Masks: Self or the Other

Masks: The Self or the Other

Abstract

Philip Michael Ondaatje is a great anti-colonial contemporary writer whose novels are mainly

preoccupied with the life of the oppressed and the colonized who are suffering from the loss of

true self and identity. The present study was an attempt to read Michael Ondaatje’s novels, In

the Skin of a Lion and Anil's Ghost, under the light of W.E.B. Du Bois’s and Frantz Fanon’s

theories of double consciousness. Double consciousness refers to the nature of the colonized

individuals who look at their selves through the eyes of the other and to the ways they take on

two different cultural identities at the same time. Therefore, the researcher will apply concept of

double conscious to depict the ways the colonized feel out of place in colonized society, how

they are behaved, how they resist this situation and why the colonized wear mask and why they

try to remove it aftermath.

Key words: Double consciousness; single-minded consciousness;

Frantz Fanon; W. E. B. Du Bois; Ondaatje;

I am talking of millions of men who

have been skillfully injected with

fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation,

servility, despair, abasement.

-Aime Cesaire, Discourse sur le Colonialisme

Argument:

Michael Ondaatje is a contemporary writer who is mostly known

as the writer of The English Patient from which the film of the same

name is adapted. Many dissertations and articles are devoted to

the study of Ondaatje's works in the world, but as much as the

researcher searched no results were found for any study on him by

Iranian students. So the researcher hopes that this study help to

better introduce Michael Ondaatje and his literary taste. The

purpose of the present study is to analyze Ondaatje's novels, In

the Skin of a Lion and Anil's Ghost through postcolonial approach,

applying mainly the Fanonian and Du Boisian theories of double

consciousness, and single-minded consciousness. Du Bois, in his

well-received book The Souls of Black Folk and later Frantz Fanon in

his book, Black Skin, White Masks, discuss argue the ways people

suffer from double consciousness or in Du Bois's words twoness.

Therefore, it is recommended to focus on a single-minded

consciousness to reconstruct the minds of those who have been

affected. In these two novels Ondaatje tries to make double

consciousness go towards single-minded consciousness by letting

characters pass the veil, remove masks and confront their true

self.

Choosing an appropriate methodology and applying a proper

approach is very essential in any types of research. This

research is a library research with the use of electronic

sources. The main aim of this study is to analyze the characters

in the novels that are immigrants or trapped in a colonized

society. In order to investigate their look towards society and

society's look towards them postcolonial approach seems suitable

in this research and thus the study tries to answer the following

related questions:

1-How are the characters in both novels suffering from double

consciousness?

2-How are characters in both novels resisting colonization?

3- How can characters' speech and action be justified according

to Du Bois's and Fanon's theories of double consciousness?

4- How does Ondaatje help the characters of both novels to reach

a single-minded conscious?

5-How successful are Ondaatje's characters to fulfill his aim to

resist colonization and reach to a state of single-minded

consciousness?

6-What are Ondaatje's means and methods as an anti-colonial

writer, referring to Anil's Ghost and In the Skin of a Lion?

Introduction:

W.E.B. Du Bois is the first scholar and theorist who

introduced the term “double consciousness” to mean “this sense of

always looking at one’s “self” through the eyes of the other, of

measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in

amused contempt and pity”. The struggle between the self and the

other is taking place in the mind of the Black, the slave, the

oppressed, and the colonized; “one ever feels his twoness, - an

American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled

strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged

strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 3).

Generally throughout The Souls, Du Bois addresses the Blacks and

the Negros as the oppressed; however, his theory on double

consciousness is applicable to all the oppressed in search of

freedom of thought. Obviously, Du Bois and his follower Frantz

Fanon, who will be discussed later, are two essential freedom

seekers who devoted all their lives to emancipation of the

colonized and the oppressed all over the world.

Also Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks speaks of these

colonial subjects in the categories like Black/White, Self/Other.

