Dear Editor,
“Cuffy was a proud and outstanding house slave…” (Anil Nandlall – AG). Sigmund Freud would enjoy a “field day” having Anil Nandlall “in house” on a couch in Freedom House. Anil Nandlall seems adamant that the “house slave” in “Django Unchained” is the role that African Guyanese must perform in the PPP.
“So I rewatched Django Unchained tonight, and for those who don’t know or remember, Samuel L. Jackson plays a house slave who is extremely loyal to Calvin Candie, a slaver, and this slave supports and participates in his master’s racism and belief in the inferiority of blacks. Does this character have any special meaning beyond as a tool of the story?”
The role is expressed as is, Calvin Candie, who “supports and participates in his master’s racism and belief in the inferiority of blacks”, is a living contradiction. To see himself as superior to the Blacks he controls on his master’s behalf, he must first convince himself that he is, indeed, not one of them in some miraculous way, since some special “power” must separate him from them. On the other hand, he is inferior to his master on the basis of race, which is genetically defined. This is the definition of paranoia and schizophrenia, in RD Laing’s “The Divided Self”, Frantz Fanon’s “White Skins, Black Masks”, CLR James “Black Jacobins”, and RL Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.
Black Skin, White Masks is primarily about Antilleans – black French citizens from what was, in Fanon’s time, a French colony in the Caribbean. As Fanon notes, everything from history lessons to comic books shapes the young Antillean to think of himself not only as a Frenchman but as a white man, because he identifies with the morally good, civilized and civilizing heroes of children’s stories. According to the Antillean understanding of race that Fanon describes, blacks are people who, like the Senegalese, live in Africa and speak “inferior” French. For the young Antillean, the black man is an object of fear and revulsion who epitomizes sin and savagery.”
The children of middle-class families like Fanon’s were not only educated according to the French system and inculcated into anti-black French ways of thinking, but also frequently traveled to France in order to complete their education. They only learned they were black upon arriving in France, where they were treated as second-class citizens and racial inferiors. Fanon describes the sense of disorientation and cognitive dissonance that results from this encounter – the Antillean no longer understands who he is. After a lifetime of identifying himself with the white man and considering himself French, he learns that he is in fact black and that his countrymen do not view him as an equal.
CLR James, “Black Jacobins” describes one hundred and twenty eight gradation of skin colour from Black to White, exposing how race defined social status. I have spent the last three weeks in Guyana listening to Guyanese East Indians describing African Guyanese in the most demeaning, denigrating, racist terms, something that I would have willingly subscribed to, were it not for my encounter with Walter Rodney, Eusi Kwayana, Tacuma Ogunseye, Omawale Omawale, Rupert Roopnarine, Moses Bhagwan, and many others during the heady days of the WPA’s 1979 Civil Rebellion against the ruling regime. Almost fifty years after, to hear the same racist rhetoric is an abuse and violation of my humanity.
As a fourteen year old young man, I started my first official job feeding iron rods to the steel jaws of the giant hand shears that would cut them, as the GDF quarters were being built. The workers would “cuss” incessantly, and my mother noticed that I was losing weight in the space of two weeks. She pulled me off the job, and I got another job as a delivery boy and salesman at Kharag Bros. I suffered from the same abhorrence as I listened to my Indian brothers and sisters describe their black brothers and sisters as lazy, wasteful, slothful, unable to save, and jealous of Indian wealth. They tell me that “black people are getting contracts”, ignoring the stark reality that contracts to weed trenches, paint lantern posts, clean gutters, etc., can barely put food on the table or pay the rent. They ignore the stark reality that a mega-million contract has very little in common with the contracts for the crumbs from the master’s table, Django style.
My first encounter with the name Django was the Clinton Eastwood version in which Django dragged around a coffin. It turned out to be a weapon of mass destruction as he turned it on the oppressors. Hence “contracts” and “Django’s” may be very different when opened up and subject to scrutiny. Words can also uncover paranoia and schizophrenia when examined carefully, as when “The Police” sings “Every breath you take”. “Every breath you take, And every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I’ll be watching you.”
This song was written in a state of paranoia according to the band. It sounds eerily and menacingly like Anil Nandlall, as he enlists the house slaves to control the rest of the slaves. It also informs us that the paranoia and schizophrenia is not limited to the house slave who controls the slaves to please his master, but also of the master who depends on the slave to do his bidding. This was the theme of GWF Hegel in his chapter on the master/slave relationship which is the most quoted part of his writings. It is a tragedy that we have learned very little of our history and deliberately chose to ignore it. In the movie and book “The Giver”, the philosopher notes, “If we do not know where we came from, we do not know where we are, and if we do not know where we are, we do not know where we are going to”, or words to this effect.