Fanonian White/Black Colonizer/d Paradigm in I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and The Long Walk Home

The theories of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) on anti-black racism and decolonization,
analyzed in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) (1952) and Les
Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) (1961) respectively, are a clear case of
crossing borders, for they still inspire many scholars, activists, and writers dedicated to
human rights and social justice. This paper proposes to discuss the suffering in the
experience of the African Americans in the United States who struggle to attain cultural
and political autonomy. For instance, the examination of the psychological dimension of
racist oppression is subtly manifested in Sonia Sanchez’s I’m Black When I’m Singing,
I’m Blue When I Ain’t (1982). Associated with the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez
epitomizes the repercussions of the racist and social oppression in the life of the mental
health of a young black woman, in the play, who suffers from familial rejection. On the
other hand, the political dimension of the White colonizer/Black colonized relationship is
highly represented in The Long Walk Home, directed by Richard Pearce and written by
John Cork in 1990. This movie provides a view of the black maid, Odessa, who
participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in Alabama, initiated by Rosa Parks. The
aim is to prove that both the play and the movie under study illustrate Fanon’s shift from
the internal perspective of the colonized dilemma to the trauma of the relationship
between the colonizer and the colonized.