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Tradition & Culture

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Richard Rodriguez

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Leslie Jamison

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MY tattoo kept getting delayed by other people's weddings: a bachelorette party in Vegas, cliff-top vows in Zion, a ceremony in Westchester. I wasn't just attending the ceremony in Westchester, I was officiating at the ceremony in Westchester. I couldn't picture giving my blessing in front of 200 people while my left arm glistened under Saran Wrap. I felt the slightest twinge of resentment. My life seemed perpetually tucked into the pockets of time created between the milestones of other lives.

I was getting the tattoo, in part, to mark a break from the man with whom I'd spent four years building and then dismantling a life. I was branding myself to mark a new era: my body was no longer entwined with someone else's. It was mine alone again. I was moving to a new city and I had a new book coming out, and the tattoo would be its epigraph: "I am human: nothing human is alien to me."

The quotation belongs to Terence, the Roman playwright. In the original Latin, it reads: homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. When I first came upon it, I felt its force beyond rational explanation. I knew it was something I needed to keep saying.

I got the job done by an artist who worked in a converted fire station. His walls were lined with giant beetles in jars of formaldehyde, taxidermied birds and bright oil paintings full of wizards and dragons. "Sure you don't want anything drawn?" he asked, gesturing to his art. I pictured a dragon with a thought bubble: "nothing human is alien to me..." I said I was fine with just words. He wrote them in a cursive line from elbow to wrist. "I'm going to do this so we miss your veins," he said. I said that sounded great.

It hurt just enough to make me feel like something was happening. There was a sense of deserving - that I'd earned this by hurting for it. It was an old logic I hadn't felt in a while: Pain justifies ownership. It scared me, a bit. It also thrilled me. I left with Very Serious Aftercare Instructions and an arm encased like a pale sausage in plastic wrap.

The woman at the drugstore where I bought my Very Serious Aftercare supplies immediately wanted to know what the tattoo said. When I told her, she looked at me for a long time. "I think there is so much evil in this world," she said, "and so much good."

From now on, I realized, my body would basically be asking every stranger, "What do you think about the possibilities of human understanding?" During the months that followed, I found myself explaining the tattoo to a parade of strangers and acquaintances. It's about empathy and camaraderie, I would say. Or else, it's a denial of this lifelong obsession I've had with singularity and exceptionality.

We often think of tattoos as declarations of selfhood: this is what I am, love, believe. But there are other things we might inscribe on ourselves: what we fear, what we hate, what we hope to be but can't yet manage.

"I am human; nothing human is alien to me" - my tattoo wasn't true for me, not yet. But it was what I most needed to hear, an asymptote, a horizon.

On a hot day near the end of summer, another drugstore clerk reached for my arm with a searching look on his face. He was a large man, imposing.

When I told him what the tattoo meant, he shook his head. "There are people going through things in this world that are really bad," he said. "Do you understand that?"

I tried to explain about aspiration, asymptote, attempt.

"You will leave a little piece of yourself with everyone you imagine," he said. "You will get exhausted trying to give yourself away."

I didn't know what to say to this. I felt exhausted by him. I felt how much I needed, from him and everyone, a certain kind of response: to feel inspired by the tat, and tell me so.

"You tried to give me something," he said, pointing at my arm. "But I blocked it. I blocked what you were giving me."

He was interrupting the ticktock rhythm of my righteousness, saying something about the easy aphorism on my arm: how it didn't go down easy for him and shouldn't go down easy for me, either.

He wasn't the only one with questions. My father wrote from the Rwanda Genocide Memorial: Did I really believe what my tattoo said, even about perpetrators of genocide? And on a first date, a man asked me whether my tattoo could even apply to evil? We never went out again. But there were other dates, other men wanting translations, running their fingers along the script. It started to feel uncomfortably like philosophy as accessory, something to match a certain kind of intellectual posture.

Before these men, there was a moment with the original man, the one from whom the tattoo marked my liberation. I ran into him on an ordinary afternoon, about a week after I got the tattoo and a week before I moved away from the city we shared. He was surprised to see my arm holding something it hadn't held before.

I realized how different things were now. Something could happen to my body and it would be weeks or months before he knew about it. The tattoo was supposed to represent a new freedom but in that moment it felt like a shackle. It showed me how much it still hurt to feel the new distance between us. I felt that loss of proximity like a flesh wound.

It's like being pregnant, people would tell me. Your body is a conversation-starter. Eventually I started drawing the comparison myself. But the truth was it didn't feel like being pregnant at all. I was alone; my body was my own. It was a deep privacy, an autonomy tinged with sadness. It was the opposite of pregnancy, the residue of intimacy.

I'd always insisted I didn't get the tattoo so that people would talk to me about it. In fact, I told myself I wanted nothing less. But at a certain point I've had to admit to a desire for contact I couldn't own at first: It's there and it isn't.

The script is full of vectors pointing in opposite directions, a statement both aspirational and self-scolding, a desire to be seen and a desire to be left alone; a desire to have my body admired and a desire for my body to need nothing but itself, to need no affirmation from anyone. The tattoo holds an idea and its refutation, a man and his absence, a vote of confidence from the world and - in that downtown drugstore, on that humid day in summer - something more like the opposite.

The author of the essay collection "The Empathy Exams."

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MY tattoo kept getting delayed by other people's weddings: a bachelorette party in Vegas, cliff-top vows in Zion, a ceremony in Westchester. I wasn't just attending the ceremony in Westchester, I was officiating at the ceremony in Westchester. I couldn't picture giving my blessing in front of 200 people while my left arm glistened under Saran Wrap.

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Maxine Hong Kingston

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Yung Wing

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Gloria Anzaldua

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Jaswinder Bolina

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Chapter 10: Metacognition

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Introduction

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Chapter 7: So what? Who cares?

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Chapter 8: As a result

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from The Norton Reader