Frantz Fanon, a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist, discusses the project of relentless self-identification and self-reinvention in Black Skin, White Masks. In conjunction with psychoanalysis, he presents how Black men are denied legitimate masculinity under the shadow of Eurocentricity and white men, and in turn, investigates the type of pathology it creates. He criticizes the conflation of the sexual “liberty” that Black men desire with political or social liberties—the Black male desire for white women, and by extension, white civilization, ideology, and worthiness, is but a form of power struggle rather than freedom. In resonance with the Freudian fixation on the phallic symbol, Fanon asserts that it is crucial to identify how the male figure functions as a focal site for the reconstruction of colonial power dynamics and how it conceives and articulates new potentialities for hierarchies of gender, sexual orientation, and racial identification.
In “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar explores Fanon’s engagement with Lacan’s notion of the “Other.” His use of the mask metaphor in the poem’s title resonates with Fanon’s phrase, “Black Skin, White Masks,” and highlights the “atmosphere of uncertainty” and the complex layers of psychological dimensions that surround the Black body that certify its existence and threatens its dismemberment (Fanon, xvi):
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask! (Dunbar).
In the first stanza, Dunbar uses oxymorons in the lines “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes” and “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.” His hyperbolic, incongruous diction reveals Fanon’s delineation of the metaphor of vision that is “complicit with a Western metaphysic of Man,” from which the displacement of the colonial relation emerges (Fanon, xii). Here, Dunbar incorporates psychoanalysis with sociology within his poem and expounds on the pains of the systematic oppression and practices of the colonial gaze/language that are indoctrinated into the minutiae of the everyday life of the Black community.
Dunbar continues his exploration of appearance and reality in the dialectic of the Black mind/body in the second stanza. The simultaneous defiant yet defeated tone in “Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?” reflects Dunbar’s impassioned stoicism against the West’s treacherous stereotypes of crudity and depravity of the Black figure. The stanza’s atmosphere of torment, self-deception, and conformity substantiates how “the White man’s eyes break up the Black man’s body” and how “in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed” (Fanon, xii). Dunbar demonstrates the emotional conflict between the authentic Black Self and the internalization of colonial value systems and thus spotlights the symbolic significance of the mask as a defense mechanism adopted by Black individuals in response to racial prejudices inflicted by white-dominated societies
In the third stanza, Dunbar delves into Fanon’s concept of double consciousness— “As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro… In order to terminate this neurotic situation… I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal” (Fanon, 197). Dunbar uses auditory and natural imagery in “We sing, but oh the clay is vile / Beneath our feet” to elucidate his lonesome yet liberating apathy towards hostile colonial fantasies and inhumanities. The tactile, earthy diction in his depiction of vile clay beneath his feet not only connotes Dunbar’s strategic resignation from battling the duplicitous structures of hegemonic signification, but it also illuminates the possibility of the Self, completely removed from its environment, as a dispersion into a discursive space of earthliness, belonging, and spiritual transcendentalism in opposition to paranoic identification. Finally, Fanon states that “Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him… His human worth and reality depend on this other and on his recognition by the other” (Fanon 216). Through the exclamation, “But let the world dream otherwise, / We wear the mask!”, Dunbar consolidates his resistance against the inferiority complex and refuses the colonial condensation of the meaning of his life.
While Dunbar’s poem embodies the semantic, metaphorical, and psychological implications of the mask, Kerry James Marshall’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self examines the role of the visual and the visible in Fanon’s theories. Through scrutinizing the essence of the color black, Marshall conflates nuanced notions of Blackness as subject, condition, and imagination, and announces his chromatically rich artist’s statement against the material realities of the Black figure that is tethered to colonial oppression and depersonalization.
Kerry James Marshall. A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self (1980).
Egg tempura on paper. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Using starkly contradicting colors, black and white, Marshall creates a representative figure of the colonial perversion of Black skin, an image of the “post-Enlightenment tethered to, not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his actions at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of his being” (Fanon, xiv). The first layer of the interpretation of this painting is its elucidation of the violent act of racial caricatures—Marshall critiques the degradational practices of blackface and minstrelsy by depicting the portrait with one-dimensional unshaded colors, the man’s haunting eyes, and his depraved gap-toothed grin. Here, he uses a monochromatic palette to establish Fanon’s postulation of the binary image as a representation that is “always spatially split—it makes present something that is absent” (Fanon, xvii). The exaggerated laughter of the figure (a white man in this interpretation) is one that breaches the boundaries of skin, enforces alienation through condescension, and perpetuates the splitting of binaries within the collective consciousness of humanity. It is a laughter that is neither benign nor liberatory.
The second layer of the painting lies in its commentary on the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of Black individuals. Marshall renders the figure (a Black man in this interpretation) with no lighting, contouring, modeling, shading, or volume—he is stylized and flattened through the pure usage of shapes. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes:
I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility…
‘Oh, I want you to meet my black friend… Aimé Césaire, a black man and a university graduate… Marian Anderson, the finest of Negro singers… Dr. Cobb, who invented white blood, is a Negro… Here, say hello to my friend from Martinique (be careful, he's extremely sensitive) …’
Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color (Fanon, 116).
By distorting and obscuring the illumination of flesh, Marshall displays Fanon’s sentiments on the infuriating social dynamics that hyper-recognize, abstract, and obfuscate blackness. The striking whites of the figure’s eyes and teeth juxtapose his invisibility amidst the painting’s dark grey background and his shadowy face, and thus synthesizes the plight of the Black image, locked in an infernal circle of concealment and insincere acknowledgment.
Last, upon the combination of these two artistic interpretations, Marshall contributes the binaries of subject/object, owner/slave, and colonizer/settler relationships to the concept of “closed consciousness” and “dual narcissism,” and consequently posits epistemic defiance as an agent of transcendence—defiance that lies in seemingly trivial resistances of power (Fanon, 12). In the painting, the man’s eyes are not averted. Rather, they look directly outside of the frame into the audience. Marshall also places the figure directly in the center of the portrait. As a result, he asserts the urgency of the subversion and reproduction of the languages of desire, validation, and the gaze to combatively incite group consciousness and the reverse settlement of the Black body as Other.
In conclusion, Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” provides a vernacular expedition of the psychoanalytical impacts of marginalization on Black bodies within Eurocentric societies. Marshall’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self further offers a compound visual exploration that complements Fanon’s and Dunbar’s scorching critiques on the perversely oppressive cultural mummification of Black people within the colonizer’s rhetoric of civilization and modernization. As the two Black artists conduct self-identification, or disidentification, in their journeys of cultural empowerment and self-determination, they echo Fanon’s powerful proclamation on the possibilities of reinvention:
“Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit… Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep” (Fanon, 140).
Works Cited
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, “We Wear the Mask.” The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Poetry Foundation, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44203/we-wear-the-mask
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967.
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