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Fanon and Hair
Fatima Seck
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie française et de
langue française, Vol XXX, No 2 (2022) pp 102-110.
Vol XXX, No 2 (2022)
ISSN 1936-6280 (print)
ISSN 2155-1162 (online)
DOI 10.5195/jffp.2022.1031
www.jffp.org
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
Vol XXX, No 2 (2022) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2022.1031
Fanon and Hair
Fatima Seck
University of Maryland
Moi-même, au début, j’avais du mal à aller au travail en afro. J’ai fait
des nattes pendant un temps, puis j’ai porté un bandeau, avant de les
laisser naturels. J’étais assez fière. Mes collègues rechignaient sans
oser me dire franchement qu’ils n’aimaient pas mon allure. A leur
réaction, j’ai vu qu’ils préféraient les nattes à l'afro. Un jour,
j’attendais le bus, une voiture s’est arrêtée et on m’a demandé si
j’allais chez le coiffeur…C’est dur. J’avais besoin d’encouragements
et d’aide pour faire les nattes et les vanilles. Maintenant, ça va, je
gère. Je suis les conseils de coiffure sur YouTube. J’ai un peu peur que
le mouvement nappy ne soit qu’un effet de mode éphémère. Ce serait
dommage car on commence à s’habituer à voir des coiffures
naturelles. Il ne faudrait pas que les générations futures souffrent des
mêmes problèmes de cheveux que leurs aînées.
– Cynthia Tocny, Chef de projet informatique bancaire.
At first, I was uncomfortable going to work in an afro. I had
braids for a while, then I wore a headband, before wearing my
hair naturally. I was quite proud. My colleagues were hesitant
and did not dare to tell me that quite frankly, they did not like
my appearance. From their reaction, I saw that they preferred
the braids to the afro. One day, I was waiting for the bus, a car
stopped, and they asked me if I was going to the hairdresser...
It’s hard. I needed support and help to do the braids and the
twists. But now, it is okay, I can manage it. I follow the hairstyle
tips on YouTube. I am a bit fearful that the nappy movement is
nothing but a trend. It would be a shame because we are
getting used to seeing natural hairstyles. Future generations
should not suffer from the same hair problems as their elders
–Cynthia Tocny, IT project manager in Banking
(translation mine)
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What would it mean to think about Frantz Fanon’s work on race,
embodiment, and identity in the context of the contemporary cultural politics
of Black hair? Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks offers us some key terms for
deepening our engagement with this issue and, in that continuing relevance,
his work tells us something important about the persistence of the colonial
gaze in contemporary life. The discourse around Black hair has evolved to
mean more than what it meant in the 1960s and 1970s, even with all the
resonant continuities. Though it continues to revolve around the symbol of
Black beauty, celebration and resistance, the symbol is not exclusive to one
single hairstyle choice. One of the perils of freedom is the ability to exercise
the right of choice. That includes the freedom to choose how you want to look
and what language you want to speak. This is about giving agency to Black
bodies to make choices that make meaning for them, self-invention between
Black peoples, and thus to not define such meaning in terms of the white gaze
or white ear. In trying to create safe spaces for self-invention, we must take
caution as not to create barriers around emergent thoughts, visions, and ideas
that are in some basic way uncategorizable. The existence of Blackness on its
own terms, measured without the white gaze, has long been obscured so we
should take caution to not dismiss or degrade any aesthetic that does not fit a
specific type of (racial) mold.
An autobiographical note. As a Black woman born to Senegalese
parents, raised in the United Arab Emirates and now living in the United
States, I have always been around multiple cultures and that came with the
ability to now speak multiple languages (Wolof, English, Arabic and French).
And my hair journey has ranged from having an Afro, braids, perming my
hair, going through a period of transition, wearing it natural, adding
extensions and the list goes on. Many have tried to contest my Blackness for
one reason or another – aesthetic and linguistic. But, in no way am I less Black
than another because of a hairstyle choice or the languages I speak. My
Blackness has always been spoken to me by my family. My Blackness is a
constant reminder to me by society. My Blackness is rooted in my experiences.
My Blackness is rooted in my very existence. As long as I continue to live in
my Black body, no one can take away my Blackness, and all the
marvelousness it is capable of. To this, Fanon might suggest I read his Black
Skin, White Masks as a way to explain my back-and-forth hair journey between
the natural and the permed, in order to deepen an understanding of the effects
of colonialism on the Black psyche.
