A Reflection of the Times: Racial Ideas of the Nineteenth Century in Dunbar’s Lyrics of

Lowly Life

Nerlande Adolphe

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Before Lyrics of Lowly Life: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Influence of his Race

In 1872, five years before the end of Reconstruction, Paul Laurence Dunbar was born. The time Dunbar was born is significant it speaks to how Dunbar grew up during a time when the racial tenor was signified by pervading theories of racial hierarchies and racial caricatures, socio-political entrenchment for African Americans, and growing black scholarship. In this social context,

Dunbar flourished as a poet and influential figure and became the first African-American commercially recognized poet. As William Dean Howells’s cannot help noting in the introduction of Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), Paul Laurence Dunbar was the child of once enslaved people; his father escaped to Kentucky and his mother was freed during the Civil war (xiv). This particular detail of his life is not a defining marker of Dunbar’s identity as a poet or man, but it becomes integral, for it reveals Dunbar’s racial identity. Furthermore, similar to Phyllis Wheatley,

Dunbar’s history and race are factors that attract some of his admirers, especially those who identify with his poems written in African American dialect.

Additionally, Dunbar further developed his talent and acquired connections through his education, which later assisted with his literary popularity. Paul Laurence Dunbar was the only

African-American in his high school class in Dayton, Ohio. During his time in Central High

School, Dunbar involved himself with programs that involved writing; he was the president of the literary Philomathean Society, editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, and class poet. Despite clear indications of aspirations, Dunbar did not attend college after high school due to his family’s limited funds. He did become the editor of the Dayton Tattler, which he founded. However, when the publication folded, Dunbar sought other work with already established newspapers, but most times, prospective employers turned him away because of his race, which forced him to rely on a menial job as an elevator boy at a hotel (Dunbar, Paul Laurence; Haralson). This is not abnormal, Adolphe 2 especially during a time of legalized discrimination, but this is just one instance where race is inseparable from Dunbar’s literary aspirations, which is the reality for Dunbar’s career during and posthumously. However, Dunbar kept writing during his free time at his job, and eventually, a former teacher asked Dunbar to address the Western Association of Writers in 1892 (Haralson).

Ultimately, this meeting began his profitable career.

At the meeting, Dunbar met James Newton Matthews who would become one of Dunbar’s champions. Matthews and other supporters like James Riley Whitcomb and Wilbur Wright circulated Dunbar’s poetry and name by sending letters to various newspapers about the poet

(Jarret). And although these letters helped promote Dunbar, they ground his poetry within his race.

For example, below is an excerpt from the letter that James Newton Mathews sent to newspapers, and his comments regarding Dunbar’s race are telling of the period that Dunbar and his poetry would have to contend with:

Great was the surprise of the audience to see stepping down lightly down the aisle...a

slender negro lad, as black as the core of Cheops’s pyramid. He ascended the rostrum with

the coolness and dignity of a cultured entertainer, and delivered a poem in a tone ‘as

musical as is Apollo’s lute’...He then disappeared from the hall as suddenly as he entered

it, and many were the whispered conjectures as to the personality of the man, and the

originality of his verses, none believing it possible that one of his age and color could

produce a thing of such evident merit. (Eident, 307)

The letter shows how people, Matthew’s included, are in awe of Dunbar’s, an African American, talent. Although such lines like “a poem in a tone ‘as musical as is Apollo’s lute’” shows a worthwhile appreciation for Dunbar’s capabilities since within the sentence, Dunbar is equated with the symbol of literary excellence itself, it is compromised by “as black as the core of Cheops’s Adolphe 3 pyramid.” The exaggerated simile of the latter quotation conveys a hyperawareness of Dunbar’s body, of a black body, that white readers would seek in his collections such as Lyrics of Lowly

Life.

Additionally, for some time, there was a desire to clarify who was Dunbar’s initial benefactor (Eident 308). This is important to think about in terms of possessing ownership of

Dunbar’s career. Of course, seeking recognition for those who aided in the rise of a prolific writer is not strange; however, this apparent concern about who is the first to initiate Dunbar’s career speaks to a reality of Dunbar always being explained in the context of his white supporters who one way or another projected their ideas of Dunbar’s race onto him and his writing. Even in this paper, I found it difficult to discuss Dunbar’s struggle of being a representative without referring to the thoughts of his white benefactors and supporters.

