Reading Faces
Imagery is put to very effective use in a passage describing how one character has come to learn how to read the facial clues that dominate a foreign culture. Interestingly, the introduction to this passage is prefaced by the assertion that the strange had first had trouble reading them due to their “wooden expressions, and the even more wooden gesture.” Over time, he develops quite the aptitude:
“Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man's cheek…the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man's temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow's feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses…He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away.”
Gemmy on the Fence
The central narrative point from which the story radiates outward occurs just a couple of pages in when a strange looking creature leaps to the top rail of a fence, arms stretched out like a bird, mouth struggling to form words that finally come as Gemmy is able to stay “Do not shoot. I am a B-b-british object.” That image of Gemmy on the fence starts as a symbol, but through recurring references to the moment evolves into imagery that represents the metaphorical fence dividing Aboriginal and European society as well as the myriad aspects that represents Gemmy’s life before that moment and his life afterward.
The Things You Never Notice
Sometimes imagery can be used to draw attention to the essential quality of normal everyday things we do actually see every day and don’t realize how different the world would be without them. It is tendency of human nature to overlook the significance of things taken granted. It is part of the job of the writer to highlight to what extent they are taken for granted:
“One of his eyebrows was missing. Strange how unimportant eyebrows can be, as long as there are two of them. It gave his face a smudged appearance. He had the baffled, half-expectant look of a mongrel that has been often whipped but still turns to the world, out of some fund of foolish expectancy, as a source of scraps as well as torment.”
A Helen Keller Moment
Gemmy experiences a moment not dissimilar from the famous scene in The Miracle Worker where young Helen Keller finally makes that connection between what Annie Sullivan is spelling out in her hand and the tangible reality of water. The imagery described is every bit as powerful as that visual imagery:
“A drop of moisture sizzed on his tongue: the word—he had found it. Water. Slow dribbles of rain began to fall. He was entering rain country. Soon the sky let down tangled streamers, and he was walking now in a known landscape; all the names of things, as he met them, even in their ashen form, shone on his breath, sprang up in their real lives about him, succulent green, soft paw and eyeball, muscle tense under fur.”