Though Fanon’s perspective can explain so much this, I would like to
put his text in dialogue with Rokhaya Diallo’s Afro
1
a book project in which
she compiles the experiences of 120 Afropeans, men and women living in
France, documenting their experience of wearing their natural hair in an
interracial public. Experiences range from those of professors, bankers to
ministers and civil servants. And it works from the plain fact that hair dictates
so many factors in a Black woman's life. Although the Afropeans in the study
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are talking about hair, their experience conveys more broadly what it means
for a Black body as such to exist in predominantly white spaces. By putting
these two texts in dialogue, can we extend Fanon’s discourse around that to
which Black bodies must conform when existing in white spaces? To what
extent does Fanon’s theorization of Black bodies in white spaces hold up?
To better grasp Fanon’s understanding of Black bodies' existence in
white spaces, our way into theorizing the culture and politics of Black hair, I
want to begin by looking at his discourse on language in Black Skin, White
Masks. When looking at Fanon’s discourse on language, it is important to
remember the time and period of this text, a time when the Vichy period had
so deeply influenced people’s attitudes towards their own Blackness. As
Fanon states, “every West Indian, before the war of 1939, there was not only the
certainty of superiority over the African, but the certainty of a fundamental
difference. The African was a Negro and the West Indian a European.”
2
Thus,
when the Second World War broke out, Martinicans were caught in the
untenable psychological position of believing that they were French, exactly
like (and equal to) the metropole, while simultaneously rejecting and
repressing their Black identity. From this, we can see how the text Black Skin,
White Masks was influenced by this moment and the subsequent rise of Black
consciousness–embracing one’s Black identity and rejecting any association
with the French metropole. This is highlighted in many moments throughout
the text where Fanon signifies a clear divide between the Black and white
body, while also maintaining an aspiriational relationship. For example,
Fanon notes how a Black person cannot exist in a white space without
changing their true self: “Among a group of young Antilleans, he who can
express himself, who masters the language, is the one to look out for: be wary
of him; he’s almost white. In France, they say ‘to speak like a book.’ In
Martinique, they say ‘to speak like a white man.’”
3
Fanon’s ambiguities in articulating an either/or framework of
approaching language, either Black people speak their heritage language or
that of the colonizer, follows the colonial ideology and value placed “one-
language, one-state, and one-nation.”
4
I would like to shift away from an
either/or framework and adopt a both/and framework, one that tolerates the
coexistence of languages, cultures, and different views on the Black body.
Black bodies have been used and extracted from, but what happens when the
Black body takes autonomy and agency and can exist in multiple different
spaces in multiple different modes? Fanon emphasizes his argument by
looking to the Antillean living abroad, namely France, and being an altered
individual upon their return home. However, we can see how Diallo’s
arguments in Afro demonstrates critical narratives about selfhood and the
body and that, although it may be challenging to keep one’s Black essence, it
is still possible to do so while existing in white spaces.
As a way of seeing the effects of additional languages on the Black
tongue, we can also look to English Language Learning (ELL) for adults. The
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reason for looking to ELLs is because they are perfect examples of individuals
who are both heritage speakers and gaining the language proficiency of
European languages. In an essay on decolonizing language and linguistic
practices for ELLs, Chaka Chaka argues the need to revisit the learner labels
attributed to ELLs, as they are often often framed negatively, resulting in
“raciolinguistic profiling of these learners, as they end up being classified by
their race, panethnicity, nationality, immigrant/refugee status, regionality,
and at times, by their skin color in addition to their language abilities.”
5
Chaka
points to how ELL remediation models that hope to fix ELL’s English
language errors are problematic. One of the reasons Chaka points to is that
the othering of ELLs leads to a “belief that ELLs are different from dominant,
monolingual English speakers.”
6
In doing this, these models follow “the
different ideology, or on what Gutiérrez and Orellana refer to as genres of
difference, which do exactly what they are intended to do: frame difference
(e.g., multilingualism) as a pathology or characterize ELLs as linguistic others.
Additionally, such models are driven by the essentialized and racialized
notion of whiteness. Whiteness adopts and appropriates a dominant and
normalizing vantage point that frames and conceptualizes other racial groups
differentially.”
7
Furthermore, Chaka points to how,
equating the native speaker to Standard English is an ideological
tendency that is oblivious to correct varieties of English used and
spoken by people of color, as well as by those who are not necessarily
natives as implied by the native speaker construct. The same applies to
equating the native speaker to whiteness: there are native speakers of
English who are not White. So, this metonymic equation tends to erase
native non-White speakers of English from existence.