However, explaining the role of certain figures is still necessary to enumerate why Paul

Laurence Dunbar both perpetuated and subverted the racial ideas of the time in his poetry. For example, one of Dunbar’s newly acquired benefactors, Wilbur Wright, funded the self-publication of Dunbar’s first collection, Oak and Ivy (189) (“Dunbar, Paul Laurence”). The success of that book lead to Dunbar publishing the second collection, Majors and Minors (1893) by garnering support, and finally, the success of Majors and Minors (1985) lead to the third collection, Lyrics of Lowly Life, to be commercially published. Lyrics of Lowly Life and the social context surrounding the collection are worth examining in order to understand Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poetry in nineteenth-century post-Reconstruction United States.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar is a prolific poet whose works garner as much praise as they do criticism, and most of the praise and criticism comes from Dunbar’s poetic style. The poems that

Dunbar wrote in black vernacular are regarded as “[affirming] the past and present social structure in what has become an identifiable black voice” and “[offering] a primitive version of blackness that satisfies a particular racial fantasy” (qtd. in Elston 52). This assessment of Dunbar’s work is correct to an extent. Dunbar’s poetry written in standard English and dialect depicts him at times a problematic writer who could be lumped with other writers of the period who wrote minstrel- like poems. However, it would be a disservice to ignore the pro-black sentiments in his poetry, and the tension between Dunbar’s poetic aspirations and the societal demand, which Lyrics of Lowly

Life captures.

What makes Lyrics a unique text is not only its content, for it is an accumulation of the poems featured in Dunbar’s previous two collections, Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors, but it is also the fact that it is his first relatively popular collection. After his second collection of verse,

Dunbar moved from the peripheral awareness of powerful literary figures such as William Dean

Howells and his name came into mainstream circulation, which lead him to the leading publishing company of the period, Dodd, Mead, and Company. Ultimately, the publication of Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life signals his rising popularity, and this popularity brought a wider audience to read and then later laud Dunbar’s poems. As this paper will demonstrate, Dunbar’s poems that mimic the southern black tongue and perpetuate a plantation slave stereotype are the ones that received the most contemporary attention, mostly because these poems seemed to satisfy a societal desire to validate a collective prejudice. Some of Dunbar’s newly-acquired audience would possess such prejudices that feed off what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would call the “single story,” which concerns how people and cultures are reduced into a single narrative that is widely circulated. The Adolphe 5 single story of African Americans dominating this period was that related to the southern-negro type of blacks being lazy, superstitious, aggressive, hypersexual, complacent, and entertainers

(Jones). Dunbar’s poems, even in Lyrics of Lowly Life, perpetuates that single story but it also reflects a complex balance of personal identity and social identity reflective of the time.

Furthermore, the repeated poems featured in the third collection are no less integral to the text, considering these are the pieces that Dunbar and/or his editor chose to recirculate for a growing audience. The elevation that the publication of Lyrics brought is signified by the book’s slight variations, such as the introduction, a more ornate cover, a table of contents instead of an index of poems organized by alphabetical order, and the intermixture of the dialect poems and formal English poems instead of them being divided. Mostly, these slight changes mark the beginning transformation of Dunbar’s poetry into what is acceptable for mass, popular consumption. Simple changes like these are taken-for-granted as the editor’s control but however minute these details about aesthetic and organizational shifts are, they begin to illustrate the

“popularization” of Dunbar’s work, which will increase as Dunbar published more collections and novels in rapid succession. The very fact Paul Laurence Dunbar was able to sign with Dodd, Mead, and Company is significant in a period when black writing failed to “make its way among...white fellow-citizens to anything like a desirable extent, and...to a degree which [African American authors’] literary merit deserves” (Kaestle).

