Yellow Skin, Yellow Masks
Just imagine a brown-legged son of the east in the red and black gown of an M.A. as I saw him. The effect is killing. I had an irreverent vision of the Common room in a Muhammedan get up. At the end of the proceeding, an excited bard began some Urdu verses composed in honour of the occasion. It was a tour de force of his own—but I am sorry to say he was suppressed, that is to say, they took him by the shoulders and sat him down again in his chair. Imagine that at Oxford! (Kipling, 1882, in a letter to George Willes)
How can an African or West-Indian, subjected to French rule, adopt the cultural values of his coloniser without suppressing his own way of life and turning his back to his own people and history? Similarly, the modern immigrant to Britain who acculturates or ‘integrates’ must surely lose an essential part of who he is? Does he not become a hollow being, a mimic man, an evoulé, a babu, a coconut, a banana? Now obviously I did not think in quite those terms, but I remember the curious looks and piercing laughter as I sang a rendition of My Heart Will Go On for my relatives on a return visit to China. I looked at myself and I was not happy with what I saw – I was Fanon’s Antillean ‘been-to’.
In the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) saw that he would never be white enough for the coloniser to treat him as an equal. No matter what, his “blackness was there, dark and unarguable”. No matter what, he would always be the “Negro teacher, the Negro doctor [emphasis added]” (p. 88). And although I considered myself fiercely British, I was fiercely British because it required defending again and again. No matter what, I would always be asked: “Where are you from? No, where are you originally from?” Fanon’s reaction was to study his own culture with a celebratory zeal, to turn to negritude (pp. 93-97). Now instead of denying my skin, I too embraced it.
The words “you don’t count – you’re one of the good ones, you’re one of us” were no longer a source of comfort and pride, but a testimony to my betrayal. Oh venerable and sagacious ancestors, pray forgive me! In a dialectical turn, and with such vigour that would make Hegel proud, I disavowed ‘Britishness’. I embarked on a race to reclaim myself, a transformation of truth and value – I wanted to be Chinese. I threw myself into Chinese literature, film, music, and history. Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdom, the Analects, even Mao’s Little Red Book – these books that I had always owned but sat neglected and dust-laden on a bookshelf – now found their new lease of life. In hindsight, I consider myself fortunate that I had access to such a litany of ‘authentic’ Chinese literature and history (cf. the culture of the national bourgeoisie in Wretched of the Earth).
In a similar vein, as post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference from the centre, those who recognised the collusion between English literature and cultural suppression sought to isolate literature from linguistics, and subject both to a critical re-evaluation. They realised that little genuine decolonisation could take place so long as the nexus of power involving literature and language remained in place, and retained the unquestioned status of culture, tradition, and education (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 4).