The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White

Cicatrization

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cicatrization T he New York Times has warned me that the image I’m about to see is graphic. But I press the tiny arrow long before processing this, in a compulsive expression of my animal self. And so it is that I am staring at Gaddafi’s body, a little underwhelmed, a little surprised by the flicker of pleasure I feel at the specter of his disorientation, his bloodied wounds. I don’t think of myself as reacting this way to violence . Normally I avoid these kinds of images, and I certainly don’t seek them out. I am disturbed by the fact that anyone’s death could be framed, as Gaddafi’s is, as Bin Laden’s was, by such cartoonish glee. This image from Libya is a kind of synecdoche, part for the whole of Africa. My associations with this continent are all present on Gadda fi’s face: a momentous, historical bleeding. The wound and the rupture. At the thought of Africa, I am once again suspended in the shock of violence, the terror and the beauty of life jostling its way out of bewildered flesh like a bird busting its way out of a cardboard box. Red lines sliced, skin wrapped tight around the exact shape of a bone, gashes blown into the surface of the body. What is the difference between these things and Africa? As a child I sprawled out on the living room floor, paging through coffee table books wherein the gourds, instruments, necklaces, and masks we had hanging on our walls and bookshelves were carried, played, and worn by actual people. Flipping through Africa Adorned, I traced my finger over the bodies covered with white ash or intricate scarification. I tried on the beaded necklaces that my father had collected over time, looking at photographs of women with tight metal coils around their arms and necks. In the Mangbetu tribe, skulls were, until the 1950s, “elongated as a process of beautification.” The pho- 108 Cicatrization tograph of an infant shows the result of a procedure whereby, “soon after birth a baby’s head was either confined between two pieces of wood or bound tightly with strips of bark.” Angela Fisher writes, “Boys and girls of the Murle, a small group of people living in Southern Sudan, have their faces and part of their chests scarred with intricate circular patterns in a process known as cicatrization. In this, a sort of bas-relief tattoo, the skin is pierced and the wound rubbed with ash so that it becomes inflamed and later heals as a hard scar in relief.” In one black-and-white photograph, the torso of a Sara woman from Chad is knit like a blanket, raised marks in parallel lines or twisting in loops at the hips of a diamond that stems from her protruding belly button, which is not a circle but an almost rectangular bulge that wears thick hatch mark whiskers, three to each side. This is a kind of violence that has nothing to do with aggression. Rather, it is evidence of connection with the spiritual world. Some of the tribes depicted, like the Dogon tribe of Mali, filed their teeth in reference to the celestial twins of their origin story, the “Nommo,” who were responsible for creating their race. Dogon men and women would shape their teeth in order to “recall the origin of speech, believed to have started as the weaving of threads through the sharply filed teeth of the Nommo, and women wore nose studs and lip rings which symbolized the bobbin and shuttle used in that mythical weaving.” Wind of words pushing past the raw nerve of exposed bone as a way to honor the very act of expression. Other tribes used lip plates or plugs, stretching for example the mouths of Sara women so that, as the story goes, slave traders would be too frightened to steal their bodies. Seeing, perhaps, the devil inside of them reflected in that gaping mouth. When I tell people I am going to South Africa, the unanimous response involves an intake of breath. I am lectured about the startling statistics for rape there. Cautioned to be careful in one hundred different ways, many nonverbal. But my hunger for this experience is heightened by the dullness I’ve been feeling of late. I am spiritually numb, moving from art classes to the subway to work to home with little curiosity or excitement. I...