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Figuring Myself out: Certainty, Injury, and the Poststructuralist Repositioning of Bodies of Identity

2004; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3527375

1543-7809

James Haywood Rolling,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

I have been attempting to figure myself out. Out of chaos and incompletion,toward increased certainty. I have been at this task of construction for quitesome time now. I have just proposed my dissertation and my intentions areonce again uncertain. My dissertation is to be a self-study. It is also a storyabout uncertainty and my attempts to redeem a clear definition, to be nameda peer and a colleague among artists, writers, and teachers. I have been un-certain as a little boy; uncertain as a son; uncertain as a student of architec-ture; uncertain as an artist and writer; uncertain as a teacher; uncertain as ablack man. To compensate, I have sought the conferral of certainty, a nameamong leaders in many fields of inquiry. Still, it is not easy to forget thatcertainty has also been the cause of great injury to my body, to my mind.On sunny afternoons after school all the kids came outside to play. Theair would fill with echoes going back and forth between the red brick andstone buildings on both sides of our narrow street. Pounding rubber balls,the taps and scratches of shoe heels, and the slapping of sneakers on thecement and asphalt.Sometimes white chalk would appear and hopscotch boxes were quicklydrawn on the neat squares of cement pavement in front of my Grandma’shouse. Grandma lived next door to us. Houses on our block were side byside, sharing each other’s walls.On a particular day, similar to other days, I watched as a small flat stonewas tossed to bounce across the cement into a numbered box. I watched theone foot, two feet, one foot hops from box to box to stop and balance on onesmall hopping foot, steadying itself, to drop a hand to pick up the stone.Some little girl came to sit beside me and asked me to look at her. We weresitting on one of Grandma’s two wooden benches, just inside the front gate.