8
The concept of genres of difference put forth applies to both hair and language
for Black people. Both aesthetic qualities center their difference on the basis of
a conception of whiteness as pathology. Chaka argues how “This culture of
monoglot Standard has its roots in colonial modernity ideologies that
privilege the primacy of one-language, one-state, and one-nation over
multilingual states and pluriracial nations. This ideal, romantic, monolingual,
and monocultural statehood and nationhood has given rise to the “coloniality
of language.”
9
There is a parallel between the discourse, we can see, on how
ELLs are regarded and Fanon’s theory of the Black man and language. Fanon
clarifies how the struggle is not about proving the Black man being equal to
the white man, but how “What we are striving for is to liberate the Black man
from the arsenal of complexes that germinated in a colonial situation.”
10
With
that being said, Chaka’s argument is also a sort of response to Fanon in that
we must combat the framing of difference by adopting a both/and framework
where we allow Black bodies to hold multiple identities and languages. To
move away “from the arsenal of complexes that germinated in a colonial
situation” is to combat it with an open system that gives agency to Black
bodies to exist in a malleable way of their choosing.
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In a study that looks at the experiences of Black women who wear their
natural hair, Johnson and Bankhead present the historical role of hair and how
inseparable it is from Black people’s identity.
11
Dating from the 12th/13th
century, Johnson and Bankhead present how there has always been a link
between hairstyle choice and social messaging. For example, a young Wolof
girl would partially shave her head to point out that she was not of a marrying
age. During the slave trade, the Europeans took note on this and other
significations of the value of hair within African communities. As a way of
dominating the society and erasing their roots, slave owners shaved the heads
of enslaved Africans upon their arrival to the Americas. They note how
[i]n an effort to dehumanize and break the African spirit, Europeans
shaved the heads of enslaved Africans upon arrival to the Americas.
This was not merely a random act, but rather a symbolic removal of
African culture. The shaving of the hair represented a removal of any
trace of African identity and further acted to dehumanize Africans
coming to the Americas in bondage… Europeans deemed African hair
unattractive and did not consider it to be hair at all; for them it was
considered the fur of animals and was referred to as wool or wooly.
12
Enslaved Africans who worked closely to the plantation masters had to wear
hairstyles that followed the trend or norm of the time or cover their heads as
to not “offend Whites, a concept that carries into our present society, in a
somewhat more nuanced manner.” The view of the “unattractiveness” of
Black women’s hair persists today. “Good” hair is perceived as the hair closest
to European hair—long, straight, silky, bouncy, manageable, healthy, and
shiny; while “bad” hair is “short, matted, kinky, nappy, coarse, brittle and
wooly.” Using the terms “good” hair is often synonymous for “White, straight
hair” and “bad” hair linked to mean “highly textured African hair.”
13
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon notes that “whether he likes it or not,
the Black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him.”
14
This is where we can place his text in dialogue with Diallo’s Afro, as her
collection of testimonies shows how times have changed to show how Black
bodies have come to resist heteronormative norms by carrying their Blackness
as Blackness into white spaces. The narratives presented in Afro demonstrate
the psychic battle they endure of carrying their Blackness, via their hair, into
these white spaces. However, these narratives also show us how they
eventually break out of this psychic battle by de-centering the white gaze and
choosing to focus on what the Black body wants and how the Black body
wants to define itself regardless of the Other. In this case, the Other is no
longer the Black and brown body, but the white body.
Although the stories in Diallo’s Afro are told by Afropeans, these same
stories and sentiments are shared by Black women in the United States.
Notedly, in the United States, the civil rights era had a deep impact on Black
hair. During the 60s and 70s, the Afro hairstyle, or hairstyles that involved
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preserving the naturalness of a Black woman’s hair was embraced. Johnson
and Bankhead state how “This was the era where hair that was once
considered “bad,” because of its tight curl, was now considered “good”
because it was worn “free” from chemical or heat processing restraint.”
15
As
early as 1905, studies show how Black women denounced hair straightening
methods, as they were associated with trying to mirror European beauty
standards. However, Johnson and Bankhead note how “some disagreed with
this perspective, arguing that hair straightening was simply a style option and
not an attempt to become white.”
