I manage my ubiquity by running copies of myself.
“How was your run today?” asks the clerk at the wine store. It takes me a few seconds to catch up to the question. At first I think I misheard him or maybe he is mistaking me for someone else. Sensing my confusion, he elaborates, “I saw you running this morning. Sometimes you run by my house.” I do not know his house. I do not know this man’s name nor does he know mine. “It was fine,” I say. “I knew it was going to be hot, so I went out early.”
“Do you know you are known as a sort of landmark on the arts quad?” an undergraduate informs me. “You mean like the statues of the dead dudes?” I ask. “I mean like you wear interesting coats,” she counters.
In the lounge of the humanities department of which I am not a member but whose espresso machine I frequent, someone greets me with the wrong name. The third time this happens, I realize what is going on.
At a bar, a man tries to strike up a conversation by telling me that he has seen me around.
In the mailroom of the humanities department of which I am a member (but which, crucially, does not own an espresso machine), a staff person I have known for years calls me by the name of another Black woman. I do not correct her.
At my friend’s birthday party, I introduce myself to her colleague who tells me she actually sees me everywhere. “Everyone knows Farah!” agrees my friend. Everyone sees Farah, I want to correct, but I decide this will make everyone uncomfortable.
Online, I mention my obsession with Elena Ferrante and a copy of her latest novel turns up on my porch. There is no note and no postage, which means someone dropped it off. Alas, I do not read Italian…
Lots of things turn up on my porch: books, baked goods, candy, cards, bouquet of herbs, returned dishes, homegrown flowers, bread, vegetables. Sometimes I know who they are from, other times they remain a mystery. I, too, leave things on porches, sometimes unannounced but always signed. This inescapable proximity and the kinds of intimacy and friendships it conditions are a big part of what I love about this town. So, I try hard to ignore the funny feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I am reminded of the fact that anyone can learn where I live and feel free to stop by.
I am at the university chapel talking with friends while we wait for a Christmas service to begin when a white woman sitting in the row ahead of me reaches across the bench, taps me on the arm, and tells me to be quiet. The service is not due to begin for another ten minutes, the whole chapel alight with noise.
At an organizing meeting, we are encouraged to wear masks and nondescript clothing to protests so as to evade police surveillance and safeguard against doxxing.
My neighbor invites me to an art exhibit showcasing her work. When I arrive, I discover she has painted me. In the painting I am standing in her luscious garden conversing with our other neighbors while a bonfire roars in the background. The exhibit that includes this painting is titled: “Seeing Ithaca.” I am moved that my neighbor, who has lived in this town longer than I have been alive, has included me in her map of Ithaca. But when I make the mistake of posting about this slice of neighborly connection on social media, it goes mega viral and is seen and shared by tens of millions of people around the world. Embarrassed and exposed, I do not leave my house for a week. For months after, people come up to me—at the grocery store, on the bus, at the coffee shop, on the street, at the farmers’ market, at the park, in the library—to ask if I am the girl from the painting. I stop wearing yellow altogether.
*
In these instances, it is hard to tell whether I am a first-rate narcissist or living in a version of the Truman Show. All bodies have public lives, I strenuously remind myself, as I endure yet another encounter with a stranger who wants to make it known that they have, in fact, seen me about town. All bodies have public lives, but not all bodies experience their publicness the same way, just like not all bodies have the same publics. The publicness of my body is marked by its hypervisibility. Long before I am able to speak, I am seen. And it is my being seen without my being aware of when, or how, or how often I am seen that conditions how I move my body through the public.
In the decade I have been living in America, I have only lived in small towns. Out of these towns, Ithaca has the largest Black population where a whopping 4.9% of its 31,000 residents are Black. At Cornell, Black students also make up about 5% of the university’s 26,000 students. The same cannot be said for the town’s murals, however, where according to my very unofficial unscientific count, 90% of Ithaca’s public art depicts Black people. Sometimes I feel like I am one of those murals, a static flat scene about town, a body that cannot help but offer itself up to sight.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon considers how he becomes estranged from his body in the instance he is interpellated as a Black body, which is to say, a public body. “Look! A Negro!” the white child exclaims, whose alienating white gaze threatens to tear him asunder. Fanon writes: “it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person.” In Black Bodies, White Gaze, George Yancy builds on Fanon’s work when he takes up the difficulty “Black invisibility and hypervisibility” poses for the Black body held under the white gaze, whose ways of seeing seeks to confiscate the Black subject either physically or psychologically or both. Reflecting on those moments when the hypervisibility of his Black body invites surveillance and fear—like when he is followed around in a department store or feels the air tighten when he walks into an elevator—Yancy throws into sharp relief the racialized matrix through which the Black body is read so it always already appears “as an object of suspicion.” He writes: “I feel that in their eyes I am this indistinguishable, amorphous, black seething mass, a token of danger, a threat, a criminal, a burden, a rapacious animal incapable of delayed gratification.”
In 2020, twenty-five-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was out on a jog when three white men pursued him with their vehicle and shot him dead. They later claimed they believed him to be a burglar. To be a Black man in America is to live with the persistent reminder that the distance between being seen and being seen as dangerous is fatally small.
