N°020_Vol.3_05

Introduction: Living in society may be a challenge for individuals. If understanding oneself is not an easy task, what about understanding the other. That is why effective communication is needed for the self and the other to get along. At times, the other seems nice. But most of the time, the other becomes a threat.  In this case the self seeks for shield to protect and preserve one’s life. A mask could be an appropriate tool. A mask caries different meaning and interpretations. “Despite their essential familiarity, however, masks remain something of an enigma” (Pollock, 1995:581). Among many others, the mask has functions such as: privacy and anonymity, psychological persona (social mask), concealment of emotions, “false self” and safety (protection and camouflage). The mask creates two distinct identities, the true self with no filter, and the masked self, the private self and the persona or the social self, the vulnerable self and the shielded one. So, mask is intrinsically related to identity. “The general relationship between masks and this sense of identity or person­hood has long been recognized; the mask is normally considered a technique for transforming identity…” (Bouttiaux, 2009:582). Concerning the persona role of the mask, Anne-Marie Bouttiaux explains that “the word persona itself is used in many languages (including English) to evoke the attitudes we must embody to live in society” (p. 62). Thus, the mask is a tool of communication and a filter between the self and the other or society. The mask is a message, even though ambiguous. “This juxtaposition between what is being said and what is really being said stands as the trademark of a black literary tradition” (Black, 2005:401).

This duality of self-identity is vividly portrayed in “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Dunbar (1895) and “What If I Took off my Mask” by Mwila Mwila (2022), where the mask serves as a metaphor. Dunbar’s poem explores how African Americans put on a metaphorical mask to survive systemic racism in post-Reconstruction America. Then, “The Ku Klux Klan was powerful; voting was forbidden to Blacks; Jim Crow laws were stringent – and the only way to exist in peace seemed to be the way of Booker T. Washington” (Cain, 1978: 37). The violence White America had deployed in those days urged Black hidden ways or Washington’s way to convey their messages. Yet many critics “with few exceptions, have been unable to see beneath the humorous mask to the profound, bitter irony in Dunbar’s work” (Candela, p. 1976:62). Mwila’s poem, on the other side, deals with contemporary African society, where the mask metaphor reflects struggles with imposed identities and the desire for authenticity.

So, in what ways does Dunbar’s and Mwila’s metaphor of the mask function as a strategy of survival and resistance in African American and African contemporary poetry, and how does unmasking redefine the concepts of selfhood, concealment, and authenticity in the construction of identity within their respective socio-historical contexts?  In this perspective, this paper hypothesizes that Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” constructs identity through concealment as a strategy of survival, and that Mwila’s “What if I Took off my Mask” uses authenticity as a strategy of resistance by redefining the metaphor of unmasking. It also holds it that these two poems taken together constitute a trans-historical continuity in the mask’s role as a metaphor for negotiating identity across African American and African literary traditions.

To meet this end, this paper uses Afrocentricity which is “a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from the perspective of the African person.  The Afrocentric approach seeks in every situation the appropriate centrality of the African person” (Asante, 1987:171).