decolonIzIng mAstery 57which I meant that I was answerable in my body and in my heart for what
was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an
anti- Semite is inevitably anti- Negro” (1967c, 122). The logical progression
in this passage is fascinating, as Fanon moves from the “strange” associa-
tion between anti- Semitism and Negrophobia, to his reading of his teach-
er’s declaration as a universal ethics in which Fanon becomes “answerable”
in his body and heart to his Jewish “brother,” and finally to a concession
that forms of oppression are always linked. Here Fanon summons a uni-
versal, ethical bond, both bodily and psychic (registered via the metaphor
of the “heart”), that links him intimately to the Jew. Yet later in the chapter,
when Fanon critiques Jean- Paul Sartre for having “destroyed black zeal”
(135) and for forgetting “that the Negro suffers in his body quite differ-
ently from the white man” (138), he moves away from the alliance between
the two marginalized figures. Fanon declares in a footnote that although
Sartre may well be correct in his reading of “alienated consciousness,” the
white man remains “the master, whether real or imaginary,” and therefore
Sartre’s attempts to apply his formulation to “a black consciousness proves
fallacious” (138n24). The Jew becomes proximate to the black man but fails
to be mobilized as an effective ally in decolonization because he (dis)em-
bodies oppression differently.
Detailing the risk of “the closure of difference instead of the expansion
of political possibilities” (1997, 93), Ann Pellegrini illustrates how while
Fanon expresses a commitment to heterogeneity, he repeatedly “replicates
a hom(m)ologics of the same.” If, as we have seen, black women mark what
Pellegrini calls Fanon’s “extended blind spot,” the figure of the Jewish man
in Fanon’s writing extends the horizons of this blindness. Pellegrini argues
that “the ambivalence of Fanon’s own identifications with Jewishness and
Jewish men holds out, as it turns its back on, the spare promise of speaking
across difference” (93). Reading alongside his European interlocutor Sartre
in Anti- Semite and Jew (1995), Fanon aims to cast the “sympathetic anal-
ogies” between anti- Semitism and Negrophobia without conflating them,
signaling how in the European imperialist frame the Negro is characterized
as body, as sexual predator, while the Jew is figured as cerebral, dangerously
prosperous, but removed from the realm of body. In thinking the Negro in
relation to the Jew—both historically racialized figures that pose “opposite”
dangers to white Europeans—Fanon forges an alliance through difference.
But Pellegrini illustrates that he does so by ultimately “assimilating Jewish