the word made flesh

I was very interested in the way in which Fanon places questions of language and thought into embodied forms. In "The negroe and language" he connects the choice of speaking in either creole or french to a history of and an existence in face of the subjectification of colonization, analyzing how the choice of speaking either creole or french plays also into questions of identification and depending on the choices how the choice to speak french rather creole can actually be playing into the logic of 'white supremacy'.

"Black Skin White Masks", seems to be a very bodily text, for instance when "the vein has been mined out"(p.121) or after criticizing Satre for taking the power out of the words and resumes: "I began to weep" (p140) and there are many more instances, for instances the encounter between the black guy on the train who shivers because he is cold and the little boy who starts to shivers because he feels threatened. And with some of these moments he also seems to play into racial stereotypes or to parodize them, for instance, when he first talks about mother earth and then states "That is because the body is not something that is opposed to the mind"(p.127).

Still in contrast to the Burroughs text, who essentially proposes that meaning can be cut into little pieces to be reassimilated in which ever way you like, to you're own benefit, creating virus which can spread. It is really interesting how the issue of control on bodies, virus, language and are so much interwoven with questions of race. The colonized subject cannot escape his/her embodied meaning, while the white writer chooses to construct, bodies of text, virus and media collages to assert power.

It also really reminded of a text by Drew Leder which is called "the absent body" and in which he tries to explain why the body is so non-present in western societies. The funny thing is only that there is a scene in this text in which we have a woman, (who gets chatted up by some guys) and whose body suddenly becomes very present again, Leder then concludes in a supposedly pro-feminist way that this happens because her body is the "other" in this instant, still his main-argumentation is that the body in general is absent, actually 'othering' this woman in the first place through is own perogative. So I'm wondering in how far questions of embodiment are presently linked to questions of oppression.