by Aiman Fatira
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks provides a robust account of the historical processes and forces instrumental in the experiences of objectification and loss of selfhood of Black/colonized peoples. Fanon describes the creation of an inferior sense of self through the process of objectification and belittlement in racial subjugation, which often entails, for the colonized subject, a sense of responsibility for dominant imagined histories that persist as a result of colonial hegemonic structures. The late-colonial Indian poet Mohammad Iqbal’s use of poetic devices that obscure a defined sense of self, and his view of the connection between the development of khudi (i.e., the highest potential possible for an individual) and society comprise a useful heuristic device for exploring ideas introduced in Black Skin, White Masks, and vice versa. Iqbal’s philosophy is formed in part as a critique of his contemporaries for their views of Muslims in British India as existing in a denigrated state, while Fanon critiques attempts at reclaiming history as a tool of liberation in response to colonial paradigms. Iqbal theorizes the necessary connection between the reclamation of the self through the attainment of khudi and its connection with societal development, endorsing a renewal of Muslim society in British India, whereas Fanon argues that appeals to history and the past are ultimately futile, and do not comprise a practical strategy for the liberation of colonized peoples as subjects or as an aggregate, instead arguing that liberation comes from the prioritization of the liberation of the self from colonial history and its structures for future freedom.
Iqbal’s Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self) delineates his conception of khudi, or the self. In Iqbal’s poetry, the attainment of khudi consists in the awareness of oneself through the awareness of God and the connection between the two, and thus, the capacity of the improvement of the self in realizing its full potential in becoming the ‘Perfect Man’, another concept described in Iqbal’s writings. This point is the crux of much scholarship and commentary on Iqbal’s work and philosophy [1].However, Shah in “‘A Stranger in the City’: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures,” elaborates further on Iqbal’s stance on the self, arguing that Iqbal’s use of portraitures and poetical devices that posit him (as a figure in his poems, and as an author) as an ambiguous, mutable, and undefined individual work as a critique of the notions of selfhood and its relation to society. For example, Shah analyzes the use of this effect in his poem Zuhd aur Rindi (‘Piety and Profligacy’), which presents a dialectic between the personifications of zuhd (conventionality) and rind (unconventionality) [2]. Shah describes the final portion of the poem:
The puritan Zahid attributes these mischiefs of Rind to his apprenticeship in philosophy, but catches hold of him one day and urges him to clarify who he really is in the bundle of contradictions he instantiates. Iqbal, in his candid response, seconds his view and acknowledges that he is equally clueless about the ‘real’ Iqbal underneath or beyond the bundle of contradictions, or the Muslim Iqbal minus his heterodoxies [3].
These personifications/characters, particularly Rind, may be used as a way to analyze Iqbal’s conception of himself as an enigmatic or unclear figure: “Iqbal the Rind presents himself to the world as the enigma of his own strangerhood, attentive to his own otherness in open and unapologetic ways,” which allows for the “opening up [of the] possibility for his community to strive to live with, and eradicate its fear or aversion of, and anxiety about, difference, non-adherence, otherness.” [4] The use of self/characters presented in ways that provide social commentary in text is a rhetorical device employed in Black Skin, White Masks as well. Fanon leads his philosophical, social, and historical commentary into a narrative-style retelling of his experience of racism on a train:
“Look, A Negro!” It was a passing sting. I attempted a smile.
“Look, A Negro!” Absolutely. I was beginning to enjoy myself.
“Look, A Negro!” The circle was gradually getting smaller. I was really enjoying myself.
“Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!”[5]
Fanon’s use of the train episode in the narrative is arguably similar in some sense to Iqbal’s usage of self-portraitures within his writing. Shah draws from Beaujour’s writings on self-portraits, noting that “[i]n a self-portrait, [Beaujour] argues, there is no reconstruction of the story of one’s complete personality or an exhaustive narrative of one’s identity.” [6] The self-portrait is rather a form of situating the individual within a wider cultural and societal context that provides the ability to analyze the relationship between selfhood and social processes. As Shah writes, “Iqbal’s discourse of ‘I’ about ‘I’ is a way of establishing connections between the microcosmic ‘I’ and the macrocosm at large […] demonstrating their discursive and public character.”[7] This connection is most pointedly demonstrated in Fanon’s use of narrative devices to conduct analysis of the self’s relation to racial hierarchies situated in their historical context, rather than the product of simply phenological observations or objective realities, and the resulting creation of a normative reality of racial hierarchy.
Fanon comments on a “third person” body image in colonized/Black subjects, but within the narrative of the train incident, notes that, “[my body was] no longer in the third person but in triple.” [8] Use of everyday experience/interaction as a narrative device allows Fanon to illustrate the alienation from the self that occurs through racialization and imposed narrativization (i.e., the colonial imagination of the concepts of “races” and their respective histories), which ultimately results in total objectification. He describes the outcome of this process as being one which causes him to “give myself up as an object […] [p]eeling, stripping my skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body.” [9] Nielsen, in “Resistance through re-narration: Fanon on de-constructing racialized subjectivities,” comments on the train incident presented in the narrative, stating that it “highlights the way in which phenotypic or so called ‘racial’ differences […] result in the oppressed group living in what amounts, historically speaking, to a different world than the dominant group.”[10] The implication of this cleaving of subjective realities is a binding of the self-perception of colonized subjects and societal impositions of racial schemas, a topic further explored within the text.
Fanon describes that during the process of colonization, “[Black people’s] metaphysics […] were abolished because they were in contradiction with a new civilization that imposed its own.” [11] This erasure of an autonomous ontology occurred as a result of a historical event, i.e., the imposition of a new ontology by an outside civilization. The notion of contradiction in this statement is important to note—if the imposition of European civilizations is that of subjugation/power, then the mode of existence in past civilizations contradicted it due to the autonomy it bestowed upon its subjects. Using historicity, Fanon provides a basis for a contemporary reality, which supports his following arguments concerning race and liberation as a political issue. Accordingly, Fanon explains through his assertion that a Black person must be Black in and of themselves, but also in relation to the “superior” race as it is posited within the hierarchy, i.e., White people. He states that “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”[12]The imposition of a subjugation/power schema by European civilizations is naturalized through the establishment of racial hierarchies. Parris, in “Frantz Fanon: Existentialist, Dialectician, and Revolutionary,” writes that “[o]ntology for the Black subject is not an a priori reality; instead, it is a reality that becomes permanently compromised and defined by its inescapable duality with whiteness and all that it represents– white supremacy, anti-African racism, and racist stereotypes.”[13] The implications of this are two-faceted: 1) the imposition of the novel ontology by colonizing forces inextricably binds colonized subjects and their senses of self to this society-wide model (being Black in relation to White) and 2) the sense of self of colonized subjects, even on a personal level, is forever shifted within these conditions to accommodate this inferior racial status. The creation of this condition of an “inferiority complex,” for Fanon, is an essentially historic event, in that its lineage can be traced to a specific locus, and that it is not a consequence of biological or natural conditions, nor a result of a nebulously originating interpersonal strife that results in the permeation of unfounded racial prejudice.
