He had seen them leaving, and he had also seen them returning. The Martinican who had been to the metropolis was, like the ‘been-to’ of Anglophone Africa who is so proud of having been to London,4 a demi-god but he could also be a pathetic figure. Anyone who had been to France and had not succeeded in seeing a mounted policeman there was the object of mockery.5 Those who came back so convinced of their superiority that they refused to speak Creole were soon put in their place, and Fanon knew the story of the been-to who could not recognize a familiar piece of agricultural equipment . . . until his peasant father dropped it on his foot.6 He also knew that the Martinican who landed in France could be a comic figure, especially if he hyper-corrected his natural tendency to ‘swallow’ his ‘r’s’ by addressing a waiter in Le Havre as ‘garrrçon’, and then giving the game away by ordering ‘un vè de biè’ and not ‘un verre de bière’.7 He knew that a magic circle surrounded the young man who was leaving, and that the words ‘Paris, Marseille, La Sorbonne, Pigalle’ were its keystone.8 The erotic promise of Paris was the stuff of adolescent male folklore and he could recall how, as he finally approached a delayed puberty, a friend had told him of how he had held a young parisienne in his arms.9 Curiously, he appears to have been unaware before he left that many Martinican men were so eager to sleep with a white woman that their first port of call was a brothel in Le Havre; in Peau noire, he remarks with what sounds like genuine surprise that this was a recent piece of information.10 Many of the fantasies and hopes about Paris mentioned – and no doubt entertained – by Fanon could of course have been shared by any provincial youth dreaming of the capital, but they are overdetermined by the racial question. The dream of sleeping with a white woman in France was all the more alluring in that it was virtually impossible for a young black man to do so in Martinique. The opening sections of Peau noire, masques blancs paint a composite picture of the lived experience of the young Martinican in France – and it is a specifically male experience. Fanon’s sister Gabrielle, who also left for France in 1946, would have had a different tale to tell.
Writing of his childhood in the black-mulatto society of Fort-de-France, Fanon remarks: ‘I am a nègre, but naturally I don’t know that because that is what I am.’11 His experiences in the army and in liberated France had begun to teach him what he was in the eyes of most French people. The lesson was now to be reinforced. And it is a lesson that is still being learned by students from the ‘French’ West Indies: ‘The West Indian who comes to France is steeped in what he believes to be French culture; he is sometimes “more French than the French” and believes that he will find a milieu into which he will be accepted, into which he can merge immediately. Despite his (legal) Frenchness, he finds that he is a foreigner living amongst whites and other foreigners. Because of his colour, he is rejected by a world whose culture he had, he thought, absorbed.’12
Sitting on a train on an unspecified date, Fanon heard a Frenchman who stank of cheap red wine rambling on about the need for a National Union to defend French values against foreigners. Looking towards the corner where Fanon was sitting, he then added ‘Whoever they are.’13 Fanon knew that Europeans had a definite idea of what a black man should be. He knew that he would probably be asked how long he had been in France, and be complemented on his ‘good French’.14 He realized that he would suffer the humiliating experience of being addressed in petitnègre, or the French equivalent to pidgin English, by white people who called him ‘tu’ because they spoke to blacks in the way that an adult speaks to a child;15 Cézette can still recall how it felt. In 1946, Fanon had probably seen neither the image of the grinning Tirailleur sénégalais on the posters advertising Banania nor the images of Bamboulinette, the black maid from Martinique whose broad smile was used to sell shoe-polish. At home in Martinique, he had no reason to know that for many of his fellow French citizens, he was that soldier and that his sister was that maid.
Nothing could prepare him for the most devastating experience of all. It occurred on a cold day in Lyon when Fanon encountered a child and his mother. This is possibly the most famous passage in Peau noire, masques blancs. The child said to his mother: ‘Look, a negro’ and then ‘Mum, look at the negro. I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’16 Fanon’s own analysis of this traumatic encounter is discussed in detail in the next chapter. In the meantime, it is useful to ask how and why the child knew that Fanon was a negro. Part of the answer may come from a geography textbook for use in schools that was published in 1903:
Paul is usually a very punctual pupil, but one day, he is late for school. ‘I’m sorry, sir’, he says, ‘I didn’t realize what time it was. I was watching a nègre on the Grand’ Place.’ ‘Was he a real nègre?’ ‘Yes! Yes sir. A real nègre with all black skin and teeth as white as milk. They say he comes from Africa. Are there lots of nègres in that country?’ ‘Yes, my friend.’17
A more complete explanation comes from the extraordinary childhood correspondence of the nine-year-old Françoise Marrette, who, as Françoise Dolto (1908–88), became a psychoanalytic grandmother to the nation. During the First World War, she met a black family on the beach at the fashionable Normandy resort of Deauville; her nanny laughed at the sight. Another significant encounter came when she met a wounded Tirailleur sénégalais who was being cared for by her mother. The soldier kissed the little girl because she reminded him of his own daughter. Her nanny washed her vigorously. There follows an exchange of letters with relatives. Her uncle warns her not to play with any black troops she might meet on the beach: they are handsome, but not as good as ‘our’ mountain troops. From London, her father sends her a comic postcard of ‘four little nègres’ who look as though they were a group of street minstrels. Young Françoise describes a school composition she has written about a bayonet charge. It features a Tirailleur she calls Sid Vava Ben Abdallah, whom she describes as having a black face, white teeth, a flat nose and a red turban – she clearly identifies with him, as ‘Vava’ was her family nickname. Finally, her mother sends her a postcard of a Tirailleur smoking a cigarette. On the back, she has written: ‘Here is Bou’ji ma’s portrait. Are you frightened of him?’18 After this, there are no more images of black people in Dolto’s juvenilia. French children of her generation were, in other words, taught to recognize a nègre when they saw one, to laugh at him and then to be afraid of him.
In late 1946, Fanon was twenty-one. He was a decorated war veteran and had passed his baccalauréat. His bac gave him the right to go to university, and legislation introduced on 4 August 1945 gave veterans free tuition and the right to small maintenance grants. He was free to study any subject he liked at the university of his choice. He had good reason to be somewhat apprehensive about leaving Martinique, but he was not reluctant to do so. On the contrary, like many young Martinicans he felt he was ‘a prisoner on his island, lost in an atmosphere from which there was no way out’ and the appeal of France was irresistible.19 Fanon and his siblings were the first members of their family to attend university, and their entry into higher education was a further advance in the family’s upward mobility. This could be described in class terms as a move from the petty bourgeoisie to the liberal professions, but Fanon does not speak in class terms and was not the classic boursier, or ‘grammar school boy’. The Martinican conflation of class with race meant that going to university was a further stage in becoming French, or in other words becoming white: ‘The West Indian who comes to France sees his journey as the last stage in his personality. We can say quite literally and without any fear of being mistaken that the West Indian who goes to France in order to convince himself of his whiteness will find his true face there.’20 And yet Fanon was in one sense a boursier rather than ‘an inheritor’, whose family and extracurricular activities equipped him with the symbolic capital that allowed him to negotiate the system and to profit from it.21 Some of the decisions he would make about his education were to be strange, even perverse, and one explanation for them is quite simply that he made them alone and had no one and no training to guide him through the system.
His destination was Paris. The Atlantic crossing took twelve days, with the weather growing colder as he went north. Fanon’s port of entry was Le Havre, which he had seen from the decks of the San Mateo just over a year earlier.