Tuesday, February 14

A little bit of literature

“We Wear the Mask

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 they be overwise,

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!”

Vocabulary build-up

The noun guile means “treacherous cunning; skillful deceit.”

The noun form of sigh means “the act or sound of sighing.” But the intransitive verb form means “to exhale audibly in a long deep breath, as in weariness or relief.”

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Today we continue our homage to the Black History Month, which is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time to recognize their central role in US history. Most African-American scholars point to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s work as the founding father of African-American literature and culture. Dunbar was a first generation non-slave (he was born into freedom)  who took advantage of the opportunity of education not only to rid himself of the shackles of post-slavery poverty and indentured servitude of the late 19th century, but also to rise to the ranks of a respected African-American scholar, nearly unheard of in the day. He delved his being into poetry, writing such marvelous poetic works as “We Wear the Mask”, “Sympathy”, and “The Colored Soldiers”, which began the profound search for the African-American existence within a predominantly white culture. In his poem, “We Wear the Mask”, rather than proclaim his profound disgust for American racism, he instead opts to hide his cries of rage behind a mask,  placed conscientiously to create an appropriate identity to adapt to and deal with a society that had alienated him purely due to racial issues. It is only behind this mask that he allows the interaction of society, while he implies that the “we”, i.e. the black American race, interacts without the mask in a much more honest manner to cope with the suffering and emotions of the African-American people. Thus, Dunbar created an identity to contend with the good manners of the white society, be they from whatever social class, while he simultaneously established another identity to interact with his own black people.