The black man who has lived in France for a certain time returns home radically transformed. The native islander who has never left his hole, the country bumpkin, adopts a most eloquent form of ambivalence toward them. After a fairly long stay in the métropole, many Antilleans return home to be deified. On this subject I shall indicate a fact that must have struck my fellow islanders. The black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod. Then-and this is the essential point-there is what lies beyond his island. First, there is his island: Basse Pointe, Marigot, Gros Morne, in opposition to the imposing city of Fort-de-France. The same process repeats itself in the case of the Martinican. If you meet him on his return from Paris, and especially if you’ve never been to the capital, he’ll never stop singing its praises: Paris, City of Light the Seine the riverside dance cafés see Paris and die. He will boast of how calm his city is, how bewitchingly beautiful are the banks of the Rhône, how magnificent are the plane trees, and so many other things that people with nothing to do like to go on about. ![]() There is the capital, there are the provinces. They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master’s orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status. In the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of Senegalese soldiers, the “native” officers are mainly interpreters. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. Going one step farther, we shall enlarge the scope of our description to include every colonized subject.Īll colonized people-in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave-position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. For the time being we would like to demonstrate why the black Antillean, whoever he is, always has to justify his stance in relation to language. In a work in progress we propose to study this phenomenon. Paul Val”ry knew this, and described language as “The god gone astray in the flesh.” You can see what we are driving at: there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language. A man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language. We are fully aware that this is one of man’s attitudes faced with Being. The problem we shall tackle in this chapter is as follows: the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets-i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being. We would very much like to be given credit for certain points that, however unacceptable they may appear early on, will prove to be factually accurate. Since the situation is not one-sided, the study should reflect this. ![]() To speak means being able to use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology of such and such a language, but it means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization. This question is terribly present in our lives. How can we possibly not hear that voice again tumbling down the steps of History: “It’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it.” These are objective facts that state reality.īut once we have taken note of the situation, once we have understood it, we consider the job done. Nobody dreams of challenging the fact that its principal inspiration is nurtured by the core of theories which represent the black man as the missing link in the slow evolution from ape to man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking. ![]() ![]() A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man’s dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.
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