Child Soldiers- Close Reading for Doniger's "Many masks, many selves"

Note: The Australian Human Rights Commission conducted a competition in 2005 that allowed children to enter artwork that they felt captured the theme of civil freedoms (or lack thereof) in some way. The committee chose fourteen year-old Sarah Hollick’s charcoal drawing, entitled “Child Soldiers- Stolen Innocence,” as the winner.

http://www.humanrights.gov.au/about/competitions/2005/art/childsoldiers.jpg

In her essay “Many masks, many selves,” Wendy Doniger expounded on the belief that even when it is “safe to take off your mask… no one ever does.” Following this perspective, the individual would experience a constant rotation of selves and a ceaseless cycle of masks throughout the course of his life. Yet the most striking characteristic of Hollick’s art is that most of her child soldiers have no faces at all. These small armed figures are just embodiments of blankness- they have no masks, and no selves.

Another noticeable aspect of the work is the mysteriousness of the subject in the foreground, who is divided from the other characters by what looks to be a rifle. Is this the weeping parent of a son whose innocence was stolen by the brutality of war? Or is this a child whose identity will soon be lost and who is thus shedding a final farewell tear for his masks that are to be forgotten? Doniger may be correct in stating that we have a preference for keeping our masks on, but it appears that there can also be times when those masks are taken from us. This tragic possibility raises the questions of what happens when we are left with nothing but a blank face (in a state of being that might not even constitute “living”) and if one can ever cross that rifle-laden border and regain a stolen self.