s humanity, which as a Black woman has been questioned, is actualized by a relationship with a white man. Rather than turning to intersectional feminist (or Womanist)[43] narratives, it is remarkable when Sharpley-Whiting defends Fanon’s harsh blows to Capécia’s work and character. She begins by crushing the arguments of brave writers who have opted to defend Capécia in the era of Fanon as God. Her first critique is of Gwen Bergner’s “The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.[44] Sharpley-Whiting then goes on to critique Mary Anne Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. And lastly, she quotes at length Susan Andrade’s “The Nigger of the Narcissist: History, Sexuality, and Intertextuality in Maryse Conde’s Heremakhonon,” calling it an “equally aggressive
critique of Fanon.”[45] Sharpley-Whiting tears all of these arguments apart, opting in favor of Fanon’s scathing review of Capécia. She writes, “These feminist critics deny Capécia’s agency or at least
circumscribe her autonomy and agency more than Fanon ever could.”[46] She is particularly referring to feminist writers’ tendency to insist that Capécia’s characters rely on men for economic independence. Indeed, the reading that Capécia’s characters need men for economic independence is not a well-understood close reading of Capécia’s characters. Sharpley-Whiting believes that feminist critics’ insistence of this, when it is in fact not true, strips Capécia’s characters of agency. Capécia’s protagonist in I am a Martinican Woman is actually economically independent; she owns her own business as a laundress and she is entirely able to support herself, often times refusing to take money from her lover. However, Sharpley-Whiting’s claim that Bergner, Doane, and Andrade deny Capécia agency, is like confusing a drizzle with a hurricane. These writers simply fail to close-read Capécia’s text (a travesty to her literature, but hardly a disservice to the author). Mayotte does not intend to gain economic wealth through her involvement with a white man; she strives to gain social capital that arises from whiteness. These feminist critics misinterpret Mayotte as a character, and what Capécia is trying to express, but it is not worth spending as much time as Sharpley-Whiting does on this. Instead, it would have served her better to spend more time with Fanon’s review. In particular, Sharpley-Whiting distracts from the larger argument being made by Bergner: that sexual and gender difference is at the core of why Capécia’s characters face harsher levels of inferiorization and ostracization. Bergner writes: Fanon overlooks the ways in which colonial society perpetuates racial equality through structures of sexual difference. He sees women’s economic and sexual choices as emanating from some psychic dimension of the erotic that is disconnected from material reality. Ironically, such a decontextualized analysis of black femininity re-creates the structure of the colonialist discourse Fanon successfully deconstructs in much of Black Skin, White Masks.[47]
Sharpley-Whiting focuses so intently on Bergner’s brief mention of “economic” differences that she fails to acknowledge the cycle Fanon perpetuates when he critiques Capécia. Bergner, more profoundly, argues that Fanon does not only overlook the ways in which “colonial society perpetuates racial inequality through structures of sexual difference,” he actually contributes to the structural inequality with his commentary of Capécia’s work. Further, he denies Capécia the noteworthiness he grants to other Black (male) Antillean writers. To that end, it is less about what Capécia does in her books and more about what Fanon does and does not do in Black Skin, White Masks. By means of failing to give a fair diagnosis to Capécia as he prescribes to Maran, for example, Fanon actually deconstructs his own argument, as Bergner suggests. Sharpley-Whiting’s criticism that feminist writers strip Capécia of agency is not only overly scrupulous, but it is extraneous; whether or not Capécia’s characters have agency matters less than the exploitative circumstances under which they make decisions. Fanon spends pages exploring how
“colonial society perpetuates racial inequality”[48] in men, but for some reason, not women. His critique of Capécia is a repudiation of his own “clinical study”[49] –– the entirety of Black Skin, White Masks. Still, Sharpley-Whiting maintains the double standard Fanon puts in place. She writes, “While Fanon may have been ‘relentless’ in his critique of Capécia’s desire to marry a white man, Capécia is equally relentless in her blackphobia, her self-hatred.”[50] She maintains that Capécia believes Mayotte’s love for a white man will “liberate her from the black female body, endow her with value, and thus ultimately allow her to exist as a human being.”[51] This craving to exist as human is exactly what Fanon cites as being wrapped up in the collective Martinican inferiority complex throughout Black Skin, White Masks, yet it is paradoxically what Fanon, and later Sharpley-Whiting, criticize so scathingly. Fanon insists that he starts “suffering from not being a white man insofar as the white man discriminates against [him]; turns [him] into a colonized subject; robs [him] of any value or originality; tells [him] [he] is a parasite in the world,” he is faced with the decision to “whiten or parish.”