I am watching the news with my brother-in-law on a drizzly October evening at his house in Yvelines, southwest of Paris. He stands against a mahogany dining table uncommittedly, face expressionless and inscrutable. I am sunk in a huge sofa, feeling the foreigner. Abdulley graciously entertains my futile attempts at pigeon-French small-talk with brief polite smiles, like a pilot does the mumbled gratitude of a relieved passenger disembarking his aircraft. We are both on the move; I briefly touching base with family, he between trips home to Senegal. I feel we’re watching the 8’oclock bulletin as if in parallel worlds.
Then onto the screen jumps a shocking image that would be completely unprecedented in British broadcasting. There, in full HD, is a cartoon of a bearded man, bent prostrate on a rug, his rear end and genitals showing. At best, to the most ignorant, it passes as tasteless toilet wall humour, hardly broadcast worthy. Only, as you must surely know, this isn’t a joke; it’s literally a matter of life and death.
You do not need any knowledge of French current affairs or history: of hundreds of years of French empire-building and industrial-scale human trafficking, of France’s nineteenth-century “missions civilisatrices” in north and west African states, the oft-brutal subjugation and killing of native peoples, the mercenary use of African soldier-subjects in two world wars, the ghettoization of its migrant workers in the supposed Trente Glorieuses of the 1940s to 70s and the still-persistent determined persecution and alienation of its own Muslim citizens under the guise of secularism; you do not need to know any of this to know that this image is explosive. You simply need to know that this is a recognizable representation of one way in which millions of people, including my African brother, choose to pray to their God.
In this moment, whether we react with silence or exclamation, shock or sorrow, outrage or disgust, in unison or discord, neither of us can escape one plain, ineluctable fact; I am the white man and he the black; I in my natural born privilege and he, lawyer, good citizen, employer, taxpayer, father, and devout religious man always, as the boxer Muhammad Ali so compellingly conveyed, having to account for himself and his people. And in what seems to me an inescapable sign of Abdulley’s bruising encounter with France’s proud secular entrenchment, he simply shrugs and moves almost imperceptibly to inspect the firm-fleshed red snapper my sister-in-law bagged at market, now floundering on the kitchen table waiting for the chopper.
The psychiatrist, socio-therapist, and political philosopher Frantz Fanon might have described this moment as the excoriating lightning strike of the colonial encounter, lighting up in searing starkness the massive psycho-existential complex of race politics in which we’re still swimming, and about which he so compellingly wrote in his classic 1952 text Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). Born in the old French Indies colony of Martinique, Fanon died young in the U.S., but was buried in a martyr’s grave in Eastern Algeria, having fought with the Algerians for their independence in a brutal war with France (1954–1962).
This Guerre d’Algerie, crucial to any understanding of recent French colonial history, barely got a mention in the French classrooms of my generation (the 1980s), which is only a slight improvement on the subject of centuries of profitable slave trading and brutal subjugation that got no mention at all. That is quite something when you consider that in just the late eighteenth century alone, a staggering 1,381,000 souls were loaded on to ships bound for the Caribbean island of Haiti (colonized and renamed by the Spaniards as Hispaniola), of which some 216,000 never saw land again; not so much laid to rest as tossed overboard, like spoiled goods to add to the general mid-Atlantic flotsam and jetsam.
What horrified and enraged Fanon was not just the systematic robbery of a people’s resources, livelihoods, self-determination, and life. What Fanon fought to articulate was the wild-fire speed and efficiency with which the colonized mind is inflamed and infected with the distorting values of its parasitic invader; how easily the conqueror’s fearsome might and overwhelming dominance tear through the subject’s self, ripping up the fragile fabric of personhood and place; in short, how the Pied-Noir or Blackfoot’s selfhood is so quickly jettisoned, under a crushing pressure, for the promise of being like “that,” like “them”—for the promise of being white.
This same wish haunted the author Toni Morrison, who gave it heart-wrenching life and voice in the broken-winged protagonist of her 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye. Pecola, a rag-doll black girl, debased and shattered by kith, kin, and Jim Crow America, and consumed by the promise of white beauty, dreams of returning a white gaze with eyes the colour of sky. But unlike Fanon, Morrison, who is perhaps better fortified through the subterranean well-spring of family resilience and a childhood relatively free of the most rabid racism, manages to articulate a more intimate, nuanced, and complex portrait of human survival, failing, and strength in a racist-riven continent. As she writes in her Forward:
In exploring the social and domestic aggression that could cause a child to literally fall apart, I mounted a series of rejections, some routine, some exceptional, some monstrous, all the while trying hard to avoid complicity in the demonization process Pecola was subjected to. That is, I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.
And why did Morrison choose melanin of the eye and not the skin? She describes once having known a girl like Pecola. But perhaps the eyes have it because, as Fanon points out, it is the racist gaze, the visual banding and branding of skin tone, that most thoroughly constitutes the racialized subject. Using the artless indefatigability of a perturbed child, Fanon dramatizes the excruciating moment of interception and incision like this:
“Look a Nègre!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile
“Look, a Nègre!” It was true, it amused me.
“Look, a Nègre!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement
“Mama, see the Nègre! I’m frightened.” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
Where does this painful account leave us, when trying to make sense of the white-man-medicine that is called psychotherapy?
Lottie is in her twenty-fifth session of psychotherapy. She is tall for her age, and slim, and sports a big afro. Outside of the session room she is quiet, although she is disruptive at school because, she says, she likes the attention. This striking-looking teenager with a strong jaw, proud brow, and the deepest charcoal eyes, has been living with her Nigerian foster-mother, Rosita, since she was four. She doesn’t have much contact with her dad and doesn’t remember her mother, who perished, along with her baby sisters, in the fire that swept through their home, taking everything she knew. All she has is a single thumb-curled finger-smudged photograph of a slim and beautiful young woman, dark as hewn ebony with teeth like dusky pearls, on the back of which is scrawled “somalia97” in blue ballpoint.