16
Racial symbols overlay Black women’s
choice of hairstyle, whether they choose to use methods to straighten their
hair, wear wigs, braid their hair or just wear their hair naturally. Although
this movement challenged the norms of the beauty standard set by the West,
it highlighted a divide within continental and diasporic Black communities
putting those who wore their natural hair against those who did not and chose
to wear socially acceptable hairstyles set by the West. A Black woman’s hair
and/or hairstyle choice can influence their social capital, as well as their social
and political stance. This divide in the hair community persists today and is
propagated by the media, such as BBC News, that releases articles such as
“Empowering black women to embrace their natural hair.”
17
Although there
may have been some good intentions behind such a piece, it propagates a
narrative that Black women are the ones who refuse to embrace their natural
hair. Considering the historic and psychological traumas that Black women
had/have to endure in the past because of their hair, and knowing how hair
is tied to one’s social capital and can impact one’s financial capital, does the
problem lie with the Black woman or with society and their perceptions on
what is acceptable hair? When we look at the African continent as well, we
see propagation of colonial stereotypes and European hairstyles. In another
BBC News article “Letter from Africa: Fighting ‘uniform hairstyles’ in
Kenya”
18
that came out in 2019, state that “not too long ago, the management
of a national TV station sent a memo to female presenters saying they should
not wear the Kenyan Hollywood star Lupita Nyong'o's look or natural
hairstyles.” This article also speaks on Black-on-Black discrimination when it
comes to hair and the social order involved stating “the silkier it is [hair] the
higher your status.” Black women have long been judged by their hair and/or
their hairstyle choices. Why does the aesthetic of hair offend many? What
does it say about us as a society that we critique others based on the hair that
goes from their scalp?
The raciolinguistic profile being done to ELLs is comparable to the
profiling of Black women’s hair and declaring which hairstyle is socially or
culturally acceptable and why. Chaka’s argument that ELL labeling is
informed by whiteness, which mimics the logic of hair politics and the politics
of what and how languages Black people speak. Fanon remarks that to be
Black is to have whiteness as a destiny. “To speak a language” he writes, “is
to appropriate its world and culture. The Antillean who wants to be white
will succeed, since he will have adopted the cultural tool of language.”
19
This
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framing privileges European languages and a colonial consciousness, but
what would it mean for the Antillean, a Black body, to succeed not because
they are able to speak French, but to succeed because of their ability to “adopt
the cultural tool of language[s]” and metamorph into multiple different
spaces? Fanon’s framing is obsessed with whiteness and so, to bring it back to
hair, what would it look like if we decenter Black hair, negotiating aesthetics
outside of whiteness? What if an afro could just mean an afro and a Black
woman's choice to perm her hair could just mean that? If we are to use the
analogy Chaka develops, that “there are native speakers of English who are
not White,” then we can say that this is similar to how there are Black women
who do not have a kinky hair texture. Does not having the kinky hair texture
negate one’s Blackness? Although it has its evils, one of the promises of social
media is the ability to hear alternative narratives. For example, the dominant
narrative around some Black women’s decision to perm their hair is rooted in
wanting to mirror beauty standards set by the West. However, in so much
social media, we see and hear so many reasons, such as not having enough
time and/or the know-how to properly maintain natural hair.
Regardless of the reasons and rationales, Black women now have
options for how they want to look. If we connect this to language and
linguistic practice, what would it look like for a Kenyan to speak French and
English fluently then turn around and speak Kikuyu? Instead of the colonial
frame, which sees denigration when that Kenyan that speaks English and
French is less Black compared to a Kenyan who only speaks Kikuyu, we
should consider how both are fully inhabiting an authentic Blackness, even if
it sounds different. This is not to say that Fanon’s argument about the
psychological effects of colonialism on a Black person’s consciousness does
not hold. Indeed, given our rapidly changing cultural moment, driven by
seemingly endless access to information, I encourage us to expand how we
define Blackness and Black bodies, and caution against creating restrictions –
so often evocative of colonialism – in transition to new ways of thinking.
You may be wondering why I have gone on and on about Black hair.
Though this phenomenon of the politics of Black hair is not new, I would like
to draw attention to the similarities on the effects of hairstyle choices and the
mastery (or lack of) of European language when it comes to Black people. Just
like hairstyle choice, there has long been a discourse around Black people and
language. The way a language is spoken is often linked to one’s social and
socioeconomic status and can also affect their social and financial capital.
Despite a growing recognition amongst linguists that there is no such thing
as a correct way of speaking a language, we still see how the default accepted
language is that of the American US or British, in other words, white standard
European languages. Just like the choice of straightening one’s hair, there are
historic and psychological underpinnings around the use of language for
Black people. Just like hair, the socially accepted and default “correct” way of
speaking was set by the European man. Any other style or way of speaking
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was (and in some communities still is) seen as “incorrect” and/or lacking
mastery of the language.
