All the I-s we cannot see
Dedicated to identity, Rimbaud, and the clairvoyance of the Halloween costume
So, I went to a Halloween party. beat.
More like just a party, really, which is why I almost didn’t go (what’s the point of a Halloween party if you’re not dressing up?). “Don’t worry, no one’s dressing up, it’s just a small gathering”, promised my friend when she invited me, waiting for a sign of relief in my reply. Instead, I said that I hoped I could go dressed as a movie character, something like Annie Hall or Anna Karina in Bande à part, maybe even something as elaborate as one of the women in Picnic at Hanging Rock, or the painter in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that I was looking forward to taking a break from the cage of my body, but then the idea of pondering the outfit and everything else that goes along with it felt too exhausting to explore any further. So I told her that I’d think about it, but that I probably wouldn’t be there, the thought of an evening spent alone in my apartment still novel and exciting.
But because lately I’ve been spending a lot of time inside my head and I’m still unsure whether it’s a good thing, I decide to put on a face, my own, and show up at the party. And my friend was right: no one’s wearing a costume, but everyone’s dressed up as something, this version of themselves it was agreed they’d represent, the chosen, Pirandellian mask that was imposed upon them. Here’s the kind, funny guy who introduces himself to everyone, big smile and gentle hands; here’s the artsy, cool girl with a pixie haircut and an expression of contempt mixed with introverted curiosity; here’s the shy, intellectual type, glasses sliding to the tip of the nose, fixed back in place with quick fingers, head in perpetual nodding motion.
Like the writer I am, I can’t help but wonder what’s behind the façade. As I start shuffling words around in my mind, making literary sketches of my surroundings, I also begin to imagine these people in their Halloween costumes, had they worn one. What forbidden part of themselves would they choose to reveal?
My first Halloween costume (the first I remember at least) is what my mum called “punk”. While other kids dressed up as Disney princes and princesses, I wore distressed jeans hand-painted with stylized skulls, flowers, and slogans like “punk rebel” in black marker all over them and a leather jacket that felt too heavy for my 7-year-old frame.
On another occasion, she dressed me up as Mammy, Scarlett O’Hara’s maid, a black, plump woman in her late 40s. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate alter-ego for a little girl with skin the colour of milk. As much as I hated them, it wasn’t the headscarf, an old cleaning rug roughly patched around my head, or the bouffant skirt with its impractical cottony weight that bothered me so much. What bothered me was the brown foundation - its synthetic floral smell, the terrifying scent of womanhood - that my mum applied all over my face, everywhere except around my eyes, so that now I looked like an inverted panda, everything about my face wrong and out of place. “Mum, but I’m ugly,” I protested and she told me something like “True beauty is not reflected in a mirror,” although I doubt these were her exact words. Later, in the car, driving back home from the party where all my girlfriends wore their hair up and swirled in plasticky, iridescent gowns that made them all look alike and beautiful, I made her promise: “Next year, I’m going to be a princess too”.
I was too young to grasp what she wanted me to know: that it’s okay to be different, that if you feel like you don’t belong somewhere, you owe it to yourself to gracefully move away instead of trying to flatten every edge of your being, the very things that make you who you are, hoping to fit in.
When next year arrived and she asked which princess I wanted to dress up as, I said that I didn’t want to be one, that I just wanted to be myself, and if I had to wear a costume, then the “punk” uniform would do. Ripped denim and a white t-shirt became my go-to Halloween attire, and funnily enough, my everyday outfit years later, as I morphed into the woman I am today, someone I both know and don’t know, someone that’s me and also another, someone who wears loose, distressed jeans as much as she wears dresses.
Challenging the notion of a single, unified self, Rimbaud writes “Je est un autre,” (I is another). But to me, this implies a separation between the manifold facets of self, a rupture in the delicate fabric of our being, rather than a fluid communion of identities. Perhaps it makes more sense to say “I is every other,” instead.
Like my mother saw and celebrated the punk rebel in me before I was even aware of her existence, I, too, watching these strangers dressed up as themselves (or the self they chose to represent) at this party I didn’t plan to attend in the first place, try to look for the mask behind the mask.
And they all look familiar, so familiar they could almost be me.