Yellow Skin, White Masks
I am reclining in the bottom bunk of a chic yet intimate hostel dorm in a quiet suburb of Brussels. It is only late afternoon and the room is empty, but I have had a full week on my feet. I rest my battered soles and enjoy my novel. The door opens – a new guest; sandy hair, reddened skin, lugging a heavy rucksack. I hear him thank the hostel owner as the door closes – southeast England – I think to myself. Probably just north of London. Our eyes meet hesitantly and he gives me a cautious nod. This is the crucial juncture. In a not-so-subtle Scottish accent, I call to him: “Alright mate, how’s it going?” His eyes widen, a twitch of the eyebrows; his lips curl into a soft smile-in-recovery. It is the look of comfort and relief as he realises I am not the notorious Chinese tourist. Loud, rude, broken English. No, he sees that I am one of the good ones. I am almost like him. I am almost… white.
***
“Jackie Chan! Jackie Chan!”
“Why are your eyes closed, ha-ha”
“Eww, you’re Chinese – you eat dog”
“So what if you did well in the exam? You don’t count, you’re Chinese”
To quote Fanon (2008), “An unfamiliar weight burdened me […] I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors” (pp. 83-84). My yellowness defined me; it marked me as an ‘Other’ to which “a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (p. 84) could be gratuitously attached. I desired nothing more than to be a subject in my own right, to be judged as a human being, to no longer be yellow. I could never change my skin, but I could change my history, my culture, my mask. I neglected my Chinese studies – why should I study such a useless language (quite an ironic sentiment now) – and I immersed myself in English literature and European history; my bookcase was replete with names like Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, Winston Churchill… I underwent a crisis of self-image – any valid and active sense of self was eroded by dislocation and cultural denigration; my original personality (if I can even remember it!) suppressed, consciously and unconsciously, willingly and unwittingly, by a ‘superior’ cultural model.
But before we begin in earnest, and because I feel the need to explicate this, the scholars that I discuss write of blackness and the colonised. I am neither black nor do I live under colonial rule. Nor do I claim to equate my experience with theirs. But in contemporary Europe, a range of racially and culturally marginalised groups gather under the aegis of the Black. That is not to say we suffer the same oppressions, but to make it a common cause, a common identity of Otherness.
Let us first take a moment to consider the pivotal role of English. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) explain: “The study of English has always been a densely political and cultural phenomenon, a practice in which language and literature have both been called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism” (p. 2). Since the late nineteenth century, English had emerged to replace the Classics as the marker of British civility and imperial power. In English, British colonial administrators found a valuable ally in maintaining control of indigenous populations. English establishes a ‘privileging norm’, which naturalises the constructed values of the imperial centre (civilisation, justice, etc.) and conversely establishes the savagery of the periphery, and makes the latter the target of reforming zeal (p. 3). Then when elements of the periphery encounter and seep into the privileged space of the centre, there is a process of “conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation” (p. 4). In other words, the mimicry of the centre does not only arise from a desire to be accepted, but absorbed; through mimicry, the colonised fully imbibes themselves in the dominant culture, repudiating their heritages in an attempt to become “more English than the English” (p. 4).
Likewise, Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks (2008) that the coloured native develops a sense of ‘self’ in relation to the coloniser, and by reflection, the coloniser develops a sense of superiority. In the struggle with his perceived sense of inadequacy, the coloured man tries to emulate the white man; he assumes Western values, language, cultural practices, and renounces his heritage. He dons white masks over black skin, and experiences a schizophrenic atmosphere.
Staying with language – “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture” (Fanon, 2008, p. 25). The Antillean who travels to the major cities of the metropole and assimilates into French culture develops an air of superiority; he stops speaking Creole apart from to servants. In his French, he imitates the ‘correct’ pronunciation to a degree that is almost comical. I think of how often I avoided my native tongue, how often I have been spoken to in Mandarin, but replied in English, how often I have turned my nose up at accented and broken English, how often I rejected the friendship of Chinese boarding students in secondary school. For Fanon to be told whilst giving a lecture on poetry: “At bottom you are a white man” (p. 25); this was what I wanted. I thought that I could prove that I was just as educated, just as civilised…
But as Fanon (2008) writes, “When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone” (p. 17). To assume the White Mask is not a ‘clean’ process; the coloured man remains dissemblingly in two places at once, which makes it impossible for the evoulé to fully join the coloniser’s ‘us’. Because no matter what, “Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro” (p. 133). He instead becomes a disturbing image of Western pretence inscribed on the coloured body.