The body of Fanon’s work consists of “Hegelian-Marxist dialectic,

a phenomenological affirmation of Self and Other and the

psychoanalytic ambivalence of the Unconscious” (x). H. Bhabha in

the introduction written to Black Skin, White Masks discusses the

conditions, according to Fanon, that underlie an understanding of

the process of identification. One is that to “exist is to be

called into being in relation to an Otherness, its look or

locus”. It is the desire to reach to an external object outside.

Then it is discussed that the exact place of identification is a

“space of splitting”; there is an on-going struggle of “demand

and desire”. “The fantasy of the native is precisely to occupy

the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s

avenging anger ... It is not the colonialist Self or the

colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in-between that

makes the figure of the colonial otherness- the white man’s

artifice inscribed on the black man’s body”. Here comes the

“luminal problem of colonial identity”, double consciousness (xv-

xvi). Bhabha continues that in Fanon’s opinion when occupying two

places at once, the “depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject

can become an incalculable object …and a difficult one to place”.

“The strategy of colonial desire” is to make the black mask slip

and the white skin reveal. In this point, there is a “tension of

meaning and being” between the black body and the white body

(xxii). Having mentioned Du Bois’s and Fanon’s theories of double

consciousness, the study now turns to Ondaatje’s novels, In the Skin

of a Lion and Anil’s Ghost to make it clear how the characters in these

novels suffer from double consciousness.

In order to solve the mental conflict, in words of Moore

according to Fanon’s theories, one can develop both an “adaptive”

and “maladaptive” response. In adaptive response the exploited

person is not certain of which position to take; to be her/his

true self or become like the other. So, he/she is in continuing

vacillation between these two positions, wearing and removing the

masks. On the other hand, the oppressed people may be inclined to

become completely like the other. In this case the people change

his/her reality and “takes on the characteristic of the other”

(753). In both of Ondaatje’s novels, the characters suffer from

double consciousness; however, their approaches towards it is

different. In the novel, In the Skin of a Lion, the characters have

developed an adaptive response as a solution for their mental

conflicts, since they are wavering between conflicting positions

and they are not decided yet of which positions to take. But the

main character in Anil’s Ghost experiences a maladaptive response

because she has been westernized and has taken on the

characteristics of the western other. The signs which refer to

the mentioned facts about the characters’ states of minds and

their identities are discussed fully in the following part.

The Self or the Other

In the Skin of a Lion is a novel which takes place in Toronto in

years following the First World War. The novel is about several

characters most of whom are immigrants and come from hard-working

families. Patrick Lewis, the main character of the novel, is just

a boy at the beginning of the novel, but as the novel continues

he grows from boyhood to manhood. Patrick is constantly searching

and looking for his true identity. He moves to Toronto looking

for work but finds work only as a searcher, seeking out the

location of a millionaire, Ambrose Small. Throughout his journey,

he meets many people who play an important role in his life. They

also help him build up his identity and true self. However,

Patrick feels a separation between him and the community he lives

with. He feels like a stranger trapped among whom he knows

nothing of the language. One of many themes in this novel is the

search for identity and light. As the title of the first chapter

indicates “Little Seeds” Ondaatje spreads the seeds of the main

themes of the novel which are the struggle between the self and

the other, and the search for identity. From the very first pages

Ondaatje focuses the reader’s attention towards the fact that the

workers have little connection with the town:

They sleep in the shacks behind the Bellrock Hotel and have

little connection with the town … no one in the town of

Bellrock really knows where the men have come from. It takes

someone else, much later, to tell the boy that. The only

connection the loggers have with the town is when they emerge

to skate the line of river, on homemade skates, the blades

made of old knives. (2)

This passage is a clear illustration of the “willing blindness

on the other side of the veil”. According to Du Bois in words of

Lemert, a “veil is an essential aspect of the communications

between those divided”. A veil “sets off the other and organizes

information that passes between”. In this way it blinds those who

wish not to view the other; “limiting the others in ways that

affect deeply what they [the oppressed and the veiled] think of

themselves” (386). Therefore, the very presence of the veil makes

the other- the city of Toronto in the novel- blind towards the

colonized and oppressed selves who are the immigrants and

workers. Moreover, leitmotif of veil is depicted skillfully

through the two worlds coexisting in the novel; one is the

literal world of Toronto and the other is the fictional world of

the characters. In fact, In the Skin of a Lion is a novel in which the

act of story-telling plays an essential role. When characters

start telling their stories, they pass the veil and go beyond it.

