The Eye of the Beholder
January 1998
Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us.
And yet, in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.
Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you, no doubt, delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.
(--by Ogden Nash)
That's one of the silly poems that I memorized as a teenager. Every once in awhile I find an occasion to quote it with great flare to some bemused audience who thinks I've lost a few marbles. It came to mind recently when no one was around to impress with my eloquence. This time the occasion was someone on an e-mail polio list, describing a childhood incident that so many of us can relate to. Being laughed at, called names and assumed to be sub-intelligent because of the physical aftermath of polio's attack.
Identity. Who assigns it to us? Whose assessment do we accept?
For 17 years I lived and worked as a missionary among what we would call a "primitive" tribal culture in the interior mountains of Irian Jaya (now called Papua), Indonesia. The Kimyals live a subsistence life-style, making, growing or gathering everything they need for their way of life. Kimyal culture has a rich oral literature of legends and chants which paint a picture of who they believe they are.
An important part of my learning the Kimyal language and culture was to go to their huts and listen to some of these stories. One day they told me that one of their ancestors long, long ago said that some day spirit beings from another world would visit them. These visitors would have faded skin and would wear spider webs. When Phil Masters and Bruno deLeauw, the first Western men to discover the Kimyals, walked into Kimyal territory, they had white skin and wore cloth -- something the Kimyals had never seen before. It looked like spider webs. The conclusion was obvious. The two men were spirit beings from another world, and must be killed before they did any harm. How that didn't happen is another story. The point for now is, Bruno and Phil were identified by the Kimyals according to what was normal for Kimyals and what they knew to be true ("real" people don't have pale skin).
Within a year of hearing that story, my mission organization requested that I do a language/dialect survey of the other mountain valleys where we believed Kimyals to be. There was no way for me to do that except by helicopter. Armed with great curiosity, some note cards and the Swadesh 100 word list (a linguist’s list of words and objects common to all cultures), I spent a day flying from valley to valley, landing at villages, trying to find someone from whom I could elicit a word list. Sometimes, though, the villages were empty, and no one responded to my calls to come talk.
One of the villages on the farthest fringes of Kimyal-land had never seen a white woman before. The pilot carefully chose the least muddy-looking spot to put down. This village, too, was eerily silent at first. Finally a young man appeared and began slowly walking towards me, shaking from his ears to his toes. I didn't know the human body could quake like that. It was actually audible, like leaves rustling in a tree. The young man's eyes were wide with fright but his face was etched with determination to overcome his fear. With some difficulty I elicited enough words to show me that his dialect was related, but very different from the dialect spoken at Korupun.
When I was finished, he pointed a quivering finger at the pilot and the helicopter and I managed to understand his question, "Are you going to stay here in your house tonight, or go back to your sky village?" He thought we were spirit beings who had come to visit. We didn't lose any time leaving!
These two stories are pretty extreme examples of inaccurate labeling, but are more understandable than what sometimes happens in our culture. Yes, I'm thinking again of that person on the post-polio e-mail list who still bears that tinge of self-doubt because of who he was told -- and is still told -- he is.
How do we handle that? The eye of which beholder should we trust? Do we accept as true a social evaluation that is based on physical appearance or strength? Where can we find an accurate assessment of who we are?
Long ago I decided that if I based my identity and worth on the feedback I got from cultures or individuals, I would end up at best confused and at worst depressed and bitter. I discovered a standard higher than human evaluation. An eye that not only sees more than the human eye can, but sees with perfect accuracy. God's. What does he say about me? He says, "But you are... a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light." (1 Peter 2:9)
Now, that's an identity I can really LIVE with!!