[52] Again, he is made to feel inferior. In this same situation, the colonized situation, why should it be that Capécia does not face the same crossroads? Why should it be that Capécia is not forced to “whiten or parish”? While Fanon may come to the conclusion that he can “shout [his] blackness,” Capécia is not granted that same ability as a woman.[53] While she may have economic capital, her social capital is still at stake, her intellectual status clearly questioned. Perhaps because Sharpley-Whiting is so deeply submerged in Fanon and his followers’ blind myopia, she contradicts her own feminist leanings when she defends Fanon. In a prophecy-like fashion, over a decade before Sharpley-Whiting even published her defense of Fanon, Michele Wallace wrote that “Post-modernists, new historicists, deconstructionists, Marxists, Afro-Americanists, feminists, and even some black female academics, for the most part, fail to challenge the exclusionary parlor games of knowledge production.”[54] It is almost as if Wallace is directly referring Sharpley-Whiting, a “black female academic” who “fail[s] to challenge the exclusionary parlor games of knowledge production.” Precisely because Fanon is so widely critically acclaimed contemporarily, scholars such as Sharpley-Whiting have lost their will to critique him and to question the canon he is part of. To better understand the contradictions within Sharpley-Whiting’s defense, we can turn to Fanon himself. He writes in “The Psychopathology of the Black Man,” “At the first white gaze, [the Black man] feels the weight of his melanin.”[55] He may be referring only to the Black man, but any darkness in Mayotte’s skin prevents her from joining the white world –– socially, culturally, and psychologically. She learns this when she is denied a passport to travel to Guadeloupe. She protests: “I don’t understand you, lieutenant, sir. I know that, as of yesterday, you issued some [passports]. I am French like anybody else.”[1] The
next page, the lieutenant responds, “You are forgetting that you are a colored woman and that an officer must follow his career. I am here only to carry out orders…”[1] Despite having a child who passes as fully white, and despite her relationship with a white man, the shadow of Mayotte’s skin follows her and disrupts her from living a life as a “French” woman. Even after all efforts to abject all associations with this melanin, Mayotte feels its weight. We are back at the Antillean inferiority complex. It is hard to deny that Capécia is suffering from a similar neurosis as Fanon says Maran is. She lacks self-esteem, wishes to abandon her color, and struggles to feel adequate in the face of the “white male” who “stands as the ultimate purveyor of value.”[56] Once Mayotte returns to her hometown, however, it becomes apparent everyone around her stands as a “purveyor of value” as she is devalued for having a white child. She is recognized by a young boy while walking on the beach: A small black boy cried out: “It’s miss Mayotte!” I did not recognize him. He must have been a baby when I left Carbet. He had grown like the young palm trees that were now stretched under the sun. “What’s your name?” I asked him. “Maurice.” “And how come you know my name? “I’ve heard about you. They say you were terrible. I wanted to see you, but mama wouldn’t let me.” “And why didn’t she want you to?” “The grown-ups say that you have a white child,” he said opening his eyes wide.[57]
Her reputation, even where she grew up, is damaged due to her decision to have a child with a white man; she is no longer accepted even in the place she grew up. “I heard one woman say that I had betrayed my race.”[58] Even her own father considers her behavior to be a betrayal.[59] But instead of being upset by this, as we assume she would be, she continues, “Well, yes! Perhaps I had betrayed our race, but I was proud of it.”[60] We are appalled when we realize she still stands by her decision, despite the social –– and even familial –– ostracization that has come out of Mayotte’s decision to “whiten the race.” However, is this not simply another manifestation of her deeply rooted inferiority complex? Betraying her own race was more than a symbol of “unhealthy behavior” as Fanon might call it; this was an act of radical self-alientation and double negation –– betraying the part of her that she had felt betrayed by all along.[61] Fanon’s professional and intellectual social capital, exactly what Capécia strives for, grants him privilege to allocate credit where he prefers, but not where it is rightfully deserved. By nature of disavowing Capécia the credit she deserves (and by also denying other female Martinican writers the same credit), he negates Black female Martinicans as a whole. Jeremy Metz makes the connection