As Fanon mentions in The Wretched of the Earth that “the colonized

world is a world cut into two compartmentalized worlds”, the veil

has separated the self and the other in this novel (37). The veil

has made the world of the other, which is Toronto, blind to the

world of the workers. “The worlds within and without the veil”

are so much different that generates “an almost morbid sense of

personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-

confidence” (Du Bois xxi). All through the novel, the characters

are trying to pass over the veil and go to the other side of it,

since the world inside and outside are so much different that it

has created lots of problems concerning the communication. Also,

it has ruined the characters’ self-dignity that they feel lack of

confidence to express their true self. The last sentences of the

first chapter denote the ambivalence and the struggle in the

character’s mind, of which positions to take. Trapped in a state

of double consciousness, Patrick can neither trust the self nor

the other. “He did not trust either himself or those strangers of

another language enough to be able to step forward and join them”

(8). Patrick is in an on-going struggle with his self and the

other. He feels a sense of twoness that reminds one of Du Bois’s

declarations about the state of “being an American, a Negro; two

warring ideals in one dark body…” (3).

To find Ambrose Small, Patrick forms a relationship with

Small’s former lover, Clara, who was an actress. He feels madly

in love with Clara. Clara leaves Patrick to return to Small.

During his time with Clara, Patrick meets Alice, Clara’s friend.

Patrick “saw something there he would never fully reach- the way

Clara dissolved and suddenly disappeared from him, or the way

Alice came to him it seemed in a series of masks or painted

faces,…” (49). Indeed, In the Skin of a Lion is a novel about the

wearing of the masks and skins and the removal of them. All the

characters in the novel lack a true self and an organized

identity. All of them try to hide their inner selves under the

masks in order to be welcomed in the society. They have denied

full expression of their manhood in a bourgeois context. It can

be deduced that they are not “psychologically healthy, for they

measure their worth through the eyes of the others”. Fanon speaks

most effectively about an “unresolved contradiction between

culture and class; from deep within the struggle of psychic

representation and social reality” (Fanon, Black skin, white mask ix).

Whereby, it is understood that the characters’ warding off their

selves is a sign of the psychic struggle of which masks to wear

to be compatible with social reality.

The novel’s title, In the Skin of a Lion, borrows a metaphor that

has several meanings. One of them is a reference to wearing mask

and hiding the true self. By disguising the self in the skin of a

lion, one will empower herself/himself in the eyes of the other.

Exactly after the image of Alice and Clara wearing masks, there

comes a passage describing Patrick who is thinking of Alice “as

he cuts skins in the Cypress Street leather factory…” (40);

although he himself is suffering from double consciousness,

Patrick becomes aware of the masks on the face of the people

around him little by little. By having the mentioned passage put

around the middle of the novel, Ondaatje intends to show the very

theme of the novel which is the wearing and removal of the masks

and skins. Near the end of the chapter named “Palace of

Purification”, where Patrick has been invited by Alice to

theatre, Patrick notices how strangely Alice shifts between “her

true self and her other true self”:

But with Alice, after the episode at the Waterworks and in

other performances, he can never conceive how she leaps from

her true self to her other true self. It is a flight he knows

nothing about. He cannot put the two people together. Did the

actor- holding her on stage, reciting wondrous languages,

holding his painted face inches away from her painted face,

kissing her ear in drawing-room comedies-know the person she

had stepped from to be there? (59)

