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LA ÑAPAIn Dominican Spanish la ñapa refers to "the little extra" added on at the end. Just when you thought you'd gotten all that you would get, along comes your ñapa, like a baker's dozen, with one more kiss, one more pastelito, one more mango at the mercado.
Let's name the animals no longer with us,
except in language: start with the dodo, the Haitian long-tongued bat, the dwarf emu, the laughing owl, the eastern buffalo. And then animals like the nukupuu, the lorikeet, the broad-faced potoroo, whose absences don't sadden me as much as I can't put a picture to their names: two potoroos, say, lounging in their den with baby potoroos clambering over them. I think of Adam watching the parade
of just-created animals, their form still taking shape, so had he touched too hard, the camel might have had some extra humps, the colors might have smudged on the peacock, which wasn't yet a peacock, but a thing, a brightly-colored, gorgeous, feathered thing in need of a name -- as was the camel, the marmoset, the deer, the parakeet, waiting to enter language and be claimed. But now, we, Adam's babies, find ourselves uttering names no one comes up to claim: no iridescent, billed, web-footed thing quacks back when we say Leguat's gelinote- in fact, unless we say the name out loud or write it down, the gelinote is gone. And so, our language, which singles us out from dwarf emus, nukupuus, potoroos, becomes an elegy, as with each loss our humanness begins to vanish, too. from The Woman I Kept To Myself (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2004)
Copyright © Julia Alvarez 2004-2010. | |||||||
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Copyright © Julia Alvarez 2009-2010. All rights reserved. No further duplication, downloading or distribution permitted without written agreement of the author (please contact my agent, Susan Bergholz).
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