The Wilds Beyond Our Fences
by Bayo Akomolafe, Chennai
As I walked Alethea down the road, we both noticed a beautifully designed kolam on the cemented entrance of a neighbour’s home — painstakingly realized with rice flour in startlingly bright colours — the whole thing unfurling like a two-dimensional lotus. “They did that for me…that’s for me, Dada”, Alethea remarked.
“No”, I responded. “That’s for ants, my dear”.
“Ants?” “Yes…many people here usually draw that with rice flour so that ants wouldn’t have to walk too far before they get their meal.”
She didn’t budge. She insisted that whoever created the kolam must have had her in mind. It was a precarious father/3-year-old-daughter moment: how do I gently invite Alethea to consider that the world does not revolve around her? How do I invite her to consider that she is not ‘special’ (at least not in the exclusive, insular, humanistic, and entitled sense of being ‘special’ that is so pervasive these days) without truncating her own soft experiments with identity and meaning? How do I show that she is an aspect of a fragile dynamic that includes other beings, other scurrying ones in their own flows of becoming, other stories and meanings she might never be part of?
Ej and I do not want her growing up shriveling behind a psychological scaffolding that conditions her to think that truth is user-friendly; that prohibits her from exploring the world unless it is ‘safe’ or ‘self-affirming’; that whispers to her that she is better than others and should strive to be ‘greater’ than them; that teaches her to think her own body demarcates her self, and that her ‘self’ is the complete ground for her actions and identity. I want her to gasp when she meets another — so that if and when she says namaste or whatever she chooses to greet with, she recognizes the incommensurability of that life — she sees an aspect of ‘her’ soul she has only just begun to know…the wilds beyond her fences.
So I warily suggested that we would have to ask the ants if the kolam was indeed for her, and not for them — as she had fiercely insisted.
“But ants don’t talk!” she said, rather matter-of-factly.
“Well, you don’t know that…because you haven’t tried to listen to them, have you?”
“No…but when we say hello, how do they reply?”
“We’ll have to find out, right?”
“Yes.”
So, ants are now objects of mutual fascination — and we will explore them together…both of us hunched over their shiny bodies, one of us learning in infinitesimally small ways that she doesn’t have to bear the burden of being special in a world that is a rhapsody of wonder — the other re-encountering old wounds that still smart with the pain of memories of being told he is special.
