Dobby has no master, Dobby is a free elf!
by dianaquan
So it’s late (or early?) and I should really be studying for a french midterm but I thought I’d get this out of the way.
What I liked:
- the style that Fanon uses, with his integration of quotes from other texts and poems
- the language is actually understandable, unlike all the medical terms that Freud used
What I think the text is talking about:
(this is just brain vomit)
- being black means being evil, a savage, etc
- being white means being good, angelic
- black people want to be white
- a black man is a penis
I’m going to be honest here, I followed along pretty well at the beginning and quite enjoyed the book. But somehow along the way I realized I had no idea what was going on anymore. Maybe I had missed out on something from not reading the footnotes? But really, like Hannah mentioned in her post, footnotes are just not that fun to read when they take up so much of the page.
On another note, on page 195, when Fanon talks about the abolishment of slavery, I was reminded of Dobby the house elf being freed from the Malfoy’s. Especially in the line, “the upheaval did not differentiate the black man. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another,” (195) I began contemplating whether Dobby could represent the black man and I realized that Fanon’s statement does apply to him as well. Maybe Dobby isn’t a free elf after all.
One of the best parts about this post is the Dobby connection. When you end up close reading Harry Potter and watching J.K. Rowling interviews she does say that the world of Harry Potter has much of the same issues as our own, we just don’t see them as such because we get caught up in the magic. There’s racism of its own kind interwoven throughout the series and your Dobby comment reminded me about it all over again.
Dobby?! 😉
Otherwise, “brain vomit” is just fine, and indeed it’s exactly what I want from your blog posts.
Overall, I agree that this is a difficult text. It’s useful, in such cases, to try to pin down what makes a text difficult. It’s interesting to hear you say it took you a while before you realized you were no longer sure what was going on.