Thoughts on Fires in the Mirror and A Journey to Speech

I am actually really glad other people brought up feeling uncomfortable with Smith's encouragement toward depicting another person. As I was reading I noticed I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with some of her ideas and I decided I needed to explore my own uneasiness. I wasn't just uncomfortable with the thought of potentially infringing upon or offending someone else, but the very concept of "traveling" from one identity to another made me distressed. My own distress is confusing for me because I tend to think of identity as fluid, especially my own. I do not like to think my identity is tied down by a particular time or environment; I like to imagine I have more possibilities then that. However, the idea of adopting the identity of another person, for myself, seemed impossible. I finally felt a little more at ease when Smith began to establish the difference between Mimicry and Character. She writes, “Mimicry is not character. Character lives in the obvious gap between the real person and my attempt to seem like them. I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness” (xxxvii) I understood this as willingness to be exposed, to admit that ultimately the adaption will never be as true as the real identity. In attempting to be another character, Smith realizes to actually replicate another’s identity is impossible. She celebrates this as a necessary revelation in both understanding the identity of another and identity of one’s self. Therefore for her, the experience of imitating another is also necessary. In rereading her article I found she addressed this as well: “My overall goal was to show that no one acts like anyone else. No one speaks like anyone else. Identity, in face, lives in the unique way that a person departs form the English language in a perfect state to create something that is individual” (xxx). For me, understanding that her motivation for becoming someone else was not to speak for another but to recognize that we cannot possibly do so helped me feel significantly more comfortable with what she is proposing.

 Like HSBurke said though, I am still not entirely of how to effectively use any of this in the way I live my life. I do not think that empathy is entirely lost though if it manages to change the way you treat others, the choices you make, or even in the judgments you feel about others.