Alice Gull is part of a group of Macedonian extremists seeking

recourse from the government. In an “attempt to be mentally

healthy in the society”, Alice who is one of the oppressed,

develop “an adaptive response” which necessitates a “mentality

that vacillates between different selves”; in the middle of these

“two diametric positions” is mental conflict of double

consciousness. Therefore the individuals suffering from this

mental conflict “must generate fever of resistance” to regain

their true self (Moore 753). Patrick, along with other characters

in the novel, suffers from twoness. Since they are trapped in a

society in which they are considered as outsiders, non-natives

and poor immigrants, they try to postpone their own true and

indigenous selves. By disguising themselves in the skin of the

powerful other, the oppressed and debilitated characters of the

novel try to get away with their inferiority complex. They look

for an out-side object in another space to settle down their

inner struggle. To view her/his “self” through the eyes of the

“other”, on the one hand, and to ignore the true self and

identity, on the other, are subtle signs of psychological

problems. The oppressed people are faced to live with mental

conflict when they “confront their oppressors on an intellectual

level” (Moore 753-4). To gain enough confidence to tell their

stories, the characters wear skins and masks themselves. In other

words, whenever they want to “enter into a larger public

discourse” (Du Bois xxi), they should postpone their own true

self and identity. As it is shown in the passage below:

Patrick has clung like moss to strangers, to the hooks and

fissures of their situations. He has always been alien, the

third person in the picture. He is the one born in this

country who knows nothing of the place… Alice had once

described a play to him in which several actresses shared the

role of the heroine. After half an hour the powerful matriarch

removed her large coat from which animal pelts dangled and she

passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor

characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on

the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into

languages. Each person had their moment when they assumed the

skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the

story. (60-1)

Also in Anil's Ghost there are lots of signs which illuminate the

fact Anil is suffering from double consciousness. Anil who is the

protagonist of the novel is a forensic anthropologist. Born in

Sri Lanka and educated in West, she returns to her country after

fifteen years at the behest of international human rights to

investigate war crimes. The threads of mental conflict and double

consciousness in Anil are obvious from the very beginning in the

italic introductory part: “there are no words Anil knows that can describe,

even for just herself, the woman’s face. But the grief of love in that shoulder she will not

forget, still remembers. The woman rose to her feet when she heard them approach

and moved back, offering room to work”. Anil feels a kind of sympathy

with the woman, but there are no words to describe that feeling.

Anil was once part of that woman’s society but now she is not

involved in that society’s destiny and future. So there exists a

kind of distance between Anil and the woman. Although Anil feels

sorry for that woman and the scene was a moving and lugubrious

one for her, it is not because of being involved in the woman’s

matter; she simply feels sorry for her as a human being. This

passage is an obvious sign of double consciousness which

illustrates Anil’s lost identity and her being westernized. At

the beginning of the novel, Ondaatje tries to delineate Anil’s

character as someone who has crossed over her true original self

and moved towards a western other. As Anil moves from the U.S. to

Sri Lanka, she moves towards a greater understanding of the Sri

Lankans with whom she works closely, and she moves towards a

deeper examination of her identity, so by the end of the novel

she is able to proclaim “I think you murdered hundreds of us”

(272). It shows that by the end of the novel Anil passes the veil

and gains a full understanding of the other.

Having lived for fifteen years abroad, Anil has forgotten the

indigenous language and assimilated the foreign language. When

she arrives at her homeland after these years, Anil feels uneasy

because of the young official’s frequent asking about her

language. This is, in fact, the first clash between her

indigenous self and the westernized one.

‘You still speak Sinhala?’

‘A little. Look, do you mind if I don’t talk in the car on theway into Colombia. I am jet-lagged’. (9)

Closer look at Ondaatje’s construction of Anil Tissara even shows

better the fact that Anil is westernized. Anil’s dress is

western; it becomes a habit for her. She wears sarong only

dutifully. “Rereading her girlfriend Leaf’s message from America

makes her feel better, as it is some communication from the West”

(28). Although being in Sri Lanka, “she still works what hour it

is in West” (13). The clash between East and West values becomes

subtler when Anil converse with Chitra in a restaurant; Chitra

doesn’t like England and decides to return to India sometimes.

