The source of this malediction is, of course, the perverted or false dialectic between the black body and the world. To the extent that this dialectic is mediated not internally, as a direct structural coupling, but rather by white society and the values it imposes on black bodies, it can only be an interrupted and impotent dialectic, one that cannot secure the coupling of body and world theorized by Lhermitte (and Merleau-Ponty) and hence can only burden its “subjects" with extrinsic and disabling contents. These contents comprise another schema—the historico-racial schema"—that operates not on top of, but below the corporeal schema; this schema interferes, terminally in Fanon's estimation, with the successful constitution of a physiological bodily schema.
Dramatizing his discovery that he has “sketched a historico-racial schema" of this sort, Fanon clarifies the additional burden faced by black men and women:
The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character" [citing Lhermitte, L'Image de Notre Corps], but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more. (111)
Specifically, he was called on to assume the burden of history, of the sedimented stereotypes (tertiary retentions) of his race. Continuing his dramatization, Fanon describes his discovery of this inexorable burden: "I could no longer laugh, because I already know that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity ..." (112). Inexorable or not, this burden proves overwhelming, as Fanon goes on to describe how his fractured "corporeal schema," already "assailed at various points," finally crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema" (112).
With this passage from the "historico-racial schema" to the "racial epidermal schema," Fanon and the black men and women for whose experience he testifies truly and properly become objects:
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination; 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'." On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. (112)
BODIES IN CODE
150