THE MASK

There is a mask of which I heard many times during my childhood. It was the mask Escrava Anastácia was made to wear. The many recounts and the detailed descriptions seemed to warn me that they were not simple facts of the past, but living memories buried in our psyche, ready to be told. Today, I want to re-tell them. I want to speak about that brutal mask of speechlessness.

This mask was a very concrete piece, a real instrument, which became a part of the European colonial project for more than three hundred years. It was composed of a bit placed inside the mouth of the Black subject, clamped between the tongue and the jaw, and fixed behind the head with two strings, one surrounding the chin and the other surrounding the nose and forehead. Formally, the mask was used by white masters to prevent enslaved Africans from eating sugar cane or cocoa beans while working on the plantations, but its primary function was to implement a sense of speechlessness and fear, inasmuch as the mouth was a place of both muteness and torture.

In this sense, the mask represents colonialism as a whole. It symbolizes the sadistic politics of conquest and its cruel regimes of silencing the so-called ‘Others:’ Who can speak? What happens when we speak? And what can we speak about?

THE MOUTH

The mouth is a very special organ, it symbolizes speech and enunciation. Within racism, it becomes the organ of oppression par excellence; it represents the organ whites want – and need – to control.

In this particular scenario, the mouth is also a metaphor for possession. It is fantasized that the Black subject wants to possess something that belongs to the white master, the fruits: the sugar cane and the cocoa beans. She or he wants to eat them, devour them, dispossessing the master of its goods. Although the plantation and its fruits do ‘morally’ belong to the colonized, the colonizer interprets it perversely, reading it as a sign of robbery. “We are taking what is Theirs” becomes “They are taking what is Ours.”

We are dealing here with a process of denial, for the master denies its project of colonization and asserts it onto the colonized. It is this moment of asserting onto the other what the subject refuses to recognize in her/himself that characterizes the ego defense mechanism.

Escrava Anastácia[3]

In racism, denial is used to maintain and legitimate violent structures of racial exclusion: “They want to take what is Ours and therefore They have to be controlled.” The first and original information – “We are taking what is Theirs” – is denied and projected onto the ‘Other’ – “They are taking what is Ours” – who becomes what the white subject does not want to be acquainted with. While the Black subject turns into the intrusive enemy, who has to be controlled; the white subject becomes the sympathetic victim, who is forced to control. In other words, the oppressor becomes the oppressed, and the oppressed, the tyrant.

This is based upon processes in which split off parts of the psyche are projected outside, always creating the so-called ‘Other’ as an antagonist to the ‘self.’ This splitting evokes the fact that the white subject is somehow divided within her/himself, for she/he develops two attitudes toward external reality: only one part of the ego – the ‘good,’ accepting and benevolent – is experienced as ‘self;’ the rest – the ‘bad,’ rejecting and malevolent – is projected onto the ‘Other’ and experienced as external. The Black subject becomes then a screen of projection for what the white subject fears to acknowledge about her/himself: in this case, the violent thief, the indolent and malicious robber.

Such dishonorable aspects, whose intensity causes too much anxiety, guilt or shame, are projected outside as a means of escaping them. In psychoanalytical terms, this allows positive feelings toward oneself to remain intact – whiteness as the ‘good’ self – while the manifestations of the ‘bad’ self are projected onto the outside and seen as external ‘bad’ objects. In the white conceptual world, the Black subject is identified as the ‘bad’ object, embodying those aspects that white society has repressed and made taboo, that is, aggression and sexuality. We therefore come to coincide with the threatening, the dangerous, the violent, the thrilling, the exciting and also the dirty, but desirable, allowing whiteness to look at itself as morally ideal, decent, civilized and majestically generous, in complete control, and free of the anxiety its historicity causes.

THE WOUND[4]

Within this unfortunate dynamic, the Black subject becomes not only the ‘Other’ – the difference against which the white ‘self’ is measured – but also ‘Otherness’ – the personification of the repressed aspects of the white ‘self.’ In other words, we become the mental representation of what the white subject does not want to be like. Toni Morrison (1992) uses the expression ‘unlikeness’ to describe whiteness as a dependent identity that exists through the exploitation of the ‘Other,’ a relational identity constructed by whites defining themselves as unlike racial ‘Others.’ That is, Blackness serves as the primary form of Otherness by which whiteness is constructed. The ‘Other’ is not other per se; it becomes such through a process of absolute denial. In this sense, Frantz Fanon writes:

What is often called the Black soul is a white man’s artifact (1967: 110)

This sentence reminds us that it is not the Black subject we are dealing with, but white fantasies of what Blackness should be like. Fantasies, which do not represent us, but the white imaginary. They are the denied aspects of the white self which are re-projected onto us, as if they were authoritative and objective pictures of ourselves. They are however not of our concern. ‘I cannot go to a film’ writes Fanon ‘I wait for me’ (1967: 140). He waits for the Black savages, the Black barbarians, the Black servants, the Black prostitutes, whores and courtesans, the Black criminals, murderers and drug dealers. He waits for what he is not.

We could actually say that in the white conceptual world, it is as if the collective unconscious of Black people is pre-programmed for alienation, disappointment and psychic trauma, since the images of Blackness we are confronted with are neither realistic nor gratifying. What an alienation, to be forced to identify with heroes who are white and reject enemies who appear as Black. What a disappointment, to be forced to look at ourselves as if we were in their place. What a pain, to be trapped in this colonial order.

This should be our preoccupation. We should not worry about the white subject in colonialism, but rather about the fact that the Black subject is always forced to develop a relationship to her/himself through the alienating presence of the white other (Hall 1996). Always placed as the ‘Other,’ never as the self.