Now internationally recognized, Dunbar’s writing was popular enough for white consumption. However, partly due to critics’ reviews that reflected a desire to redefine race in the popular culture post-Civil War, Dunbar was known primarily for his dialect poetry and southern negro types, a reputation that still follows him today. The literary depiction of dialect speech is not a tradition that began nor ended with Dunbar. Prior to him, writers such as Mark Twain, Joe Adolphe 6

Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, assumed a black voice (Jarret). Additionally, the application in dialect speech in writing can be traced to a Romantic perception of language, for poetry should contain “the selection of real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” as

Wordsworth wrote in the preface of his Lyrical Ballads (Calahan). However, some scholars reject the way black dialect speech was used in nineteenth-century American popular culture. Literary depictions of black vernacular disregarded or failed to consider the political, historical, and social exclusion of African Americans, nor did they accurately depict the psychology and character of a non-monolithic group (Carr 51). Furthermore, such speech conveyed minstrelsy illustrations, which some scholars charged against Paul Laurence Dunbar and for good reason.

One poem in Lyrics that overtly reads as plantation nostalgia and romanticism is “The

Deserted Plantation.” This poem is one of the most contested among Dunbar’s pieces. “The

Deserted Plantation” conveys an agrarian melancholy where missing uncles and “chillum,” silent fiddles and banjos, and a neglected plantation house define a sense of loss for a previous American institution. Paradoxically, the desertion of plantation life is signified by an active nature: the weeds that are “growin’ green an’ rank an’ tall”, the sound of “branch’s passin’ waters” breaking the silence, and the “swallers” hovering around the house as if it was always theirs, not only underscore the desertion but also a disconnection between past slaves and nature, which is significant due to the stereotypical idea of blacks being close to nature. The abandonment of the plantation house is even worse due to this act of subversion, this act of deserting nature.

Furthermore, like the poems written in formal English, “The Deserted Plantation” is structured. The poem has an abba rhyme scheme, and lines alternating between twelve and eleven syllables, showing how Dunbar does not apply any less literary formality in this poem. However, as some scholars assess, the problem derives more from the message than from the speech itself: Adolphe 7

Gone! not one o’ dem is lef’ to tell de story;

Dey have lef’ de deah ole place to fall away.

Could n’t one o’ dem dat seed it in its glory

Stay to watch it in de hour of decay? (158)

These lines not only convey the nostalgia dominating the text, but it is also accusatory, blaming a race for the fall of the plantation house, which is metonymic for slavery. As capitulatory it seems, one reading of this departs from the idea of Dunbar as a supporter of the plantation tradition, “[the poem] mourns the loss of community that developed a means of surviving, that preserved an inner sense of self and cohesiveness despite violent racism” (Carr 56). This is a perspective which considers Dunbar’s own childhood in which he heard stories about community life from his mother

(Haralson). However, this interpretation does not ameliorate the concluding lines ’Twell de othah

Mastah thinks it’s time to end it, / An’ calls me to my qua’ters in de sky” which are paternalistic in how they equate slave owners with God and create black characters who imagine their paradise as a reproduction of a romanticized version of blacks’ condition under slavery.

On the other hand, Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” exemplifies a racial awareness that brings attention to the double-consciousness role that blacks must possess. Many scholars point to this poem as evidence for the rebellious spirit that underlies the problematic representation of blacks in Dunbar’s work. “We Wear the Mask,” one of the few poems original to Lyrics, is considered emblematic of black poetry and is as recognized as much as Dunbar himself. The line

“we wear the mask” is the title of the piece, and as the unrhyming refrain or rentrement, it anchors the poem throughout, expressing the plight of the representative speaker. Like with many of the poems in the collection, this poem observes poetic tradition. “We Wear the Mask” is a rondeau, which is a short fifteen-line poem divided into three stanzas. The rondeau first appeared in Adolphe 8 thirteenth-century France as a lyric form and it made a revival at the end of the nineteenth century

(“Rondeau”). The rondeau is a fitting style choice for a poem in a collection of lyrics. Additionally, the poem’s iambic tetrameter, alternating rhyme scheme of aabba, abbc, and aabbac, and repetitive nature as seen with the sibilance and alliteration accentuates the lyrical form, and one purpose of a lyric is for the message to adhere to its readers. That is what should happen, but readers bring their own cultural understanding or are primed as this paper will show regarding the introduction of Lyrics.