between Fanon’s scathing review of Capécia and the broader misogynistic framework it fits into. He writes, “Fanon’s denunciation of Capécia as a literary hack and, in effect, a traitor to her race, bespeaks his own resentment of black women who openly and without apology sought white lovers and preferred blacks with lighter skin colors.”[62] Because Fanon, himself, would have “no chance of gaining sexual access to her” as a Black man, he resents her.[63] From Fanon’s viewpoint, Capécia is not betraying her race, but she is betraying the service expected of her as a Black Martinican woman; she is expected to be with other Black Martinican men, and her violation of this is abominable. This is demonstrated when Fanon generalizes Capécia’s actions to every woman on the island: “Every woman in Martinique knows this, says this, and reiterates it. Whiten the race, save the race.”[64] This generalization, itself, is disproven by the harsh judgement Capécia’s character faces: If every woman in Martinique believed this, she would not have faced ostracization as described by the quote above. However, Fanon does not recognize this double standard. Instead, because Mayotte seeks a white partner and has a white child, an effort to European-ize her whole self, she becomes a representation of the desires of “every woman in Martinique.” Resultantly, uniqueness in her experience is unimportant to Fanon as Capécia becomes a spokesperson for all Martinican women; moreover, Fanon misses an opportunity here to truly learn from Capécia about the female Martinican experience and the variance of that experience. We must turn to misogyny as being wrapped up in Fanon’s reasoning for omitting the experiences of Black Antillean women, particularly coupled with the fact that he tends to generalize the experiences of this group. Fanon uses his footnotes throughout Black Skin, White Masks to provide lengthy explanations and clarifications of his plain-text theory. In “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” Fanon had the opportunity to justify his negative assessment of Capécia’s work; instead, his footnotes in this chapter turn into an extended critique of Capécia and her work: Mayotte Capécia has turned her back on her island. In both books only one course is left for her heroine, i.e., leave. This island of Blacks is decidedly cursed. There is a in fact a sense of malediction surrounding Mayotte Capécia. But she is centrifugal. Mayotte Capécia has denied herself.[65] May she not add to the mass of her idiocies. Go in peace, O mudslinging novelist…. [66]
Despite Fanon’s admittance that Capécia denies herself –– that she negates her skin and her identity –– he mocks her warped sense of self as being a “mass of her idiocies” and calls her a “mudslinging novelist” as if she is some kind of primate –– an odd choice of diction considering this depiction is traditionally used by white racists to depict people of African descent as savages.[67] He adds insult to injury; Fanon’s already warped depiction of Capécia’s novel is further dilapidated by this relentless tirade. While Fanon’s critique of Capécia is not frequently defended as it is by Sharpley-Whiting, it is often glossed over, dismissed as being a lapse in his judgement or a product of his moment. Fanon’s body
of work, which keeps unfolding with updated translations and new releases of unpublished work, has been –– and will continue to be –– theory that drives forward the postcolonial canon. He was revolutionary in his portrayals of how he critically viewed the world. However, his review of Capécia’s work is not revolutionary; it is regressive and misogynistic. Fanon is not without flaws, and we cannot ignore his atrocious mistakes to maintain that he is. I cannot conclude this paper without recognizing the ramifications of Fanon’s critique of Capécia: Fanon’s body of work continues to grow, as Capécia’s work remains stunted by only one English translation and marred by a failure to print and widely distribute more copies. The cost the sole English translation (1997) of I am a Martinican Woman and The White Negress is hundreds of dollars, due to rarity.[68] Capécia’s name, if it is known, is mainly recognized from Black Skin, White Masks; her book has resultantly become an anomaly one must seek out and spend hundreds of dollars on. There are so many reasons to revere Fanon, but his failure to extend his theory of Antillean inferiority complexes to women is not one of those; his scathing critique of female Martinican writer Mayotte Capécia is not one of those.
[1] Contemporary authors such as Nalo Hopkinson and Zakes Mda have published magical realist novels (Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Cion ( 2007) respectively) that harken back to the surrealism Suzanne Césaire published in the 20th century. Directors Jordan Peele and Boots Riley have made history with their two Black surrealist horror blockbusters, Get Out (2017) and Sorry to Bother You (2018). [2] Gwen Bergner, “Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,” PMLA Vol. 110, No. 1: Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition, Modern Language Association, 1995.
[3] Jeremy Metz, “Who is Frantz Fanon Haunting? Reading Mayotte Capécia and Jamaica Kincaid in the shadow of Peau noire, masques blancs,” Written for Professor Sangeeta Ray at University of Maryland, 2011. [4] Jennifer M. Wilks, Race, Gender & Comparative Black Modernism, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, 2008. [5] T. (Tracy) Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms, Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland, 1998. [6] Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, English translation by Richard Philcox “The Man of Color and the White Woman” Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press, New York, 2008, pp. 45-63. [7] Macey, “Black Skin, White Masks,” Frantz Fanon: A biography, Picador, New York, USA, 2000, p. 169. [8] Originally written in French: Je suis Martiniquaise, p ublished in 1948. [9] Originally written in French: La Negresse blanche, published in 1950. [10] Both first translated to English in 1997 by Beatrice Stith Clark, published by Passeggiata Press. [11] Frantz Fanon, op. cit., “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” p. 25. [12] Fanon bases this negative review on some inaccuracies. Capécia’s true name is Lucette Ceranus; however, she takes up Capécia as her pen name when writing her two short novels. In I Am a Martinican Woman, the protagonist’s name is also Mayotte Capécia, bringing to question among many critics whether or not the story is semi-autobiographical. Fanon does not bring this complication into the frame of his critique, leaving out an important detail disputing whether or not her novels even have any autobiographical component to them. Regardless, Fanon seems to think they do, so in this essay I will analyze her books assuming this to be true as well. [13] Sharpley-Whiting., op. cit., p. 36. [14] Keja L. Valens, “Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise,” Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature, Palgrave Macmillan US, USA, 2013, p. 45. [15] David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A biography, Verso, London, 2000, p. 158. [16] Ibid., p. 159. [17] “The Black Man and Psychopathology,” Black Skin, White Masks; “The ‘North African Syndrome,’” Toward the African Revolution; “Medicine and Colonialism,” A Dying Colonialism; “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” Wretched of the Earth. [18] René Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres, Éditions Arc-en-Ciel, 1947. [19] This novel is not one of Maran’s most widely-read, and is not the novel he received an award for. It was published 26 years after Batouala, the award-winning novel, was. [20] William H. Scheifley, “The Book Table: The Goncourt Prize,” The Outlook Vol. 130, Outlook Publishing Company, New York, 1922, pp. 433-434. [21] Fanon, op. cit., “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” p. 57. [22] Ibid., p. 61. [23] Frantz Fanon, op. cit., “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” p. 29. [24] Wilks, op. cit., p. 32. [25] Ibid, p. 35. [26] Paulette Nardal, “The Awakening of Race Consciousness among Black students,” Negritude Women, Edited by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, University of Minnesota Press, USA, 2002, p. 72. [27] Ibid. [28] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. [29] Ibid, p. 113. [30] Daniel Maximin, Translator’s introduction to The Great Camouflage: Suzanne Césaire Writings of Dissent (1941-1945), Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 2012. [31] T. (Tracy) Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2002, p. 17.
[32] Ibid., p. 145. (note 62). [33] Mayotte Capécia (Lucette Ceranus), Je suis Martiniquaise, English translation by Beatrice Stith Clark: I Am a Martinican Woman, Passeggiata Press, Pueblo, Colo. p. 37. [34] Ibid., p. 62 [35] “It should be understood that historically the black man wants to speak French, since it is the key to open doors which only fifty years ago still remained closed to him” (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 21).
[36] Frantz Fanon, Pour la Révolution Africaine, English translation by Haakon Chevalier: “West Indians
and Africans,” Toward an African Revolution, Grove Press, New York, 1967. [37] Ibid., pp. 20. [38] Ibid., p. 26. [39] “On the afternoon of May 8, 1942, a late model bomber again landed in the roadstead and, almost as soon, a state of alarm was ordered. This time, the United States was at war” (Capécia 134). [40] Macey, op. cit., p. 170-171. [41] T. (Tracy) Denean Sharpley-Whiting, op. cit., p. 35. [42] Ibid., p. 41. [43] Alice Walker, In Search of our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Javonovich, USA, 1983, pp. xi-xii. [44] Bergner, who is now an associate professor at West Virginia University, was a graduate student in English at Princeton while this paper was written. Sharpley-Whiting’s engagement with a graduate student’s work highlights the lack of scholarship on Capécia written in English. [45] T. (Tracy) Denean Sharpley-Whiting, op. cit., p. 37. [46] Ibid., p. 39. [47] Bergner, op. cit., p. 83. [48] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. xvi. [49] Ibid. [50] T. (Tracy) Denean Sharpley-Whiting, op. cit., p. 41. [51] Ibid. [52] Fanon, “The So-Called Dependency Complex of The Colonized,” Black Skin, White Masks. pp. 78,80 footnote. [53] Fanon, “The Psychopathology of the Black Man,” Black Skin, White Masks. p. 101 [54] Michele Wallace, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” p. 53. [55] Fanon, “The Psychopathology of the Black Man,” Black Skin, White Masks, p. 128. [56] T. (Tracy) Denean Sharpley-Whiting, op. cit., p. 35. [57] Capécia, op. cit., p. 148. [58] Ibid., 145. [59] Ibid., 146. [60] Ibid., 145. [61] This example, of Mayotte being recognized by Maurice on the beach, is strikingly similar to one of Fanon’s personal anecdote in “The Lived Experience of The Black Man” from Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon tells a story of being identified by a small French boy on the train in Paris. The boy screams “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!” as he stares at Fanon (91). Fanon describes this moment as “exist[ing] in triple,” as people left room around him on the train. This moment is ostracizing for him; he is forced to be aware of his own bodily features. He writes, “I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered by blackness, my ethic features…” (92). In this moment, in almost the direct center of Fanon’s first book, we see a parallel to Mayotte’s own ostracization. While her ostracization comes from being seen as an outsider due to the white parts of her, in both cases, there is no way for either Fanon or Mayotte to join a community they long to be part of. There could have been solidarity in these moments, but Fanon only
sees difference. Mayotte is entirely alone in this, causing her to react strangely. Rather than give up and concede to the despair of loneliness, she finds pride in the part of her identity she is being judged for. This is not unlike Fanon finding a way to “shout his blackness” (101), Mayotte retreats into the white part of her mulatto identity. [62] Metz, op. cit., p. 15. [63] Ibid. [64] Fanon, “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” Black Skin, White Masks. pp. 29-30. [65] My italics. [66] Fanon, “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” Black Skin, White Masks. P. 35 footnote. [67] Wulf D. Hund, “Comparing Black people to Monkeys has a Long, Dark, Simian History,” Huffington Post, 2018. [68] As seen on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Martinican-Woman-White-Negress-Novelettes/dp/1578890012
Works Cited Bergner, Gwen. “Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.” PMLA Vol. 110, No. 1: Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition. Modern Language Association, 1995. Capécia, Mayotte (Lucette Ceranus). Je suis Martiniquaise (1948). English translation by Beatrice Stith Clark. I Am a Martinican Woman. Passeggiata Press, Pueblo, Colo., 1997. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. English translation by Richard Philcox. “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, New York, 2008. Fanon, Frantz. Pour la Révolution Africaine. English translation by Haakon Chevalier. “West Indians and Africans,” Toward an African Revolution. Grove Press, New York, 1967. Hund, Wulf D. “Comparing Black people to Monkeys has a Long, Dark, Simian History.” Huffington Post, 2018. Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. Verso, London, 2000. Maran, René. Un homme pareil aux autres. Éditions Arc-en-Ciel, 1947. Maximin, Daniel. Translator’s introduction to The Great Camouflage: Suzanne Césaire Writings of Dissent (1941-1945). Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 2012. Metz, Jeremy. “Who is Frantz Fanon Haunting? Reading Mayotte Capécia and Jamaica Kincaid in the shadow of Peau noire, masques blancs.” Advised by Professor Sangeeta Ray at University of Maryland, 2011. Sharpley-Whiting, T. (Tracy) Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. R owman & Littlefield, Maryland, 1998. Sharpley-Whiting, T. (Tracy) Denean. Negritude Women. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2002. Scheifley, William H. “The Book Table: The Goncourt Prize.” The Outlook Vol. 130. Outlook Publishing Company, New York, 1922, pp. 433-434. Sherwood, Marika. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile. Lawrence & Wishart Limited, London, 1999. Valens, Keja L. “Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise.” Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature. Palgrave Macmillan US, USA, 2013.
Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Javonovich, USA, 1983. Wallace, Michelle. 1990. “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian. Wilks, Jennifer M. Race, Gender & Comparative Black Modernism, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, 2008.