Chitra asks Anil what she likes about the West, and Anil’s answer

is not so much of interest for her. Anil likes the anonymity and

privacy individuals enjoy in the West. She is more comfortable to

wear a mask. She prefers to hide her true identity in a skin and

keep the true self deterred from the public society. Anil “had

now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-

distant gaze” (11) and has gained a western gaze towards East.

But this is not the whole story. Michael Ondaatje challenges the

idea of the western gaze by making Anil as a “colonized” have a

gaze at her own country. In this way Ondaatje transferred power

from the colonizer to the colonized. All through the novel Anil

is playing a double role, since she has to look to Sri Lanka both

as a native self and as a westernized self. She is a Sri Lankan

in blood but is a westerner in manner and speech. In fact,

Ondaatje makes Anil to vacillate between these two positions till

she successfully settles her inner conflict.

For Fanon, “although race materialized in very discrete and

polarized forms, it is possible for the individuals to shift

between those polarized worlds”. One world is the rich and

powerful world of the colonizer and the other is the poor and

alienated world of the colonized. This is what Fanon referred to

as the “compartmentalized” sectors of the colonial condition.

Yet, “Fanon often refers to the mobility of individuals between

these worlds” (Kane 357-8). According to Fanon, “there has to be

a movement and communication between the raced sectors and this

movement and communication is made possible only by understanding

each other’s world”, indeed, through recognition of the other

(Kane 358). Accordingly, Michael Ondaatje’s challenge is to

encourage both the oppressor and the oppressed to travel to the

world of the other and love the other. So what is significant is

that disalienation requires a two-sided movement. This

understanding of the other and travelling beyond the veil is

beautifully represented in both novels by Ondaatje.

As the novel, In the Skin of a Lion, reaches near its ends, there is a

scene where Harris, who is the oppressor, confesses his vicious

plans. To get his dreams come true about building the bridges

and viaducts, Harris has made use of many workers and hold them

under sever conditions. Also Patrick goes beyond the veil as he

starts learning the foreign language. He passes the veil and

sees the world on the other side of it. When Patrick confronts

Harris and shouts at him, he revolts against the oppressor and

his colonization. The passage clearly indicates that the

oppressor has reached to an understanding of the other side of

veil, towards which he was blind till then:

These were all real places. They could have existed. I mean

the Bloor Street Viaduct and this building here are just a

hint of what could have been done here. You must realize you

are like these places, Patrick. You’re as much of the fabric

as the aldermen and the millionaires. But you’re among the

dwarf’s of enterprise who never get accepted or acknowledged.

(91)

This two-side movement is displayed in Anil's Ghost somewhat

differently. In this novel, Anil is playing two roles

simultaneously. She is someone who is part of a country, and

in a way, has to betray it. So, she is both the oppressor and

the oppressed. At the beginning of the novel Anil is

introduced as someone who is blind towards the miseries and

calamities of Sri Lankan people. She can just feel sympathy

and not empathy with the woman who has lost a husband and a

brother in the abduction. Nevertheless, at the end of the

novel Anil is “no longer a foreign authority”; she has passed

the veil which has made her blind towards the other’s world

and now declares that “I think you have murdered hundreds of

us” (272). Ondaatje italizes “hundreds of us” as an emphasis to

demonstrate the point where he has achieved his goal to make

Anil reach a state of single-minded consciousness. Also Sarath

is happy that Anil has accepted her indigenous true self after

being abroad for fifteen years. Finally, it can be a scene

where all the tensions in the novel are settled down.

Therefore, “it seems plain enough that those outside the veil,

when they live in divided societies, are no less affected”.

What characterizes them is a “decided blindness” which the

“effects of this are likely to be at work wherever social

worlds are divided” (Lemert 386). So, a movement beyond the

veil and communication between the polarized sections seems

necessary not only for the colonized but for the colonizer

too.