In other words, for a non-European to speak a European language, just
like Black hair, the language had to be “straightened out” and stripped of all
and any cultural identity to be accepted by the white ear. Heritage and
creolized languages are often limited to the “home” just as some hairstyles are
limited to the “home” in order to not offend the internalized and external
white gaze. Johnson and Bankhead note how “Misrepresented, distorted or
missing images send direct and indirect messages about what it means to be
beautiful, and have beautiful hair and a beautiful body, as well as who has
the power to define these beauty standards.” Just like language, racially
hegemonic images dictate who sets the standard of the “correct” way of
speaking which often involves stripping down of any non-European accent.
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has long dominated discourses on the
psychological effects of speaking European language with a Black tongue. In
the opening chapter to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon claims that to speak a
language is to adopt another world, the civilization of another. Fanon
contends that speaking the language of the colonizer is to actively participate
in “one’s own oppression.”
20
And so Fanon poses a particularly difficult
challenge for Black people, placing them between a rock and a hard place: if
we keep our heritage or creolized language, then we risk being considered
inferior to the rest of the world, the world of white hegemony, adding what
Fanon sees as the psychological dimension that comes with economic and
political senses of inferiority.
On the other hand, if we speak the language of the colonizer, we risk
continuing the cycle of colonialism and doing the colonizer’s work for them by
adopting their psyche, world, and culture through language practices. I
wholeheartedly agree that speaking another language is to adopt the
subjectivities of another civilization. But only for a moment. Although we
may like to think things stay in neat packages (nothing stays neat forever),
our personalities flow and seep into multiple areas of our life. Does the
problem lie with those who choose to modify and transform the possibilities
of what Fanon would call the colonizer’s language or with a society that has
long privileged European languages and, through those languages, are
gateways to economic freedom? I would like to flip Fanon’s argument on its
head and, instead of seeing the addition of another language on the Black
tongue as a disadvantage to a Black essence, see it as an additional
“superpower” that can give access to Other worlds. We should not define
Blackness by the languages that are spoken (or not) but by permitting Black
bodies to engage with this world in a way that makes meaning for them. This
can look like many different things. And that is precisely the point, to lift any
and all limitations on how Blackness is defined for Black bodies.
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1
Rokkaya Diallo, Afro (Paris: Éditions Les Arènes, 2015)
2
Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trs. Haakon Chevalier (New York:
Grove Press, 1988), 20.
3
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trs. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 4-5.
4
Chaka Chaka, “English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes, Standard English, Whiteness, Deficit
Views, and Unproblematic Framings: Toward Southern Decoloniality,” Journal of Contemporary
Issues in Education, 16, no. 2 (2021): 24.
5
Chaka, “English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes…,” 21.
6
Ibid., 23.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., 24.
9
Ibid.
10
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
11
Tabora A. Johnson and Teiahsha Bankhead, "Hair it is: Examining the Experiences of Black Women
with Natural Hair," Open Journal of Social Sciences 2 (2014): 86-100. Johnson & Bankhead
constructed a research project titled Black Hair Narratives and surveyed 529 Black women. They
asked 52 questions and had discussions about natural hair, the acceptance of natural hair in
different environments, and how they were received by other social groups. The goal of this
project was to see the correlation between hair esteem levels and how Black women chose to
wear their hair. From this sample, results showed how 95% wore their natural hair out, and that
they felt that they were received favorably by others and the teasing, taunting and ridicule often
came from family members and friends but not co-workers and/or supervisors. However, we
should keep in mind that the sample set was a relatively young and highly educated population of
Black women & that most people lived in New York. These results challenged the researchers’
expectations about this study but Johnson & Bankhead note how these results could be limited to
those who occupy a higher socioeconomic status for women living in urban settings.
12
Johnson and Bankhead, “Hair it is,” 6
13
Ibid.
14
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
15
Johnson and Bankhead, "Hair it is,” 4.
16
Ibid., 5.
17
Everett, Samantha. “Empowering Black women to embrace their natural hair.” June 20, 2018.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-44521629
18
Warungu, Joseph. “Letter from Africa: Fighting 'uniform hairstyles' in Kenya.” March 30, 2019.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47721869
19
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 21.
20
Drabinski, John. "Frantz Fanon (2019)," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon
