There is a gele on the shelf above my desk that has been folded and refolded so many times it has gone soft at the creases. It is not a ceremonial cloth. It is the one I bought on a Saturday afternoon in Peckham because it was the right shade of bronze and because I had decided, with the confidence of someone who has watched a lot of videos, that I would learn to tie it properly before the next family gathering. That was three gatherings ago. The cloth is still on the shelf. It has become, without my intending it, a kind of document.
I want to write about the specific failure of learning a manual skill at a distance — not the grand failure of cultural loss, which is a different and more comfortable story, but the small, technical, almost funny failure of trying to teach hands through a screen. The gele is the object I keep returning to because it refuses to cooperate with any metaphor I try to give it. It is just a piece of fabric that will not hold a shape when I tie it. That is the whole problem. It is also, I think, the whole point.
The call, and the lag
The FaceTime lesson happens like this. My mother props her phone against the mirror on her dressing table, so the camera faces her at an angle. I prop mine against the kettle. We spend the first four minutes adjusting the frames — she can see my forehead and the ceiling, I can see her left ear and a corner of the wardrobe. There is a lag of maybe half a second, which does not sound like much until you are trying to follow a movement in real time. Her hands move faster than the frame rate. By the time I have copied the first fold, she has already done the second and is saying, No, no, like this, and I have missed it.
This is not a complaint about the technology. The technology is doing something remarkable. It is carrying her voice and her face and the general shape of her hands across four thousand miles for free, on a Tuesday evening, while she is still in her house clothes and I am still in mine. The problem is more specific than that. The problem is that a screen flattens depth. When she holds the fabric up to show me the angle of a fold, I cannot see how far her hand is from her head, or how much tension is in her wrist, or which part of the cloth she is pinching. I can see the gesture. I cannot see the force behind it.
So I copy what I can see, which is the shape, and I miss what I cannot see, which is the pressure. The gele comes out loose where it should be tight and tight where it should be loose. It looks, as my cousin once said without malice, like a scarf that has given up.
What does not cross the screen
I have been trying to name what is lost in this kind of lesson, and I keep coming back to the same thing: the corrective touch. When you learn a manual skill in person, the teacher does not only show you. She reaches over and adjusts your hand. She presses your thumb into the right place. She takes the fabric out of your fingers and does it again, slowly, and then hands it back. That moment — the hand placed over the hand — is not a demonstration. It is a correction, and it carries information that no camera can transmit, because the information is in the pressure, and the pressure is in the body, and the body is not on the screen.
This is a general observation about learning embodied skills remotely, not a claim about how Yoruba women have traditionally taught their daughters. I do not have the evidence to make that claim, and I am not going to pretend I do. What I can say is what happened on my own calls: my mother would describe a fold, I would attempt it, she would say no, I would attempt it again, and we would go around this loop until one of us got tired. The loop was not a failure of love or effort. It was a structural limit of the medium. A screen can show you a hand. It cannot put a hand on yours.
There is a particular kind of grief in this that is distinct from missing a person. I miss my mother all the time, in the ordinary way. But missing a shared physical competence is different. It is the grief of knowing that she can do something with her hands that I cannot do with mine, and that the gap between us is not distance or time or money but the simple fact that her knowledge lives in her body and mine does not yet live in mine. She can tie a gele in under two minutes. I have watched her do it. I have watched her do it on a screen. I still cannot do it.
The hands as a document
My mother’s hands are a record of things I did not witness. There are the small scars from years of cooking, the thickened skin at the base of her thumbs, the way her fingers move when she is thinking — a kind of unconscious folding and unfolding, as if she is always holding a piece of cloth. When she ties a gele, her hands do not hesitate. They know the sequence. They have known it for longer than I have been alive. I watch them on the screen and I think: this is a document I cannot read. It is written in a language of pressure and habit that I did not learn early enough, and now I am trying to learn it late, through a phone, with a lag.
What does that asymmetry cost her? I do not know, because I have never asked her directly, and I am not going to invent an answer. But I can guess at the shape of it. There is a particular tiredness in being the only one who knows how to do something. There is a particular loneliness in being the last hand that remembers. I do not think she experiences it as tragedy. I think she experiences it as Tuesday. But I notice that when we finish the call, she always says the same thing: Practice. Practice and send me a picture. And I always say I will, and I sometimes do, and the picture always shows a gele that is almost right.
The ordinary logistics of a split life
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into an essay about immigration, and that is not what it is. The paperwork is real. The time zones are real. The ordinary arithmetic of a life split between two countries — the calls scheduled around work, the parcels that take three weeks, the birthdays that happen on a screen — is real and it takes up space in the day. But the gele is not a metaphor for the paperwork. The gele is a piece of cloth. The paperwork is a different kind of problem, with its own rules and its own waiting, and I am not going to collapse the two into each other just because they happen in the same life.
What I will say is that distance makes everything slower. A skill that might have taken an afternoon to learn in person takes months to learn over video, if it is learned at all. The correction that would have happened in a second happens never, or happens wrong, or happens so late that you have already developed a bad habit and now you have to unlearn it. This is not a tragedy. It is an inconvenience with an emotional cost. The cost is that you keep trying, and the trying itself becomes a kind of relationship, and the relationship is not quite the one you wanted.
The untied cloth
The gele on my shelf is still untied. I have not given up on it. I have simply accepted that it is not going to be tied the way my mother ties it, not yet, and possibly not ever. This is not a story about cultural loss. It is a story about a skill in transit. The cloth is on the shelf. The calls continue. My mother’s hands keep moving, faster than the frame rate, and I keep trying to follow.
There is something honest about an object that does not work. A tied gele would be a symbol. An untied one is just a fact. It sits there and says: this is where you are. You have not learned this yet. You may learn it. You may not. Either way, the cloth is still yours, and the hands that tried to teach you are still on the other end of the call, and the call is still free, and it is still Tuesday, and there is still time.
FAQ
Is this essay about Yoruba culture?
It is about one object and one attempt to learn a skill. I have deliberately avoided making claims about Yoruba tradition, history, or pedagogy because I do not have the sources to support them, and I would rather leave a gap than fill it with something I cannot stand behind.
Why write about a gele you cannot tie?
Because the failure is the interesting part. A successfully tied gele would be a nice ending, but it would not be true. The untied one is true, and it is more useful to me as a writer because it does not resolve.
Does this connect to your other writing about migration and family?
It sits alongside it. The paperwork and the parcels and the calls are all part of the same life, but they are not the same subject. This piece stays with the cloth.
