We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A wave of otherness crashed into me when the children of Bambur, Nigeria shouted baturi as my fellow mission workers and I entered their village. In the local language of Hausa, baturi translates as white man. Some children were fascinated and clamored to touch my pale skin. Some were wary and peered at me from behind trees and the dependable skirts of their mothers. Others fled, terrified at the intrusion of such an otherness.
I stood transfixed at the scene before me. I wanted to shout, But wait! I am one of you! See, I have two arms, two legs, a heart that beats just like yours! And yet, even in the throes of my deep and genuine longing to connect, I was painfully aware of the fact that, intentions aside, I was the other. I was a stranger with skin too white, eyes too blue, and a belly much too well-fed.
Author and pastor Jamie Arpin-Ricci write:
It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality.
In the weeks I spent in Nigeria, my colleagues and I found ourselves sometimes humored and sometimes aghast at what we saw and experienced. We may not have spoken the words, but our quizzical expressions and nervous chuckles barely contained the question we were dying to ask each other: Is this normal? We discovered what appeared to be hundreds of locusts floating in a plastic pail of water, locusts we were told that were intended to be eaten. Normal? We learned that the woman who cooked for us was the only working member in a family of six adults. Normal? We encountered many young girls who carried their infant brothers or sisters on their backs for entire days. Normal? As much as I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t regard my new Nigerian friends as other, my bias was fueled, as Arpin-Ricci suggests, by my assumptions about my own normality. Consciously and unconsciously, I was looking at this new world through a view-finder with an American normal default setting. And if I wanted to see the Nigerians of Jalingo, Bambur, and Jos, this clearly required the other setting.
We live with a multicultural worldview that has spawned new university courses and specialties, solicited literature from around the world to remove the white bias from prevailing anthologies, insisted on inclusion as the answer to all classrooms, neighborhoods, and institutions, and repopulated the former white casts of television series and movies. All this (and more) as a means of eradicating otherness once and for all.
This worldview has also charged that we identify and appreciate those languages, traditions, and customs that make otherness unique. Enter almost any classroom during February (Black History month), and you will find students celebrating the lives and works of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other influential men and women of color. Two months later, you may find American students decorating their classrooms with balloons, flowers and streamers to commemorate Cinco de Mayo. And what mother–or father–hasn’t prepared some customary food or constructed a traditional costume as a part of a their children’s school project featuring another country?
Like many, I often struggle to successfully live this paradox: I should see no otherness/ I should see and value others’ uniqueness. It’s ironic that our well-intentioned desires to acknowledge and celebrate others’ uniqueness are also declarations of otherness. In rural Nigeria, it’s not uncommon for toddlers to live in orphanages until they can responsibly care for themselves and their younger siblings. This is unique yet so far from the normal we know. How do we keep a precious tension between uniqueness and otherness, so that they compliment each other and live easily in a world that is more either/or than both/and?
For lest we believe that the homogeneous nature of our lives will shield us from the problem of otherness, we should remember that it has so many forms. Consider the words of writer Donald Hall:
[O]ver the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying–in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way–but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
The problem of otherness is never defined by race alone. We can be alien and other if we are older, younger, richer, poorer, more educated, less educated, urban or rural. Change the setting on the view- finder, and anyone who can’t be seen within the comfortable range of normal is other. Through my grandson’s eyes, there is something increasingly other about my refusal to do a cartwheel and my barely stifled gasps as he drives me around the yard on the four-wheeler. I’m fast becoming an extraterrestrial other who lives in the distant galaxy called OLD.
I can remember hearing my younger brother sing along with the cast of Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong. . . In truth, we are taught to distinguish what is different. This is standard stuff for kindergarteners who spend countless hours bent over worksheets that direct them to circle what is different in a group of shapes, animals, numbers, things. Identifying same and different is a discrete skill we teach early and well.
In third grade, my son, who is black, had a best friend, a pale, ginger-freckled boy. When his friend’s mother asked how she would recognize Quinn at the choral concert, he replied: Oh, you’ll know him when you see him. He’s got really black hair. He may not have identified Quinn’s skin color as other, but he did identify a trait that distinguished his friend from the group and made him different. One of these things is not like the other.
In truth, there are no quick, easy solutions to the problem of otherness. It is our nature to make distinctions, to discern what is similar and what is different. Likewise, it is our nature to belong, to join a tribe of those like us. And herein lies the heart of the problem: the limits of our human natures. Holocaust victim and writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this all too well:
However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open our behavior, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.
In Galations 5:14, we read: For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In spite of our natures–or perhaps because of them–we are called to love our neighbors in all their otherness. Bonhoeffer knows that the only real conduit between one soul and another is Christ. In the end, all our programs and initiatives, all our best intentions and efforts will fall woefully short. And this is both bad news and good news. Our political and social systems may be destined to flounder, perhaps even to fail, but Christ offers a better way.
Others, like poet Mary Oliver, find a conduit from soul to soul and soul to world by willing entering the mystery and beauty of otherness:
I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Like all humans before us, we will continue to struggle with the problem of otherness. We will create new programs, institute new, more inclusive language, and mandate new rules and laws as solutions. Still, I take heart that there are, indeed, better ways. But these ways require surrender to a love and a mystery that take us far beyond the limits of our own natures. In a culture where surrender is most often a sign of weakness and defeat, those who live and promote a better way will undoubtedly be cast as others.