Shah argues that “[a]t the heart of Iqbal’s work is an elaborate case for ‘I am another’, or, to be precise, that ‘I is another’, a project, as it were, of self-differentiation […] strangerhood and selfhood function in Iqbal’s work as each other’s mirror images—self-differentiating, heterogeneous, intractable, undocile, individuating forces that resist assimilation to any larger whole, and remain irreducible to representations given to them,” meaning Iqbal presents himself in a self-distinguishing fashion which escapes societal imposition or definition.[14] In contrast, Fanon’s analysis rests primarily on the forcible assimilation of the self into a larger, societal paradigm of racialization, and the violent imposition of a racial ontology. He describes the process of racialization as making him “responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors,” which occurs through a process of reckoning with images invoked by the White/colonial imagination: “At the start of my history others have fabricated for me, the pedestal of cannibalism was given pride of place so that I wouldn’t forget.”[15] From the imposition which was described previously at the origin of colonial rule and racial hierarchies, as well as in the being of Black people in relation to White people, Fanon gives examples of specific essentialist qualities which are imbedded into White people’s perception of Black people. The corrupted sense of being is consolidated through the recognition of belonging to a certain corrupted group, a notion linked to racial hierarchy. Colonized subjects are indeed positioned as irredeemably inferior due to their status within racial hierarchy, but most importantly, they are left helpless under the fate of a history which has been dictated for them: doomed to failure as a natural process of historical development, and left to forever lament in the shadow of a constructed history of savagery and inferiority.
Iqbal and Fanon’s conceptions of the self arguably intersect in their ideas of liberation of the self, or the actualization of the full potential of the self. For Fanon, this is primarily communicated through the colonial subject’s freedom to enact their liberation even under oppression. As Nielsen writes, “this ability to choose, to act as a free (yet greatly constrained) agent highlights the fact that the [B]lack person in a colonized or similarly oppressive context is in reality not a mere res, a thing determined from the outside and lacking genuine freedom.”[16] The notion of a free will and form of agency even for the subjugated colonized subject aligns with previously mentioned concepts of a discontinuity between the self and the societal background in Iqbal’s writings. This is in contrast to the colonial imaginations of Black/colonized people that Fanon delineates that enforce certain narratives and histories upon the subject, pushing them into ontologies that limit their sense of self and ways of being. The idea of removal from this structure, and the genesis of anti-colonial resistance is, for Fanon, the exercise of the subject’s autonomy, and the abandonment of societal racial hierarchy. Parris states that “Fanon asserts that the colonizer will remain the principal catalyst of the colonized subject’s actions until the colonizer recognizes the native as a human being,” and so the decolonial mission is inextricably linked to the assertion of a selfhood in contradiction with conventional racial hierarchies, and the liberation and actualization of this selfhood.[17]
The idea of the liberation of the self is explored by Fanon and Iqbal in their own respective fashions. For both, history is of key importance in conceptualizing the process of liberation of the self from societal impositions, but, more important is the idea of a future that supersedes the contemporary issues discussed in their writings. As Fanon conceives of racial hierarchization as a historically occurring force that imposed its structures upon colonized populations, he argues that a solution based on subverting the purely superficial effects of this structure through the construction of narratives that espouse a previous glorious history or culture (such as the Négritude movement) in attempt to gain a form of political power is ultimately futile. Fanon describes the phenomenon of the racial inferiority complex as a historical force that brought about the dominance of ideologies which perpetuate a structure to constantly affirm this complex through methods of subordination expressed in daily life and internalized by the self. Due to this, his solution does not lie with the modification of racial systems, and accordingly, their narratives, but rather in the total liberation from these structures, and subsequently, the historical narratives they perpetuate. As such, he asserts that “I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future.”[18] Fanon not only views the constant invocation of the past as a limiting strategy for liberation, he also views it as an active hindrance to real struggle for liberation, as it obfuscates the origin of anti-colonial resistance, which is the struggle for freedom from domination and oppression in the present state, and for the sake of a future free from such burdens. He explains this using the example of the Vietnamese resistance at the time: “[…] they don’t expect their sacrifice to revive a forgotten past. They accept death for the sake of the present and future.”[19] Additionally, he argues that this drive for enacting change does not begin from an identification with past struggles, which have an essentializing effect on colonized subjects (e.g., identifying with enslaved ancestors), but from an attitude of emancipation of the self and the collective from suffocation.
