White Mask, No Face

Orwell's semi-autobiographical piece achieves through its ironized narcissism not simply a condemnation of the praxis of imperialism, but a realization of his own disempowered subjectivity as a colonial subject of the Empire. In the binarized Manichean Burma, Orwell's dispossessed civil servant-police officer finds that it is his own subjectivity impinged upon not only by the Burmese, but by the colonial strictures of his own originating culture.

This ironic hegemony, which closes back on itself, arises sharply in Orwell's delineation of the half-hour it takes for the elephant to die. The elephant is trapped between life and death, in a liminal hell-on-earth, its existence held in temporary abeyance. Orwell's narrator in killing the elephant to save "face" and uphold the image of colonial superiority, can no longer give the elephant life to reverse his dreadful act, but is also unable to fully and completely kill it, and it is in that painful long interval between life and death where we see the artifice of the colonial identify, and yet, more disturbingly, how this artifice forces a capitulation of his own subjective humanity - "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." In being scrutinized by both the gaze of the colonized and the interiorized colonial gaze (yes, think surveillance and 1984), Orwell's narrator sharply encounters this irony of colonial hegemony, where he is disempowered by an ideology meant to empower him. He is no longer a person, but simply a colonial representative wearing the mask of the white man.

Thus what Orwell grapples with in this short piece is not just the realization that racial identities and power structures are merely performative given the white and yellow masks of colonialism (worn both by colonizers and colonized, and not by their own volition), but ultimately with the loss of self in a dehumanizing colonial landscape as a result of necessarily having to uphold such appellated identities.