That the colonized should seek to adopt “the mother country’s cultural standards”
is, for Georges, an adoption that may take place. In fact, it should. Yet the
“transgressive and transitional truth” to which Fanon alludes, and which Caché fully
exposes, is the fact that the obverse is not allowed: the mother country, as in this case the
mother herself, may not adopt the colonized. While the attributes of the colonizing
culture are upheld as universally desirable and the justification for colonization in the
first place, the ability of the colonized to share equal footing with the colonizer is in fact
not allowed. A deep contradiction thus undergirds the (post)colonial setting, giving rise
to numerous anxieties regarding the ability of the colonized to either supplant the
colonizer or to hinder the latter’s enjoyment of the mother country’s douceur. The
colonized, it would seem, is meant to revere European (or American) culture, but may not
be on equal footing with the European (or American) in practical terms. Although they
gain status as they approximate the colonizing culture, they are never meant to fully
possess or master it. This point is again vividly illustrated where the topic of language is
concerned, for “the Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will
come closer to being a real human being – in direct ration to his mastery of the French
And yet he or she can never truly master it without being deemed
suspicious: “keep an eye on that one, he is almost white.”
Within the neurotic logic of the (post)colonial setting, access to European culture
is thus simultaneously extended and denied, both promoted and withheld from those who
can never quite feel welcomed within the society that has literally or figuratively
9
Fanon, 18.
10
Fanon, 21.
14
Convention