When Lottie and I started therapy, she told me she cut off her previous therapist because she wasn’t jolly. “What does that mean?” I wondered out loud, and she replied: “She kept looking at the floor.”
“What do you think she was doing?” I asked.
“Daydreaming,” she replied.
“Oh, so maybe you thought she lost sight of you?”
She nodded. Soon after a promising start, my own gaze became a complicated thing for Lottie. She would make a camera shaped aperture with her fingers and peer through it at me or she would lounge on the sofa and cover her face with slender fingers, regarding me through the cracks. Sometimes she would play a kind of peek-a-boo, making me wonder how she was looked at or watched as a little one.
Today she starts another dystopian Playmobile tableau of alternately furious and seductive parents, corrupted police, and feral children in huge fights. The denigration stitched into these misanthropic dramas has by now seeped out of the stories and into her exchanges with me. Tossing her phone at me, she barks “Charge it!” And when I look back at her quizzically, she gives me a well-practiced grotesque sneer or “screw face,” snatching it back and settling down on the sofa. Occasionally she throws me a comic-hostile glance. A few minutes later she’s shouting “Stop staring at me. Look over there!” pointing to the room corner.
For the rest of the session, we’re both in a kind of terribly sad and subdued hangdog standoff. In the silence I think she’s scared I’m mind reading. I think I must represent troubled past relationships. I think she’s caught between wanting and fearing closeness to others. I don’t think about my white skin. And then in the last five minutes, Lottie asks me a strange question. “Did you know that tulips grow in Kenya? Did you know that, Adam? They grow black tulips in Kenya. No, you didn’t know that Adam, did you. You didn’t know that.”
Before I can really think of what it is I want to say, I hear myself replying: “And to be honest, what would a white man like me really know about a black girl like you?” It is the most important thing I am going to say in my time with her. From that point on, we speak more freely if sporadically about color and race and history and ignorance.
Though there was warmth and will there, the therapy with Lottie petered out. And in the years since, my questions have only grown. What is it really like for a black girl to submit herself to a white man’s gaze, when the white man represents an authority and social milieu relatively oblivious to her experience, and therefore ignorant of her concerns? What is it like to be specimen of a white man’s scientific contrivance; not exactly skull measuring, but the invitation to submit to an alien setting; to be removed from reassuring kinship ties and familiar territory; to enter a small chamber with a kind, but relatively mirthless stranger expecting the most intimate disclosure and giving little away; to learn an alien language of unease invented by white men in colonial Europe; to take as true and good, paradigms of psychic reality and models of coping that largely privilege rational thought over what are still sometimes professionally termed “primitive” ways of thinking and being? What is that like?
If the question does not beg an answer, which it should, it at least begs another question. What are white people going to do about it? In cabin footage from 1974, Muhammad Ali can be seen with pilots and crew, crossing the Sahara Desert toward the most iconic fight of his life, famously, and now questionably, known as the Rumble in the Jungle, with the heavyweight bruiser, George Foreman. In just a couple of super-eloquent sentences with his inimitable deeply subversive humor, Ali gives us a vision of a very different world order:
Ain’t this something, flying a plane with ALL black pilots, ALL black crew? This is strange to the American negro. We never dreamed of this! And every time we watched television, they show us Tarzan and the natives and the jungles; they never told us that Africans were more intelligent than we are.
Ali won the fight; not with brawn—he was at that point too slow and old on his feet—but with a mixture of psychological warfare and sheer endurance. Goading Foreman all the way, he made the man punch himself out, before knocking him down with less than a handful of killer blows. But whilst his mantra, like Fanon’s, might have been to stay in the ring, roll with the punches, and then fight back, part of Ali’s vision was essentially and positively celestial; no less than a heaven on earth in which everywhere you look, high or low, you see a person of color, a person like you, looking back.
What Fanon, Morrison, and Ali encourage us to do is to imagine a world, a psychotherapy even, with completely different ingredients; to imagine talking a different kind of language, thinking different kinds of thoughts, moving beyond, as the psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion once encouraged, the comforts of memory and desire. To imagine truly creolized institutions and helping relationships as vehicles for a nourishing hybridization, as loci for openness, genuine exchange, and enriching innovation. To imagine, as a psychotherapist, swapping fifty minutes between four ivory walls for a place in the thick of it, a place where it’s at, immersed in the visceral, vibrant, sometimes violent landscapes that are people’s everyday lives.
Let us return to Abdulley in the kitchen later that evening. He’s chopping up the snapper to make a huge aromatic platter of Thieboudienne (“Ceebu Jen” in Wolof), the national dish of Senegal. This delicious mouth-watering fish and rice recipe has an instructive origin myth. It is said that whilst preparing a meal at the Governor’s Palace in colonial Saint Louis, a town on the Atlantic board, the cook, Penda Mbaye, ran out of barley, and so cracked open a sack of broken rice. The rice, an inferior “waste” product hailing from colonial Vietnam, was dumped by the French on the African market. With these broken grains Mbaye, so the fable goes, invents this kind of African Gumbo, combining the foreign and the familiar, to make a hybrid dish to nourish generations to come.
Adam Goren
Adam Goren is a psychoanalytically trained child psychotherapist and lead clinician in London, England. He specializes in working with traumatized adopted children and their families. He is also an essayist and painter interested in creatively traversing borders and boundaries to produce works that offer novel or unusual perspectives.