‘What else could it be for me,’ asks Fanon, ‘but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?’ (1967: 112). He uses the language of trauma, like most Black people when speaking of their everyday experiences of racism, indicating the painful bodily impact and loss characteristic of a traumatic collapse, for within racism one is surgically removed, violently separated, from whatever identity one might really have. Such separation is defined as classic trauma, since it deprives one of one’s own link with a society unconsciously thought of as white. ‘I felt knife blades open within me … I could no longer laugh’ (1967:112), he remarks. There is indeed nothing to laugh about, as one is being overdeterminated from the outside by violent fantasies one sees, but one does not recognize as being oneself.

This is the trauma of the Black subject; it lies exactly in this state of absolute Otherness in relation to the white subject. An infernal circle: ‘When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color.’ Fanon writes ‘Either way, I am locked’ (1967: 116). Locked within unreason. It seems then that Black people’s trauma stems not only from family-based events, as classical psychoanalysis argues, but rather from the traumatizing contact with the violent unreason of the white world, that is, with the unreason of racism that places us always as ‘Other,’ as different, as incompatible, as conflicting, as strange and uncommon. This unreasonable reality of racism is described by Frantz Fanon as traumatic.

I was hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother‘s side, but by an entire race. I was up against something unreasoned. The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than this encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason (Fanon 1967: 118).

Later he continues, ‘I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice (…) it was up to the white man to be more irrational than I’ (1967: 123). It would seem that the unreason of racism is trauma.

SPEAKING THE SILENCE

The mask, therefore, raises many questions: Why must the mouth of the Black subject be fastened? Why must she or he be silenced? What could the Black subject say if her or his mouth were not sealed? And what would the white subject have to listen to? There is an apprehensive fear that if the colonial subject speaks, the colonizer will have to listen. She/he would be forced into an uncomfortable confrontation with ‘Other’ truths. Truths that have been denied, repressed and kept quiet, as secrets. I do like this phrase “quiet as it’s kept.” It is an expression of the African Diasporic people that announces how someone is about to reveal what is presumed to be a secret. Secrets like slavery. Secrets like colonialism. Secrets like racism.

The white fear of listening to what could possibly be revealed by the Black subject can be articulated by Sigmund Freud’s notion of repression, since the ‘essence of repression,’ he writes, ‘lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at distance, from the conscious’ (1923: 17). It is that process by which unpleasant ideas – and unpleasant truths – are rendered unconscious, out of awareness, due to the extreme anxiety, guilt or shame they cause. However, while buried in the unconscious as secrets, they remain latent and capable of being revealed at any moment. The mask sealing the mouth of the Black subject prevents the white master from listening to those latent truths she/he wants ‘to turn away,’ ‘keep at a distance,’ at the margins, uunoticed and ‘quiet.’ So to speak, it protects the white subject from acknowledging ‘Other’ knowledge. Once confronted with the collective secrets and the unpleasant truths of that very dirty history,[5] the white subject commonly argues: ‘not to know…,’ ‘not to understand…,’ ‘not to remember…,’ ‘not to believe…’ or ‘not to be convinced by…’. These are expressions of this process of repression by which the subject resists making the unconscious information conscious; that is, one wants to make the known unknown.

Repression is, in this sense, the defense by which the ego controls and exercises censorship of what is instigated as an ‘unpleasant’ truth. Speaking becomes then virtually impossible, as when we speak, our speech is often interpreted as a dubious interpretation of reality, not imperative enough to be either spoken or listened to. This impossibility illustrates how speaking and silencing emerge as an analogous project. The act of speaking is like a negotiation between those who speak and those who listen, between the speaking subjects and their listeners (Castro Varela & Dhawan 2003). Listening is, in this sense, the act of authorization toward the speaker. One can (only) speak when one’s voice is listened to. Within this dialect, those who are listened to are those who ‘belong.’ And those who are not listened to become those who ‘do not belong.’ The mask re-creates this project of silencing, controlling the possibility that the Black subject might one day be listened to and consequently might belong.

In a public speech Paul Gilroy[6] described five different ego defense mechanisms the white subject goes through in order to be able to ‚listen,‘ that is in order to become aware of its own whiteness and of itself as a performer of racism: denial / guilt / shame / recognition / reparation. Even though Gilroy did not explain this chain of ego defense mechanisms, I would like to do so here, as it is both important and enlightening.

Denial, is an ego defense mechanism that operates unconsciously to resolve emotional conflict, by refusing to admit the more unpleasant aspects of external reality and internal thoughts or feelings. It is the refusal to acknowledge the truth. Denial is followed by two other ego defense mechanisms: splitting and projection. As I wrote earlier, the subject denies that she/he has such-and-such feelings, thoughts or experiences, but goes on to assert that someone else does. The original information – “We are taking what is Theirs” or “We are racist” – is denied and projected onto the ‘Others:’ “They come here and take what is Ours,” “They are racist.” To diminish emotional shock and grief, the Black subject would say: “We are indeed taking what is Theirs” or “I never experienced racism.” Denial is often confused with negation; these are, however, two different ego defense mechanisms. In the latter, a feeling, thought or experience is admitted to the conscious in its negative form (Laplanche & Pontalis 1988). For instance: “We are not taking what is Theirs” or “We are not racist.”

After denial is guilt, the emotion that follows the infringement of a moral injunction. It is an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something that one believes one should not have done, or the way around, having not done something one believes one should have done. Freud describes this as the result of a conflict between the ego and the super-ego, that is, a conflict between one’s own aggressive wishes toward others and the super-ego (authority). The subject is not trying to assert on others what she/he fears to acknowledge in her/himself, like in denial, but is instead pre-occupied with the consequences of her/his own infringement: ‘accusation,’ ‘blame,’ ‘punishment.’ Guilt differs from anxietyintellectualizationrationalizationwhitedisbeliefwhitewhitewhite