‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
I read Fanon to make sense of what I report on in Karachi's courts. Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls it ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’.
This isn't trivia. ‘Expérience vécue’ is the vocabulary of phenomenology, of Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures Fanon attended in Lyon. The chapter is a phenomenological description: a child says ‘Look, a Negro!’, and Fanon describes his body being broken apart and rebuilt by the gaze of others. He talks about a ‘corporeal schema’ being displaced by a schema woven out of history, anecdote and stereotype.
‘The Fact of Blackness’ makes the chapter sound like a statement about an objective fact. ‘The Lived Experience’ makes it a description of how racialisation is lived. The difference matters for the philosophy of race: Fanon isn't arguing about whether race is biological. He's showing what it is to be made into a race by others, from the inside.
I'd like to discuss what else gets lost or gained in translating this book, and whether readers who learned it through the first translation absorbed a different Fanon.