We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870

Approximately one half of Rafia Zafar’s book is devoted to persuasive readings of texts produced during the long eighteenth century by Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Hanson, John Marrant, Joel Barlow, Ann Eliza Bleeker, and Olaudah Equiano. Taking her title from one of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s best-known poems, Zafar traces the development of a distinctively African-American literature from its earliest origins in writings by Americans of African descent: “Early African Americans wrote American literature, and they meant it to be such. When they begin to write as African Americans, and not as transculturated Africans, an American literary milestone is reached” (13). Locating this milestone in the late nineteenth century, when black readers became numerous enough to constitute an audience separate from whites, Zafar offers We Wear the Mask as a chronological, yet hardly exhaustive survey of African American literary masks, mimicry, and invisibility. Since the late colonial period black writers have produced a wide variety of written expression…. The white literary forms available—captivity and conversion narratives, neoclassic poetry, and so on—were tried on and out, and intriguing variations on familiar genres began to appear. African American literature is not merely a set of changes rung on white genres. Rather, so-called “white” approaches to written expression were taken up and altered by Africans and African Americans, without falling into the trap of “social science fiction.” Through literary masking, the use of literary genres and styles familiar to whites, black American writers gained access to an audience that had not previously believed that the Negro had any rights worth respecting. … As a late twentieth-century literary historian, I seek to define how to read comprehensively these “whitefaced” literary acts, without overprivileging the imitated genres and while contemplating the inescapably limited nature of early black writers’ success. (9-10)

Zafa wisely consciously resists trying to read early writers, especially black ones, from a presentist or post-Romantic perspective. She points out the inappropriateness of trying to find an African-American consciousness in the first generation of writers of African descent. Such attempts inevitably find the authors wanting. She proposes instead a “comparative” approach, in which, for example, Wheatley’s achievements as an American author who is of African descent can only be appreciated by comparing her writings to those of white (American) contemporaries who shared her literary traditions, diction, and political context. Sensitive as well to the effects of gender, status differences, and the complexity of the concept of blackness, Zafar demonstrates just how innovative and subversive black authors writing for an overwhelmingly white audience could still be before the American Civil War. Critically and theoretically up-to-date, Zafar follows the lead of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Sondra O’Neale, Phillip Richards, John Saillant, and others in attempting to read the early black writers on their own terms.

Reviewing We Wear the Mask seven years after it was first published, one is inevitably struck both by how well its argument and individual readings have held up, as well as by how differently Zafar might have treated her subject were she writing the book today, given recent exciting developments in the conceptualization of pre-1800 Anglophone writing. In its challenges to the critical consensus on the supposedly very limited achievements of the early black writers, We Wear the Mask was at the forefront of these developments. Post-1997 scholarship would correct some details. For example, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative first appeared in 1772, not 1770. And Zafar would probably not now cite Equiano’s autobiography from mutilated editions. But far more significantly, one can imagine how differently she might now frame her book.

Zafar’s treatment of Olaudah Equiano exemplifies what I have in mind. She is a very perceptive critic of his Interesting Narrative, qualitatively and quantitatively by far the most significant work by a person of African descent published before 1800. She is one of the first scholars to note that the publication of Equiano’s autobiography preceded that of Benjamin Franklin by several decades: “by some markers one could say that his story anticipated the ur-text of American self-made men.” As I have suggested elsewhere, from the perspective of chronology at least, rather than calling Equiano a “black Franklin,” we would more accurately label Franklin a “white Equiano.” Zafar recognizes that behind Frederick Douglass’s autobiography lies a tradition that includes Equiano as well as Franklin. But the Americanist frame in which she tries to place all the authors she deals with does not quite suit “Equiano, a man who may best be described as an Anglo-African” (90). Zafar acknowledges in a footnote the challenge Equiano’s Interesting Narrative poses to the construction of a canon of American literature: “I and many others have debated how ‘American’ Equiano’s autobiography truly is; perhaps the relative brevity of my discussion of this remarkable text signals my continued fence-sitting” (207). The possible “Americanness” of Equiano has been further complicated by recent discoveries that he might have been born in South Carolina rather than, as he claims, Africa. The question of “Americanness” can also be raised in regard to Wheatley, Gronniosaw, and Marrant, all of whom spent most, if not all, of their lives as British subjects, and all of whom were first published in England.

Were Zafar to revise We Wear the Mask in the twenty-first century, I suspect that just as she very productively moved beyond the constraints imposed by trying to find some sort of essential “African-Americanness” in the pre-Revolutionary black writers, she would move beyond attempts to define writers of the period in terms of some kind of essential “Americanness.” Her insightful treatment of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors included in We Wear the Mask suggests that she would embrace the transatlantic approach to colonial American, and particularly first-generation Anglophone African, writing that was just on the critical horizon in the 1990s.