As for the message, the speaker, or Dunbar if one views the speaker as a proxy for him, suggests that wearing a mask is the way that blacks, not only him, can resist the racial climate.

Take the second stanza for example:

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask. (168)

These lines and the poem overall are subversive. Romanticizing or hyperbolic depictions are not prominent as they were in “The Deserted Plantation.” Considering the social context of the poem, it is clear that these lines seem to acknowledge the collective condition of blacks. The group, as invoked in first person plural pronouns, is smiling through the pain. The complacent smile is the mask and even though this is the proposed solution of the poem, it is an inadequate solution as demonstrated in the speaker’s internal conflict. Lines such as “we smile, but O great Christ, our cries / to thee from “tortured souls arise” and “with torn and bleeding hearts we smile” convey a tension between what is desired and what must be done. The smiling is offset by the great pain that blacks feel as a result of their position in society. The distress cannot be contained as it Adolphe 9 interjects between “we smile” and “we wear the mask.” These lines align with arguments that posit

Dunbar’s more problematic works in Lyrics as facades.

Furthermore, the refrain is a nod to the minstrel culture in the United States. Minstrelsy defines postbellum Reconstruction and was a way to reestablish the old, racist ways that were sanctioned under slavery. Minstrelsy also perpetuated the iconographic stories of black bodies in inferior ways (Jarret). Blackface is an identifying feature of American minstrel shows. Performers of minstrel shows would put on blackface, turning African Americans’ race into a costume that could be worn. In a sense, this tradition made African Americans’ visible, but visible through harmful depictions. Similar to how these performers assumed another face in Dunbar’s poem, the

African Americans metaphorically puts on a mask in order to resist and to struggle away from others’ preconceived notions.

“The Deserted Plantation” and “We Wear Mask” are two eminent poems of the collection that are different from each other, which brings to question to how should one then understand

Lyrics and its author? As exhibited so far, Dunbar and his third collection must be understood within its social context. Almost as a given, Dunbar’s poems of both styles play into contemporary ideas of black and white inferiority-superiority, but as demonstrated by “We Wear the Mask”, his poems do not always endorse a complacency or nostalgia for past oppressive structures. A rebellious voice is present within the sentimentality of Lyrics and it demonstrates Dunbar’s struggle to reconcile his identities as a poet and as a black representative. This struggle derives from a few places.

As Elston Carr argues, Dunbar’s use of black American vernacular is a “commodified tool” resulting in meeting the demands of the literary market of his time (57). This is an idea substantiated more in the ways writers reflected the racial preoccupation of the literary world Adolphe 10 during the late nineteenth century. This is evinced in the way Dunbar’s race became a pretext in

Howells’s introduction, influencing the reading of Lyrics of Lowly. As previously established,

Dunbar’s connections play a considerable role in promoting but limiting the writer. Through

Ripley Hitchcock, the literary editor of D. Appleton and Company, Dunbar’s second collection,

Majors and Minors reached the hands of William Dean Howells (Jarret). Howells, “the leading man of letters,” is known for introducing writers to the public and that is what he did for Dunbar when he wrote a review for Majors and Minors. A version of this review ended up in Lyrics as an introduction, which, like Matthew’s letter, is racially preoccupied. As claimed in Gene Jarret’s essay, the frontispiece of a young Dunbar in his second collection had more of an effect of captivating Howells than the text itself, for he spent a substantial portion of his review for Majors, which was featured in Harper’s Reader, describing Dunbar’s phenotypical features, which is very reflective of the phrenological fixation of the period. Even though part of that review made it in the introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life, an appendage that contributes to the marketing of Lyrics,

Howells tones down the racial delineation in the introduction. He goes as far as asserting the irrelevance of Dunbar being “without the admixture of white blood” for he is too much in the

“mood of the world” to care about race, but the idea that Dunbar is a one hundred percent black man who can write about the speech of blacks is a glaring fixation of the introduction.

