THE BLACK WOMAN’S MASK

Abstract

This article examines both the persistence and the deconstruction of authenticity in francophone modernist and postmodernist representations of black women. The discussion takes as a starting point Fanon’s reading of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise in Peau noire, masques blancs, and notes his scathing denunciation of the protagonist’s negrophobia. While Fanon uses the text to diagnose the black woman’s inferiority complex, manifested by her desire to become white through her relationship with a white man, he also scorns her blatant falsity. The rather sweeping brush strokes of Fanon’s reading of Capécia, however, reveal a lack of awareness of the complex circumstances of the text’s production, together with an uncertainty towards its status as an aesthetic artefact and a literary work. Fanon implies that Capécia lacks a more properly “authentic” assumption of black subjectivity, and yet the text’s manufacturing by the black woman’s lover and editor only shows with greater irony the elusiveness of this putative authenticity. The article then compares Fanon’s reading of Capécia with the examination of black feminine authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon. Condé rejects Capécia’s search for whiteness but ultimately debunks the Martinican protagonist’s similarly misguided preoccupation with her putative roots in Africa. The black feminine subject is shown in Condé’s work to be shaped by multiple myths, and her writing finishes by replacing the quest for authenticity with a depiction of the various fictions by which black women are shaped, and shape themselves. Reading Fanon, Capécia, and Condé together in this way uncovers the tensions surrounding notions of authenticity in the construction of black feminine identity.