“Can we be presente in masks? At first it seems impossible. Within the mask not only the face but the heart is encased, one is separate and separated through concealment. Can there be a heartening beneath the hardness of stoicism? Can you be one with a mask (to be me, I have to walk and talk with others)? Can you be one within the otherness of the mask, across the borders of masks?”
I take up Kristen’s prompting where mask, serpent, performance, and writing meet. Anzaldúa describes the construction of her own mask, “learning to rule” herself and “to grow a will”—a Western encasement of the singular self, a resistance to the porous relation between the co-constituted “I” and that which surrounds her (72). She turns to the serpent, who programmatically undos her body, bringing “the lost pieces” of herself back to a center. However, the serpent does not legislate epiphanic affect from above; rather, “every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it” (58). Spirit has many names: serpent, writing, walking and talking, dancing, singing, “singularly plural coexistence,” heartening. Spirit is a doing, a performative being with uttering into presence bodies, selves, worlds.
Spirit lives not just behind the mask, but in it, too: “When I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart—a Nahuatl concept” (95). Whereas Paz’s mask is an opaque “Form surround[ing] and set[ting] bounds to our privacy, limiting its excesses, curbing its explosions, isolating and preserving it,” Anzaldúa offers writing—for her, a practice in performance—as sculptural process, as face creation (Paz 32). So, even while she is the one doing the carving, she is animating a different kind of mask, one which unbounds new faces and facings (a relation negotiating exteriority and interiority), hearts and heartenings. We might carve Paz’s mask a bit, sand out the splinters, see how it fits, and amble along the fault lines of identity. For Anzaldúa, the performance of writing potentializes this generative mask-making, -wearing, and -restructuring; what, then, does masking do in performance, and what does performance do to our understanding of masks?
Chambers-Letson, Joshua. "Preface: The Manifesto of a Communist Party" After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. 1-8. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Boderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987. Print.Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985. Print.