Word: mask
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Ismat Ullah's expression of polite amiability is oddly out of sync with the fury of his words. In the 20 years he has spent as a Pakistani immigrant in Britain, slurs and rejections have engendered an abiding bitterness. But the mask remains in place. "I keep it all inside," he explains. "I listen to the jokes about Indians and Pakistanis, and I laugh so as not to show my weakness. But I resent it. As a colored person here, you have to be different from what you are. You have to keep a cosmetic appearance...
...scheduled into the routines of the world. They have become a way we punctuate our time. History unfolds as a sequence of detonations, a portion of the nightly news given over to psychosis. The scenes define a distinct style of politics in the world today, politics in a ski mask, violence dramatizing an unappeasable rage. Faceless, and morally depthless, the zealots crash truck bombs into their targets in Beirut or Tyre, go night riding with the Salvadoran death squads, or set the timers for the I.R.A. One sees their work-the almost daily deposits of bodies in the roads...
Michael K, the hero of this fearful fable, is a South African of unspecified color. A gardener in a Cape Town public park, he has a harelip and a reputation for feeblemindedness that mask his true nature: he is a man as meek and lowly in heart as a latter-day Messiah. Coetzee calls him "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As his life and times unfold, it becomes clear that his prodigiousness lies in his ability to continue to celebrate life in the midst of the most malignant chaos...
...corduroy trousers, dark shirt, size-twelve boots), rolled his cigarettes from a pouch of acrid shag and poured his tea into a saucer before drinking it (there he goes, that Socialist who says such terrible things about Mr. Stalin). Eric Blair had totally metamorphosed into George Orwell; the mask had become the man. Money was still scarce; his books had made him well known but not solvent. He turned out columns for Tribune, a weekly organ of the non-Communist British left, and did wartime broadcasts for the BBC's Eastern Service to India and Southeast Asia. He also...
This is followed by a mystical and erotic scene that reaches to explain the mysteries of fecundity that evade and torment Yerma. Reach it does, but not quite far enough; while the symbolism and open sexuality of the Male and Female Mask is striking and effective, the closing of the semi-circle of cast members into a circle, which now excludes the audience, isolates and distances spectators who before had been drawn into the circle of Yerma's pain...