Sevea writes in The Political Philosophy of Mohammad Iqbal that a spectre of the “backward Muslim” was invoked frequently in commentaries on the status of Muslims in British India.[20] Though not entirely true in fact (due to different definitions/aggregations of religious groups, as well as the variance in status and its dependence on multiple factors, not just religion), Sevea notes that this idea “had an important psychological impact on the former Muslim aristocracy […] The crumbling of the social, cultural and political world which they were accustomed to and its displacement by the rule of an alien power were interpreted as a substantial decline in the fortunes of Muslims in India.”[21] Ideas of a loss of former glory (particularly in looking back to former great Muslim societies) and a diminution in status informed patterns of thought, social discourses, and thus, the literature of Indian Muslims at the time, consolidating and perpetuating the notion.[22] Iqbal, on the other hand, “sought to provide a message of renewal [through his poetry and prose] […] In line with this, Iqbal argued that the role of the poet and intellectual was not to wallow in lamentation but to chart a path of action, to blaze the path of regeneration.”[23] As such, Iqbal and Fanon once again intersect at similar positions; Fanon, in rebellion against history as a definitive marker of personhood, and a critic in its usefulness in liberation of colonized subjects, and Iqbal, in contradiction to popular cultural mythos of Indian Muslims as a group of people in a state of damnation. Iqbal writes:
They do not see the truths which are veiled
Whose eyes are laden by slavery and blind imitation,
How are they to revive Iran and Arabia
These who are themselves enchained by western civilisation?[24]
In this, he forms a critique aimed at both “traditional religious authorities” and “‘modernist’ intellectuals” due to the former’s inability to reconceive and revive Islam in accordance with modern needs and due to the latter’s (perceived) adherence to Western conceptions (such as the nation-state).[25] Critiques of this fashion form the crux of Iqbal’s arguments surrounding the future of Indian Muslims, in accordance with the development of khudi and a Muslim community of a higher spiritual status.
Iqbal’s notions of khudi are not solely focused upon the individual capacity for improvement, but also on the connection between this self-attainment and the development of (a Muslim) society. Sevea explains that “[a]lthough he championed the need for the fullest development of the khudi, Iqbal located its development firmly within the ambit of the social body, […] [arguing] that society was an indispensable medium for the development of the individual.”[26] For Iqbal, this formed the basis for his political assertions of a community united through religion. However, Sevea also states that Iqbal’s conceptions of the connection between society and the development of khudi still meant that “the individual was never completely merged into the social body. The khudi maintained its selfhood even as it was tied to society; in fact, it was strengthened by its link with society.”[27] For Iqbal, this is of importance due to his own place in the political discourses of the Muslims of India at the time, and his own conceptions of religious community as opposed to the nation-state. Additionally, khudi was postulated as a conception applicable to each human; each person had the ability to actualize or reach their full potential, being a uniting concept in this sense.
Fanon writes, after the retelling of the train incident, that “I wanted quite simply to be a man among men. I would have liked to enter our world young and sleek, a world we could build together.”[28] When analyzed in conjunction with Iqbal’s observations on khudi, it can be said that the ethos of Fanon’s project lies, firstly, in recognizing the denial of Black/colonized subjects’ ability to participate in the world without impositions of racial categorization and hierarchies, which hinder them in their selfhood, both in the way they are viewed in society, and in the way they view themselves. This has implications for colonized subjects who are denied connection with a liberated world in which harmony and self-actualization are promoted. Secondly, Fanon acknowledges the possibility of the subversion of this model through resistance. This is an undeniably collective struggle, as Fanon says, “I was committed to myself and my fellow man, to fight with all my life and all my strength so that never again would people be enslaved on this Earth.”[29] Fanon’s assertion here shares similarities with the development of khudi, in that Iqbal asserted that it was possible for each person to realize their full potential, which was particularly important within the context of societal connection – for Iqbal, this idea was the foundation of his vision of a renewed Muslim society.
The humanistic and all-encompassing style of Fanon and Iqbal’s writings, as well as their focus on the potential for a future, liberated society, results in striking parallels in the way they conceive of this future. Fanon asks towards the end of Black Skin, “[w]as my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?” underscoring the centrality of the human figure to a future post-colonial reality, as opposed to society under racial/colonial hierarchy.[30] Iqbal expresses similar sentiments of a world designed after a higher-level selfhood:
Build thy clay into a Man,
Build thy Man into a World!