Additionally, the manner in which Howells elevates Dunbar as the savior of the black race while espousing the importance of differences conveys a disparity between words and beliefs that

Dunbar would internalize himself as will be shown later in this paper:

...[Dunbar’s] brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro

objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy,

and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness. I said that a Adolphe 11

race which had come to this effect in any member of it, had attained civilization in him,

and I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and the prejudices

which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts...I held that if

black poems had been written by a white man, I should not have found them less admirable.

I accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not

think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all.

Yet it appeared to me then, and it appears to me now, that there is a precious difference

of temperament between the races which it would be a great pity ever to lose, and that this

is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his

where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our English. (xviii)

Several things are happening in this excerpt and they seem to oppose each other. For example,

Howells lauds Dunbar’s literary talent, but only in the context of how the black writer defines other

African Americans. Howells’s reasoning about Dunbar having represented “the American negro with humor, with sympathy, and... what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness” is telling if one considers what a reader of the nineteenth century would consider the truth about black Americans. An idea of that is actually conveyed within the line “with humor, with sympathy,” for it calls upon the minstrelsy tradition where black characters were portrayed sometimes pitifully and humorously. Then there is Howells’s admission of finding value in delineating the different temperaments between whites and blacks, which would be a worthwhile observation if it was not undermined by the editor’s focus on speech and Dunbar’s characterizations in Lyrics of Lowly Life. To some extent, Howells believes Dunbar’s words about a race the truth because of Dunbar’s ancestry. Adolphe 12

Moreover, Howells holds two diametrically opposed perceptions of blacks in the United

States, and Dunbar’s race and black poetry bridge those perceptions. To Howells, Dunbar represents African-Americans’ potential to be intellectual, but his poetry reaffirms “southern negro” depictions that Howells ascribes to, and the way Howells can simultaneously hold such beliefs is by making Dunbar exceptional. The race has “attained civilization” in Dunbar, not in other black writers like Dunbar, but solely Dunbar. This is the case because, as far as William

Dean Howells is concerned, Dunbar is the only fully black writer to provide, “divinations and reports of what passes in the hearts and minds of a lowly people” (xix, my emphasis). In this sentiment, Howells takes a portion of the title and frames it as his understanding, connotating

“lowly people” as those “humorously” depicted in minstrel shows. Howells’s introduction and its focus on Dunbar’s race are paratexts that prime the mainstream readers to disregard the poems that do not align with certain racial ideas. In fact, Howells’s reading of Dunbar and what he considers the real treasure of the collection, the dialect poems, are so reflective of the century and so pervasive regarding Dunbar’s image, they move from the margins and almost overpower the text.

Howells’s and other critics’ appreciation, which is symbolically racist in some regard, is the result of a postbellum nineteenth-century demand for what Gene Jarret calls “minstrel realism.”

Minstrel realism embodies George Fredrickson’s “romantic racialization” where both speak to a pseudo-understanding of what characteristics should a certain race possess (Jarret). With “minstrel realism,” what makes it “real” is if minstrel blackface is performed by blacks themselves. This arose during Reconstruction, and to Howells’s eyes, Dunbar’s dialect poetry was the first to faithfully exhibit that in literature. This is evinced in Howells’s words, “[Dunbar reveals] a finely ironical perception of the negro’s limitations, with a tenderness for them which I think so very rare Adolphe 13 as to be almost quite new” (xviii). This statement captures the commercial purpose of minstrels in the century.

With all this information in mind, the implications of Howells’s introduction fits into the way Dunbar perpetuates and subverts post-Reconstruction ideas of race in a few ways. First, it shows the amount of categorizing that Dunbar must contend with. Howells limited Dunbar somewhat in the manner in which he positioned the dialect poems over the standard English ones, but Paul Laurence Dunbar would have been aware of such ideas prior to Howells’s reviews. As shown in James Matthews’s letter, people have projected this to Dunbar before. Although one cannot solely claim that Dunbar included southern negro figures in Lyrics to appease such literary critics and white readers, this is a reality of which Dunbar would be aware. Whether Dunbar meant to exploit that to promote the book further or if he was a simple victim of the times as some scholars have proposed is debatable, but Dunbar falls on a spectrum between the two extremes like how he does between perpetuating and fighting against racial ideas. Also, Howells’s ideas demonstrate that there is evidence of problematic caricatures within the poems of Lyrics of Lowly Life, for the stereotypes must be there for him to extrapolate them. Though one should consider the idea that some readers would exaggerate these caricatures for they are already primed by the cultural context, and if not by that, then at least by the reviews.

