Fairview

In the text, the playwright includes an epigram before the play: “‘Dirty n****r!’ or simply ‘Look! A Negro!’ – From Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon. This, reversed, is the play, in a way” (7). Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Black theorist, psychiatrist, physician, and writer. He was born on Martinique, an island in the Caribbean under French colonialist rule. After serving in the Free French military during World War II and receiving his education in psychiatry and medicine in France, Fanon became the head of psychiatry at a hospital in French-occupied Algeria. There, he discovered that colonial violence seemed to have observable traumatic psychological effects on both the victims of violence and the perpetrators. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon uses psychoanalysis to parse the construction of Blackness and the feelings of inferiority in the minds of the colonized as they are produced and reinscribed within colonialist hierarchies. The nature of colonization includes the destruction of colonized culture and the imposition of colonizer culture as superior. Thus, many colonized people work hard to adapt and assimilate into the society and culture of the colonizers, simultaneously trying to separate themselves from their own Indigenous culture, which is their only path toward social mobility.