Masks are scary. I don’t like them at all, not even when they are meant to be fun like the ones of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Gareth Southgate and more recently, Donald Trump. I just find them sinister and I expect it stems from my childhood.
My father’s brother worked in Nigeria for a few years, late 1940s and early 1950s. Our family had lots of African bits and pieces he had brought on visits. Most of it is lost now but my sister still has a pair of beautiful occasional tables. One of the items thankfully lost, is a large, wooden Nigerian mask which was a gift to my father. It was plain, just black with eye holes and no decoration.My father hung it on the office wall of which ever pub we were living in, probably because my mother wouldn’t have it anywhere else. It was horrible and scared the living daylights out of me. There was another one, almost the same and just as frightening, on my uncle’s bedroom wall at my grandparent’s house. In Africa they have a purpose. Masks are worn, or were once worn in certain rituals and they had a meaning. They weren’t made for décor. Some are quite ornate and more fierce looking than others, depending on what spirits they were designed to fight off.
The ‘Scream’ mask terrified me when I saw the film, but not as much as the V for Vendetta which is too creepy. The worst, by far is Hannibal Lecter’s lower face mask in The Silence of the Lambs. Although it looks nothing like our Nigerian one, something fearful reminds me of it.
Hallowe’en usually brings a constant stream of small vampires, witches and ghosts to my door. Last October there was a new trend of scary clowns like Stephen King’s ‘It’, wearing masks of the character. Ugh!
And the nips and tucks on real faces, trusting a surgeon with an extra-fine, extra-sharp scalpel. So many face-lifts end up looking like a mask. Too much Botox gives a startled, unchangeable expression. Sometimes, when I glance in the mirror and see the reflection of a much older woman, it is more frightening than all of these horrid masks. I can’t possibly have earned so many facial creases, not yet. I’ll learn to embrace these ‘over 60s’ dips and folds. For me, surgery is for a life or death situation.
I found these two poems, Dylan Thomas, making me wish I had a mask to hide behind sometimes, and Sylvia Plath, another favorite. O Make Me A Mask by Dylan Thomas O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face, Gag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece, The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies, Shaped in old armor and oak the countenance of a dunce To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners, And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve. Face Lift by Sylvia Plath You bring me good news from the clinic, Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask.
The nauseous vault Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.
They've changed all that.
Traveling Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift, Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous, I roll to an anteroom where a kind man Fists my fingers for me.
He makes me feel something precious Is leaking from the finger-vents.
At the count of two, Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard.
.
.
I don't know a thing.
For five days I lie in secret, Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.
I grow backward.
I'm twenty, Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle; I hadn't a cat yet.
Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror— Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years, Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze, Pink and smooth as a baby Thanks for reading, Pam x
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