Additionally, exclusively claiming that Dunbar and his poems such as “The Deserted

Plantation” just gave into a literary market does not consider Dunbar’s struggle of being a poet and representative. This anxiety can be found in the second poem of Lyrics of Lowly Life, “The

Poet and His Song.” Similar to “We Wear the Mask,” the musicality is a dominating feature of the poem, as seen in the consistent iambic tetrameter and rhyme pattern, but the difference lies in how this musicality is underscored by the poem’s rhetorical understatement. “The Poet and His Song” Adolphe 14 begins with a lively tone and by the speaker purporting the small importance of songs, which also symbolizes poetry, “song is but a little thing.” However, Dunbar then follows this claim with the pains that come with writing. The poet’s plight is evident and important, but it is the duality of that plight, the plight of being black and a poet, that connects the themes of Lyrics. A few lines of the last stanza exhibit this multifaceted struggle:

Sometimes a blight upon the tree

Takes all my fruit away from me;

And then with throes of bitter pain

Rebellious passions rise and swell

But—life is more than fruit or grain,

And so I sing, and all is well. (4)

“Fruits” represents authorial liberties and these fruits are hindered by the realities of writing for an “unheeding throng.” The means in which the speaker tries to harvest these fruits are framed by language that alludes to agrarian labor, “I put my sickle to the grain / I labor hard, and toil and sweat,” and such language points to Dunbar’s use of the “southern negro” image in Lyrics. The toiling, the use of plantation stereotypes and all they entail are the blights upon the tree. They are what is required.

Furthermore, in the excerpt, the idea that the speaker is lamenting his representative role comes through the lines about rebellion, for it parallels the tension between rebellion and conciliation that exists throughout the collection; “The Deserted Plantation” and “We Wear the

Mask” exemplify this. The lines leading up to the last line of the excerpt build up with frustration, but the frustration is quelled by a self-consolatory statement. This statement could be read with a sense of naivete or self-assurance of the speaker’s ability to write past the pigeonholing, but either Adolphe 15 way, it captures conflicting roles, which also speaks to the “double consciousness” ideology within the collection. Double consciousness is a term that W.E.B Du Bois used to explain the African

American experience of having one’s identity being mediated and split up through the eyes of others (Du Bois). Even though Lyrics was published after Souls of Black Folks, Dunbar represents this insofar as he used two language styles and how others distinguished between those styles

(Mvuyekure). Even in “The Poet and His Song” this double consciousness comes through as the speaker tethers between toiling and fighting and his two identities. Dunbar’s poetic struggle is not completely new, for the poet’s hardship has been philosophized long before him. Even Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow captures this struggle in his own “The Poet and His Songs” (1880) when he writes “he sings; and their fame / Is his, and not his.” As demonstrated in this paper, Dunbar’s literary success had been claimed by his contemporaries and readers. However, Dunbar’s struggle outlined in Lyrics becomes unique in the context of his racial identity.

One of Dunbar’s many admirers made a post about Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” that I believe partly captures the underlying preoccupation of Lyrics and Dunbar’s career, “being a poet means that you do not contain yourself to writing...rather your writing is an expression of your culture, your thinking, and a forward look at the past. It’s beyond measure and influencing on purpose” (Desir). Others have tried to contain Dunbar in his collection, believing him to represent a culture in a particular way, and though he has, it is the culture of the nineteenth century overall that he has expressed. Lyrics is the evidence of Dunbar’s exhibiting and fighting this definition.

Dunbar’s race and Lyrics of Lowly Life are conjoined in the fact that Lyrics is reflective of the time. The social construction of race was and still is a long-enduring project in the United States; minstrel shows were regarded as important for providing awareness to whites of what they considered important aspects of black culture in the United States. With or without Dunbar’s Adolphe 16 consent, Lyrics became a collection that affirmed those preconceptions, but in reality, it was more than a means of affirmation, but also a means to defy.

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