paired with “Connecting the Dots”

Inviting students to move from close reading to guiding ideas in the essay as a whole, this activity could be used as either an in-class discussion or as an extended writing prompt.

Introduction

ET: Both Sofia Samatar and Bassey Ikpi center the body – the black, female body in particular – in their essays, but in seemingly different ways. In broad strokes, Samatar seems to read the body as a political surface of not belonging while Ikpi potentially presents the body as an intimate space of self-discovery and belonging. Samatar tends to look outward to how others see her body, how it’s counted, commodified, and surveilled. Ikpi looks at her own body and negotiates its differences with her mother and her father’s brother.

What struck us about this difference is how readers might be more comfortable with one approach over the other or see one approach as more important than the other. But we think it valuable for students to challenge their own notions of value in the role of the body by seeing how those two approaches – one seemingly more political and the other personal –  could be two sides of the same coin. Like an optical illusion, it could be that, as readers, we see one approach before we notice the other. Asking students to see the political in the personal and the personal in the political not only helps them see how entangled those two seemingly separate realms are, but also might make them more sensitive to their own assumptions and blindspots about approaches they undervalue. What are they avoiding by discounting the political? The personal?

Guide

Close Read: Similar but Different.

Read these two sections from Ikpi and Samatar’s essays where they directly address their own bodies in the first person. Annotate them with some attention to the purpose and impact of this self-examination of the body. How do they see their bodies in similar and dissimilar ways from one another?

Bassey Ikpi’s “Connecting the Dots”

That evening, after everyone had gone, I sat on the bed in my auntie’s hotel in the village with a torch and examined my body. I searched for any hint of discoloration, anything that would grow into a patchwork on my skin. What story would I make up to explain my own? Would I tell people that I watched the brown slide off my face and crawl away? Would it just disappear one day? Would it be easier, then, to explain the kind of different I’d become?

After about an hour of searching with the torch, I found the dot on the back of my leg. This one is light, a reversal of all the other dots speckled on my body like black paint. I thought of Uncle Brodda and how this white spot could grow or show up on other places on my body. I told my mother the next morning. She said, “Don’t worry. That one is your father’s side.” She said it as if I had somehow sprung whole from her. I have her mother’s face, the one she gave us all, so it could have been the truth. I left it alone, checking every few years to see if the white spot had grown. It has been the same size since then. It hasn’t moved.

When I think about these stars that litter my skin, when I think about the dot that defies all of those black marks, I recognize one thing—that even my body defies itself. My skin is a star-filled night of moles and marks, and there is one that chose to lighten. These collections of dots and marks tell a story of who I am. How I became. On the days when it feels like my skin is a prison filled with flaws and insecurities, I think of Uncle Brodda.

Sofia Samatar’s “Skin Feeling”

I’m interested in visibility as it relates to the lives and working conditions of academics of color, at a time when visibility has come to dominate discussions of race in U.S. universities to such an extent that it has made other frameworks for approaching difference virtually impossible. We speak of diversity, of representation. Diversity, unlike the work of anti-racism, can be represented visually through statistics. How many of X do you have? What percent? There is an obsession with seeing bodies that raises the ghosts of racial memory. These ghosts haunt black performance: Charlie Parker, for example, grew up with and rejected the comedy of the minstrel show, which plays with and replays the violence of plantation spectatorship. The same ghosts haunt the academy, and we can sense them if we understand that the issue is not so much how blackness is made visible, whether the purpose is to defame or to defend, but the fact that in either case, visibility is the end point. The visual marker of blackness stands in for the person, and once it has taken the person’s place, it becomes amenable to a variety of uses. In Ellison’s words, it’s “drained of human significance.” I think of the abolitionist emblem Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, which was reproduced on brooches and hairpins.

Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander taps into that wound: “Highly visible examples of black success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness.” It’s not that we’re too few, nor is it that we suffer survivor guilt for having escaped the fate of so many in our communities. It’s that our visibility is consumed in a way that legitimizes the structures of exclusion.

Skin feeling: to be encountered as a surface.

Write: Defamiliarizing the Personal and Political

Take a resonant word from Ikpi’s excerpt that doesn’t appear in the Samatar excerpt and use that word as a framework to reinvision what Samatar is doing in her passage. How is the political personal?

OR

Take a resonant word from Samatar’s excerpt that doesn’t appear in the Ikpi excerpt and use that word as a framework to reinvision what Ikpi is doing in her passage. How is the personal political?