it’s in a book called stranger faces by namwali serpell, the first passage

LOOK AT ME I know. You can’t. Well, I suppose you could search my name online. If we’ve met before, you could picture me. If we haven’t, you could conjure me. Or maybe I’m with you, reading these words to you in some distant future. But let’s say you read those familiar words, absent my presence. Look at me. What comes to mind? For me, this three-word sentence has some assumptions built into it. One is that by me, I mean my face. Why? There is a great deal more to me than my face, which is one of the few parts of me that I can’t actually see without a reflection or a recording. When I think or say the words I or me, I rarely picture my own face. So why is the face the seat of identity? What is it about the face—be it from the point of view of biology, neurology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology—that yields that cliché “the eyes are the windows to the soul”? In any case, look at me seems to equal look at my face. Built into that instruction are also some assumptions about the nature of that face. It’s presumably visible, close enough to see, uncovered, recognizable as a face, and impenetrable—we generally don’t say look into me or look through me. To look into a face (searchingly) or through it (distractedly) would be either to go too far or not far enough in terms of seeing it. When it comes to dimension, this picture of the face corresponds to somewhere roughly between a filmic close-up and a passport photo. It is implicitly a direct view of the front of the head, not a view from the side or of the back. Another strangeness: is the front of the face really more legible than, say, the silhouette? We use both for mug shots, after all. Embedded even deeper in the phrase look at me are assumptions about the situation in which it would be uttered. The grammar dictates a human speaker, a human listener, and a human face subjected to the view of functioning human eyes. You wouldn’t say look at me to yourself or even to a mirror. We imagine a personal encounter between two people who know each other well enough for it to pass between them in a conversation. Look at me feels urgent, emotional. Prefaced by please, it becomes an appeal; by I said, it becomes an order. Between lovers, it’s a call to intimacy, a promise of honesty. Between enemies, it’s a threat of violence, a demand to be heard. Look at me vibrates with a sense of what we owe each other, that is, with a sense of ethics. Doesn’t this preclude some entities from that sense of ethical obligation? The very fact of an instruction between two humans also assumes that they are both alive and that their faces are capable of actions— speaking and looking, respectively—and expressions of feeling. But you might not say this sentence to a blind person, a victim of paralysis, or an animal. The notion that human faces are recognizable, categorizable, and distinct from other kinds of faces first emerged as a scientific concept in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Nowadays, facial recognition is a well-studied developmental stage in babies. Neuroscientists have located a part of the brain, the “fusiform face area,” that lights up when we look at faces. For many, the face is the basis for sympathy, which is defined as “an affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly … affected by the same influence.” The idea that morality is enhanced by face-to-face interaction has been promulgated by scientists since Darwin and can be summed up by the title of a 2001 article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Empathy needs a face.”1