In the course of writing this essay, I was reminded of how during Trump’s first presidency, two different white men almost ran me over in the small Iowa town I lived in at the time. One occasion was unambiguously intentional, in that the man ran a red light and sped up towards me while screaming epithets out of his car window. I just barely made it out of the road.
It was much harder to establish a clear motive in the second occasion, where a man ran through a stop sign while I was in the middle of the crossing, forcing me to hurtle my body onto the sidewalk, but not before the side of my body grazed the front of his truck. None of this, however, compelled him to stop, get out of his car, or ask if I was okay. Instead, as he sped off into the prairie, he yelled: “I did not see you!”
In my current small town, men regularly walk, drive, or bike really close behind me without announcing themselves and then speed up once I am properly startled. Last winter, a man watched quietly as I stood frozen, terrified, and mute while his unleashed giant dog lunged and barked at me for several minutes. They seem to enjoy the fright, the sight of me rattled. This almost exclusively occurs when I am out on a run, as if the point is to bring me to a halt. This is another way I experience the public life of my body, in the acute awareness of the many ways its hypervisibility renders me vulnerable not because I am seen as dangerous but because I can easily be made endangered.
*
But I also inhabit the publicness of my body in ways that are less frightening, but more diffuse, ubiquitous, sometimes downright funny. When I walk into a room—whether it is the classroom or the department function or the neighborhood garden party—I am aware of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways I am trying and often failing to outrun the various scripts I imagine have always already preceded me into the room. A neighbor invites me to her house party then proceeds to ask me, in front of all our other neighbors, “How come you are here?” I remind her that she has invited me. “No,” she explains, “I mean here, Cornell? Ithaca?” My first instinct is to make a joke of it. It was actually not easy, I want to say, there are no direct flights to Ithaca, so getting here from Iowa involved several long layovers. She continues: “I do not know very much about where you are from, but if it is anything like other places I know, their children do not just end up here. You must be somebody’s kid.” I am somebody’s kid, I think to myself, my mother’s. Here, I can only try and play catch up to the story that has already been told about me without my having to speak. Whatever I say or don’t say next could only be received in relation to the script laid out in front me. I am only its avatar.
As a form of escape, I create many more avatars of myself. I go to parties and change my name, and think, while I am at it, I should reinvent other parts of myself, too. Why not? For a while I present myself as Jackie, who is getting her PhD in human resources. I do this for a year until I learn that Cornell does in fact grant PhDs in human resources. Other avatars include, a chiropractor, hospitality worker, gallerist, crime novelist, physical therapist, dermatologist, nurse, documentary filmmaker. I manage my ubiquity by running copies of myself.
On Halloween, I wear a witch costume and change my name to Francesca, Frankie for short. But when Frankie hits it off with an attractive stranger, I feel paralyzed because I am amongst many of my friends and feel on display. I do not want my spontaneous desire to become an anecdote; it becomes one anyway. Finally, tired of waiting, the handsome stranger leaves without learning my real name or how to find me. What started out as a joke ends with me as the joke. Later, I share my disappointment with a friend who offers comfort by suggesting that maybe the stranger would come across the story about the painting and know how to find me. The following Halloween, I change my name to Georgette and discover I prefer disaster to boredom. While I do not know why I choose masculinized variations of white girl names, I know I change my name partly because I feel like I cannot change my mind.
In some ways, to be in one’s twenties is to be subject to such revisions and permutations of the self. There are not many redeemable things about this period, but the decade’s unique suitability (and permission) for discovery and transformation is undoubtedly one of them. In your twenties— the irreversible antechamber to adulthood—you are not only allowed but encouraged to change your mind about things, about yourself. This is why law schools exist, so twenty-somethings can enroll in them as a definitive signal that they have finally gotten their act together. Your twenties are what someone more earnest than I may call the years of great unlearning. But having spent mine in small rural towns, I have not always felt free to change my mind. Instead, I have convinced myself that one way to wrest control from the tyranny of hypervisibility is to maintain a minimal stable version of myself in public.
*
There are, of course, perks to being seen about town. I get free stuff; at the bar, I get to order off the menu; I make friends with neighborhood dogs; I wait out the rain in the vintage store; if I arrive at the co-op before the lunch burritos are out, the kind clerk goes in the back and wraps one just for me. These are also ways of being seen, ways that expand my map of the city and place me in a community. These daily mundane, genial interactions I have with individuals who, for the most part, do not know my name but recognize my face are part of how I experience a sense of belonging and care. In the peculiar intimacy of the space between a stranger and an acquaintance, I am not just looked at but also looked after.
It took Odysseus ten years to make it back to Ithaca. It took me ten years of journeying away from home to realize that there was never going to be a return. I would need to make other arrangements, other attachments, for my heart. And far above and near Cayuga’s waters—but also in the expansive plains of the Midwest and on the banks of the Connecticut River—I have discovered that this is, indeed, possible. And yet, sometimes being seen about town is to be reminded of the gulf between being seen and being seen as one of.
Farah Bakaari is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. If you see her buying a burrito at the co-op, say hello!
Thumbnail photo by Monique Caraballo via Unsplash