If thou art unfit to be either a wall or a door,
Someone else will make bricks of thine earth.
O thou who complainest of the cruelty of Heaven,
Thou whose glass cries out against the injustice of the stone,
How long this wailing and crying and lamentation?
How long this perpetual beating of thy breast?
The pith of Life is contained in action,
To delight in creation is the law of Life.
Arise and create a new world![31]
Throughout Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon investigates the instillation of the colonial inferiority complex and the naturalization of race as an ostensibly natural phenomenon, and how this manifests for the colonized subject as a corrupted sense of self, who is then bound to such a societal imposition. Iqbal uses the device of obscuring himself within his poetry to illustrate a dialectic between the known self and an unknown self, positing that both should not be suppressed under societal constraints and norms. Through this device, Iqbal is able to illustrate the essential difference between the self and the surrounding society and its norms. In terms of the possibility of future liberation, Fanon advocates for moving beyond reassertions of the past in an attempt to reconstruct an identity and for forcibly demonstrating selfhood/humanity before the colonizer, while Iqbal discusses the connection between the realization of selfhood and societal processes, within his historical context, as the basis for a revival of Islamic society. When analyzed in synthesis, both philosophies reveal a central impetus of collective liberation from colonial structures/realities, which allow for the manifestation of autonomy for all subjects in the present and future.
Bibliography
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Iqbal, Mohammad. Kulliyat-i-Iqbal, 531–532. Quoted in Sevea, Iqbal Singh. The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 62.
Iqbal, Mohammad. “Setting forth the inner meanings of the names of Ali.” In The Secrets of the Self (Asrar-i-Khudi). Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57317
Nielsen, Cynthia. “Resistance through re-narration: Fanon on de-constructing racialized subjectivities.” African Identities 9, no. 4 (2011): 363–385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2011.614410
Parris, LaRose, “Frantz Fanon: existentialist, dialectician, and revolutionary.” Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 7 (2011): 4-23. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A306596764/LitRC
Sevea, Iqbal Singh. The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Shah, Saliha. “‘A Stranger in the City’”: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)Belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures.” Life Writing 21, no. 2 (2024): 333–48. doi:10.1080/14484528.2023.2205547.
Endnotes
[1] Saliha Shah, “‘A Stranger in the City’”: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)Belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures,” Life Writing 21, no. 2 (2024): 338. doi:10.1080/14484528.2023.2205547
[2] Shah, “‘A Stranger in the City,’” 340.
[3] Shah, “‘A Stranger in the City,’” 341.
[4] Shah, “‘A Stranger in the City,’” 341.
[5] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 91.
[7] Shah, “‘A Stranger in the City,’” 337.
[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90-92.
[9] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92
[10] Cynthia Nielsen. “Resistance through re-narration: Fanon on de-constructing racialized subjectivities.” African Identities 9, no. 4 (2011): 368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.fz2011.614410
[11] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90
[12] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90
[13] LaRose Parris, “Frantz Fanon: Existentialist, Dialectician, and Revolutionary.” Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 7 (2011): 15. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A306596764/LitRC
[14] Shah, “‘A Stranger in the City,’” 344.
[15] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92, 100.
[16] Nielsen, “Resistance through Re-Narration,” 370.
[17] Parris, “Frantz Fanon,” 17.
[18] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 201.
[19] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 202.
[20] Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 69.
[21] Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 71.
[22] Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 73-74.
[23] Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 78.
[24] Muhammad Iqbal, Kulliyat-i-Iqbal, pp. 531–532, quoted in Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 62.
[25] Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 62.
[26] Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 139-140
[27] Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 167.
[28] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.
[29] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 202.
[30] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206/
[31] Mohammad Iqbal. “Setting forth the inner meanings of the names of Ali.” In The Secrets of the Self (Asrar-i-Khudi), trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57317