“Connecting the Dots”
Bassey Ikpi, 2016
Originally published in Catapult
Editor’s Note: The excerpt in this chapter is included on the basis of fair use.
Hashtags
#body, #otherness, #difference, #identity, #family, #personal narrative, #translation, #memory, #perspective, #colonialism
Frame
ET: I first came to this piece through another of Ikpi’s essays – one on how one can lie to oneself and be unsure of their own truths. This essay, however, has a stronger focus on seeing the outside of oneself and of what is written on the face, on the skin. As my co-authors and I spoke more about this essay, we increasingly saw it as a personal relationship to our own bodies, in contrast to Sofia Samatar’s more strongly socially and politically focused view of the body. This time our annotations provide a simple word that could both define and recast a phrase in Ikpi’s essay.
Excerpts
I stayed away from the rest of the party, choosing to hide behind the compound on a makeshift bench hidden by trees. I’d hear my names being called and draw my hard twelve-year-old knees closer to my face, resting my soft cheek upon them, willing myself to disappear or transport across the ocean back to what was familiar—back to the language I didn’t need to force myself to remember.
It wasn’t long before someone found me beneath the tree. I felt the bench sink under the new body. I braced myself, waiting for the next, new way I could disappoint.
In soft, hesitant English, he said, “I’m your father’s third brother’s eldest son. I am your brother Otu.”
Third brother could mean uncle, and there was no word for cousin in Yakuur. No term for “distant relative.” It was only colonization that introduced the English words to separate these relationships. I noted that he pronounced “brother” as “brodda,” so in my head, he became Uncle Brodda.
***
I returned to the village years later, on the verge of starting college. This time, the anxiety I carried came also with threat of depression I couldn’t name. I looked for Uncle Brodda. I had more questions about the way we change, but he wasn’t around. He had left the village for some place that knew him as he is, and not a reminder of how he’d changed. I think of how we both hid beneath the trees, that night, and how he spoke the language of acceptance.
You may access the full text here on Catapult’s website.
Text Version
Wide Shots:
- Brainstorm several phrases you’ve heard that include the word “face”: “tell it to my face,” “put a face to the name,” etc. What gets associated with the face? What’s the power of the face?
- Reimagine your childhood or adolescence and reinhabit that perspective. How did you see your circumstances and exchanges with others?
- Think of a time when you had to perform a version of self. Who was served by that performance?
- In many ways we cannot control our appearance. Some things are simple physical realities of our being. What provokes people to hide parts of what they look like?
Close Shots:
- Reading the full text in the link above, track Ikpi’s use of “faces.” What do we see on Ikpi’s faces? What do they do? For example:
- “Their disgusted faces looked like crumpled origami”
- “My favorite auntie saw the shame shadowing my face and pulled me away from the angry, disappointed looks”
- “Would I tell people that I watched the brown slide off my face and crawl away?”
- Beyond the face, Ikpi examines many body parts and specific parts of the face, often fragmented from the rest of the person. She also isolates individual senses. What is the function of isolating the parts? Does she reconcile them?
- Ikpi mentions that there is no term for “distant relative” in Yakuur. Read the below excerpt from “The Magic of Untranslatable Words” and discuss connections between this analysis and the poem.
As such, even if languages seem to have roughly equivalent words – amour as the French counterpart to love, for instance – translators have long argued that something precious is always lost in the act of translation. Conversely though, some people submit that nothing is ever genuinely untranslatable. Even if a word lacks an exact equivalent in English, its meaning can usually be conveyed in a few words, or at least a couple of sentences. However, it’s the fact that a word doesn’t appear to have an ‘exact match’ in English that makes it so potentially intriguing (and, in common parlance, renders it ‘untranslatable’). Such words pique our interest, and for good reason. Above all, they appear to indicate the existence of phenomena that have been overlooked or undervalued by English-speaking cultures.
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- Follow up: Select a word in your language that you think would be difficult to translate to another language. How does that word impose a certain worldview?
Mid Shots
- See “Body as Metaphoric Space” for a comparative reading of Ikpi on the body and belonging and Samatar on skin as a political surface in spaces of not belonging.
Possible Transitions
JS: I would teach this with Sofia Samatar’s “Skin Feeling” for further discussion on embodiment and with Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” to explore the way identities are made and unmade through visibility.
DU: I would teach this with Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” in order to have students think about collective versus individual identities.
See:
“Gun Bubbles”
“Connecting the Dots”
“Body as Metaphoric Space”
“Skin Feeling”
See:
"Asters and Goldenrod"
"Connecting the Dots"
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson"
a nonfiction genre where the author and narrator are one
See:
"Asters and Goldenrod"
"Connecting the Dots"
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive”
“Gun Bubbles”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
"Saving a Language You're Learning to Speak"
“Skin Feeling”
"To Speak is to Blunder"
Critical Learning Reflection (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
See:
"Connecting the Dots"
“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson"
Aphoristic Translation (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
Transculturation, Language and South-South Migration (exploration)
See:
"Connecting the Dots"
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Skin Feeling”
"To Speak is to Blunder"
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
analysis that highlights or encourages different points of view, usually as the basis for developing arguments
See:
"Connecting the Dots"
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Emotion in Language (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
"Connecting the Dots"
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