Findings:

The present study was an attempt to read Michael Ondaatje’s

novels, In the Skin of a Lion and Anil's Ghost, under the light of W.E.B.

Du Bois’s and Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theories. Du Bois’s and

Fanon’s theories of double consciousness form the root for all

other discussions in this research; According to the theory of

double consciousness, the characters in both novels are suffering

from their lost true self. Du Bois characterizes double

consciousness as “this sense of always looking at one’s self

through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape

of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (45). In

the novel, In the Skin of a Lion, Patrick who is the main character

finds himself an outsider in the society and tries to measure

himself through the other’s look. Also, other minor characters of

the novel are challenging with their lost identities. Alice and

Clara wear masks to hide their true self. In order to be accepted

in the society, they disguise themselves in the skin of the

powerful other. In fact, Alice and Clara have found power in

anonymity and postponing their identity. Anil in Anil's Ghost shows

the signs of double consciousness as well. There exists a kind of

distance between Anil and the people she has been once part of.

Du Bois defines the principle of twoness as a state of being “An

American, a Negro; […] two warring ideals in one dark body” (3).

Accordingly, Anil is delineated as someone who has crossed over

her true self and moved towards a western other. She has returned

to her country after many years and now feels in between cultures

and unable to decide which parts to take; being a westerner, or

an indigenous one. Also, it is argued that in an attempt to be

“mentally healthy, the oppressed can develop an adaptive as well

as maladaptive response”. An adaptive response necessitates a

mentality that vacillates between being a “Negro” or an

“American”. On the other hand, a maladaptive response changes the

“reality of the oppressed to take on the characteristic of the

oppressor”. “In the midst of these two diametric positions is

mental conflict” (Moore 753). Anil is in her own country as a

foreign authority; she wears like westerners, speaks English, and

thinks scientifically which all shows that Anil has taken on the

characteristic of the oppressor. On the other hand, she is

vacillating between being a westerner or a Sri Lankan as he gets

more involved with the people around. Therefore, her actions are

completely justifying according to theories of double

consciousness.

Finally, this study shows that Ondaatje’s characters who were

suffering from double consciousness move towards a state of

single-minded consciousness as they try to pass over the veil and

go beyond it. By the end of the novel, In the Skin of a Lion, Patrick

Lewis finds enough confidence to confront the oppressor Harris

and shouts his once-silenced voice. Patrick, also, is ready to

take the responsibility of telling his story; it shows that he

has successfully reached a state of single-minded consciousness.

Also, Anil gets over her double consciousness and manages to find

her lost true identity. Feeling a stranger in her own country in

the beginning of the novel, Anil counts herself a Sri Lankan

towards the end of the novel and states that: “I think you

murdered hundreds of us” (272). It depicts that Anil has reached

a state of single-minded consciousness and now is proud of her

past and her native culture. All these details were provided in

order to maintain how postcolonial and anti-colonial writers such

as Michael Ondaatje, Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon has devoted their

lives to the issues of the oppressed and down-trodden people all

over the world and by means of literature or literary and social

theories resist the power of colonization. Undoubtedly,

literature and art are among the best weapons to challenge the

authority of those in power, since it is a region where no

boundary is considered to exist.

References:

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Classic, 1903.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann.London: Pluto Press, 1986.

--- . The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: GrovePress, 1963.

Kane, Nazneen. “Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Racialization: Implicationsfor Globalization.” Human Architecture (2007). 12 Aug. 2010 <http:// www.encyclopedia.com/doc/IP3-1573095501.html>

Lemert, Charls. “A Classic from the Other Side of the Veil: DuBois’s “Souls of Black Folk”.” The Sociological Quartely 35, 3 (August1994): 383-396.

Moore, owens T. “A Fanonite Perspective on Double Consciousness.”Black Studies 35 (2005). 22 Jan. 2009 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/40034879>

Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

--- . In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1987.