Black Skin White Masks

Equiano’s attempt at becoming an Englishman can also be effectively understood and analyzed alongside Frantz Fanon’s seminal work, Black Skin, White Masks. Although this book explores the psychological ramifications of colonial domination and racism, it ultimately illustrates how these psychological ramifications lead to the black man’s desire to appropriate the culture and habits of the colonizer. With relation to Equiano’s Narrative, this can be seen in his rejection of the “Black self” and adoption of the obviously false racial identity of the white man. For example, Fanon states, “When the Negro makes contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of

Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot. So if I’m looking to find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it); I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left—to part the veil that was so frequently drawn” (Morrison, 193-194). For Equiano’s Narrative, this sense of “truth about the interior life” is expressed few times. Nonetheless, according to Paul, it is suggested numerous times in scenes that underscore Equiano’s fraught psychological nature, fear of rejection, and all-consuming desire for acceptance in the white community (Paul, 853). This fraught psychological nature is what Fanon calls wanting to “make [oneself] recognized” (Fanon, 217). Fanon himself experienced this sense of astonishment when he encountered a French boy in his youth, who exclaimed that he was frightened at the sight of Fanon. For Fanon, this was a pivotal moment in his development as a Black man, for it produced feelings of revulsion and shame. He specifically noted, “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin” (Fanon, 112). When the white gaze transfixes upon one’s identity, it evidently engenders one with a hatred for blackness. This leads the Black individual to constantly look to the white man for recognition and validation. Similar circumstances also affected Equiano; however, he is presented as being eager to adopt White Otherness in order to appear acceptable in the eyes of his masters. For example, while Equiano was still a child, he developed a close friendship with the