Racism and Colonialism

I keep getting e-mails from various people which champion the cause of white people being the only racial group accused of racism. Of particular interest to many is the defense that Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) offered in a court case defending himself against accusations of racist comments. I am a mixed-ethnicity predominantly white male, between the ages of 18 and 45 with a university degree. Try getting a job in Canada with those credentials. Good luck! As such, I can sympathize with the sentiments in these e-mails, as I too have felt marginalized and increasingly disenfranchised by my own culture. However, until the balance of social and economic power in the world is more egalitarian we will continue to be the white racists in what feels like an inequitable system. While modern ethnic groups in G8 countries continue to take advantage of that station in society long after it has become irrelevant, white culture (in relevant history) has not yet really earned its suffering merit badge. However, the suffering of the 'falsely accused' is rapidly emerging as the white man's plight. What minority ethnic groups fail to see is that by continuing to identify the whites as the 'discriminator', not only are they giving voice to the innocently martyred white 'non-racist' (a voice Michael Richards was all too eager to try and embody), they are taking part in proliferating their own identity as the 'discriminated against'. And truly, they may have no other identity to claim. Trapped between their ethnic culture and a predominantly white, discriminatory setting, there is no other place set aside for them in society. The following is an essay I wrote on a related topic after studying some of the new Post-Colonial Critical Literature entering the Western Canon. Before reading it, however, it is imperative that you visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYeFcSq7Mxg&feature=related.

Colonial Congeal, Post-Colonial Shatter

The post-colonial moment, far from being a simple advent of liberation, has created a subjectivity for the formerly colonized subject, that comprises the subject of an unlived history, shatters the individual, and leaves no post-colonial place for him to occupy and become one. In the colonized world, the colonized subject was relegated to the position of inferior, servant, or slave. The post-colonial world tries to eliminate that identity. However, colonization and time have ravaged original culture too far to recapture it as an identity for the colonized, yet its ramifications remain attached to the subject. So too, does the inferiority and servitude of colonization remain attached historically to the subject. The post-colonial world does not offer the privileged position of the former colonizer to the liberated. The formerly colonized subject is a composite of history, that is not solely his own, and shattered in a present that does not provide a place to occupy. Both Frantz Fanon in chapter five of his work Black Skin, White Masks, and Salman Rushdie in the first book of his work Midnight's Children reflect this subjective reality in their otherwise disparate forms of literature.
In chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes a non-fiction tirade exploring post-colonial racism against black people and the effect it continues to have on the subject in terms of identity, desire for the other, and cultural subjectivity. Most specifically, he provides a first person perspective on the fragmentation of his subjectivity as he realizes himself through the eyes of the other.
Early in the chapter, having noticed himself being noticed as a black man by a third party outsider, he expresses the emotion that he felt. "I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together by another self" (Fanon 109). The other self is the one he has reconstructed for himself with his new subjectivity. In trying to reason the subjectivity forced upon him, he traces a historical emergence of a racist identity comprised of a view of black people from the perspective of the other. "I had sketched a historico-racial schema [. . .] but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories" (Fanon 111). When the history of historico-racial schema that identifies him reaches the explosive moment of post-colonialism, the point of so-called liberation, Fanon finds a splitting of the self into two parts. "Overnight the negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has to place himself" (Fanon 110). Fanon then traces an emotional self-identity that is ripped into thirds before disappearing into the realization that the world holds no viable subjective place for him as a post-colonial black man. "I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared" (Fanon 112). He moves away from the colonial identity as slave towards the liberated privilege of the colonizer but arrives in an exile of non-existence, not one nor the other, which feeds his shattered identity.
In order to reach this realization, however, Fanon reveals how he attempted to escape his 'black' status in a post-colonial world through education. "Reason was confident of a victory on every level. I put all the parts back together" (Fanon 119). However, he finds that, even accepted as a rational intellectual equal, it was always qualified against his blackness. He also notices that the ascribed identity stems from an inability to escape a colonial past. "You come too late [. . .] There will always be a world - a white world - between you and us. . . . The other's total inability to liquidate the past" (Fanon 122). Fanon leaves the identity of 'the other' ambiguous and, therefore, includes both black and white culture in the exacerbation of the social inequity through a mutual inability to escape history. He precedes the retracing of this discovery with the conclusion that it yields. "The white world [. . .] barred me from participation" (Fanon 114). Fanon accepts that, even the rational sophistry of the intellectual white community, will not separate him from his historical identity as black on an interpersonal level.
In his shattered subjectivity, Fanon attempts to return to his ethnic roots. In contrast to the rational sophistry of white culture, he accepts the definition by that culture of black culture's inherent lack of education and rationality. He states that "here I am at home; I am made of the irrational" (Fanon 123). Unfortunately, his education, and cultural foray into the world formerly reserved for the white man, finds him barred from making that association as well. "I attach myself to my brothers, Negroes like myself. To my horror, they reject me too" (Fanon 116). Fanon finds his subjectivity unwelcome on all cultural fronts.
Ultimately, his subjectivity shattered and with no cultural place to occupy, Fanon accepts his non-identity in his closing observations. "Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned" (Fanon 138). He realizes that colonial history is inescapable by both black and white culture, and that both will continue to identify the self in contrast to the other. "The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes" (Fanon 140). His conclusive explosion is his view of the inevitable subjective identity crisis that reserves neither the place of enslaved black, nor liberated colonialist to the post-colonial black man.
By contrast, Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children is a fictitious account of the historical family elements during the late stages of the colonial era that congealed into the self of the narrator. The fictitious narrator offers a third person perspective of the subject of his grandfather before Indian independence trying to seek identity within a culture that is on the verge of socio-political post-colonialism. Like the true life account of Frantz Fanon after the colonial era, Saleem Sinai's non-biological grandfather, Aadam Aziz, is a man trapped between his westernized education as a doctor and his ethnic Indian roots. "To reveal the secret of my grandfather's altered vision: he had spent five years [. . .] away from home" (Rushdie 5). Eventually, due to his educated disillusionment with ancient superstitious custom, and a well-timed bump to the nose, Aziz rejects his ethnic roots which begins the metaphor introduced by Rushdie of the shattered individual. "This decision, however, made a hole in him" (Rushdie 4). Aziz's alienation to his ethnicity is further demonstrated by the report of his mother's verbal assaults and the rejection of his friendship by the boatman Tai, who clearly represents a metaphor for the history of the culture. "Nobody could remember when Tai had been young" (Rushdie 9). Thus Rushdie introduces the notion of a shattered self resulting from dissociation from one's ethnic history.
Rushdie extends the metaphor of the shattered self to suggest the notion of composite pieces giving the illusion of desirability that come together in an undesirable whole. Aziz, while medically examining his future wife through a hole in a sheet, becomes enamored with her feminine pieces. The narrator reports that "on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman's body" (Rushdie 21). In his romantic imagination, her parts were "[g]lued together by his imagination" (Rushdie 22). Unfortunately, shortly (in the text) following his falsely enamored marriage to his wife, she comes together as a less than appealing whole. "Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, [. . .] was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain" (Rushdie 39/40). Her description continues to escape the demure figure behind the sheet into a dominating family matriarch.
Rushdie revisits the metaphoric theme of seemingly appealing parts congealing into an unappealing whole in the character of Saleem's non-biological father. Unlike the pieces coming together for Aadam Aziz to form an indomitable wife, the pieces of an undesirable whole must come apart. Saleem's non-biological mother's second husband, whom she finds less appealing than her first, shatters him in this fashion. Saleem states that "bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this, she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts" (Rushdie 73). The history of individuals that peopled Saleem's inevitable existence, variously exemplifies the notion of people viewed in shattered pieces.
These microcosmic examples are surrounded by the larger theme of the text which points out the narrator's historical composition, and post-colonial shattering. Saleem is clear that he strongly believes his existence was preconceived by a history that predated his birth. In the last chapter of the first book, entitled Tick Tock, in which Rushdie counts down to the moment of the narrator's birth, simultaneous with Indian independence, the narrator retraces all of the characters in the colonial world that he feels played a role in the creation of his self. He lists the stories of his grandfather, the boatman Tai, the perforated sheet of the blind landowner, the family that resulted, their business dealings, and the departing colonialist Methwold as all relevant to his own existence. He concludes that "[t]o understand just one life, you have to swallow the world" (Rushdie 121). Early in the first book of the novel, Rushdie introduces the theme when Saleem states his belief that "I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history" (Rushdie 3). The history of Saleem's family in the first book is severally interjected with apostrophes to the reader in a post-colonial present tense, in which his own body is undergoing fatal disintegration. "I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, overused body permits" (Rushdie 3). Having come to be aware in hindsight of his ambiguous subjectivity in the post-colonial world, like Fanon, he is literally "falling apart". "Please believe that I am falling apart [. . .] buffeted too much by history" (Rushdie 36). Saleem has unambiguously tied the history that he feels relevant to his existence to his current dissolution.
Both works, although hugely disparate in form and style, similarly posit the idea that the lingering socio-political effects of colonialism on the post-colonial subject causes a catastrophic fragmentation of the self that leaves the colonialized subject without identity or culture. In this way, both Fanon and Rushdie's narrator have represented their present existence as the composite of a colonial history which ultimately failed to congeal into a subjective self.


Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. New York: Bantam - Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.