By Roman Hughes
“You google ‘Do ducks have a conscience?’ What you learn is that ducks are alive and conscious when their bodies are chucked into de-feathering machines. You have never eaten duck, but you still feel guilty.”
– “While You Are Walking With a Boy You Find a Duck” by Sophie Ezzell (River Teeth 23.2, Spring 2022)
When writing about “the hard stuff,” there’s going to be an element of difficulty. Hard stuff can mean many different things to different people, such as loss of a loved one, a traumatic event, a poor relationship, or a mental health issue, among other things. A writer can run into various roadblocks in getting the hard stuff down, from our own understanding of our experience to the fear of others perceiving our hard stuff, but one of the hardest parts can be talking about the subject itself. We deal with heavy topics that sometimes feel too overwhelming to face head on. One way we can go about navigating this obstacle is to employ an extended metaphor, allowing us to speak on a topic without staring at the hard thing in its terrifying fullness. This is what Sophie Ezzell does in her essay, “While You Are Walking With a Boy You Find a Duck,” published in River Teeth 23.2, using the nature and interactions of ducks to talk about the narrator’s experience with sexual assault.
The essay opens on a scene of the narrator walking in a park with a boy when they see a duck. Unprompted, the boy starts talking about how ducks mate, the unfortunate evolution of genitalia due to the rapist nature of ducks, and how that evolution only resulted in more painful intercourse: “Ducks are monsters, he concludes and slaps his knee as if he’s just told you the punchline of a joke” (14). In this startling description of the ducks’ mating process, Ezzell sets up the situation of the ducks to stand as a reflection of human sexual assault and the narrator’s experience with it. She even extends this to the rubber ducks one might find in a bathtub, asking us to reflect on how we engaged with the seemingly innocent toys: “Did you kiss their beaks together…Or did you dunk them below the surface and giggle when their heads emerged from the water, their painted-on smiles unfazed by the rush of violence?” (14). Here, Ezzell considers the normalized violence women face by referencing the “painted-on smiles” of toy ducks. In this moment, we can see the narrator’s own struggle with how she should react to the things she has experienced: can she be affected, or is she expected to let it flow over her like water off a duck’s back?
After recounting the details of an uncomfortable experience with the same boy, Ezzell uses a separate section to bring us back to the ducks. In the brief section, she writes, “You google ‘Do ducks have a conscience?’ What you learn is that ducks are alive and conscious when their bodies are chucked into de-feathering machines. You have never eaten duck, but you still feel guilty” (15). From this short musing on the consciousness and fate of ducks, we get insight into another aspect of experience with sexual assault: guilt. In her question, we see her trying to make sense of the “why” of what happened, only to receive what seems to be an excuse for the actions of those who cause harm. From this discovery, we see a misplaced sense of guilt, though she has done nothing wrong.
When Ezzell brings us to another section wherein a duck is present, she describes a scene of sudden violence:
They waddle together in a multicolored row, and you tell yourself they are childhood friends. But when they enter the water, there is a change. A white duck with feathers pure and clean as a first communion dress launches himself onto a female duck. Her head is pushed under the water. You wonder about her lungs. (15)
The way she describes the male duck paints an image of innocence and purity that we wouldn’t expect such violence from, giving us a look at how she viewed the boy early in their relationship. The suddenness of his actions, pushing the female’s head under the water, mirrors the sexual assault experienced by women. Her last sentence, “You wonder about her lungs,” brings us back to a previous section where she feels overwhelmingly aware of her lungs in her ribcage and their fragility in a moment where she is trapped in the boy’s arms. She conjures this image again shortly after, now in direct relation to the boy: “You think about the boy whenever you visit the ducks. You feel lucky your head was never pushed underneath the water, and you feel sad that you characterize that feeling as ‘luck’” (15-16). There is a clear double-meaning here; she admits that the narrator’s experience could have been worse while also acknowledging the tragedy that is seeing what happened to her as “lucky” rather than simply an awful occurrence.
When approaching something that was hard for her to write about, Ezzell chose to think creatively about another subject in order to make points about her own experience. In applying concepts to something less directly related to the hard thing, the writer opens herself up to easier reflection and perhaps new ways of understanding what makes it hard for her. Sometimes the way to a gentler experience is through something as simple—or complex—as a duck.
Exercise:
Step 1: Consider a “hard thing” that may perhaps seem daunting and unapproachable. Maybe even a specific scene.
Example: Loss of a friend
Step 2: Think about other things (objects, places, activities, etc.) that you are familiar with that you could use to approach the “hard thing” from a different angle. Make a list of at least 5 of these things.
Example: cats, running, movies, wolves, Target
Step 3: Pick one thing from your list and begin writing what you know about it. Write on this thing for 10 minutes.
Example: running is hard, you need to take breaks, sometimes the terrain is rocky or unstable, perhaps slick and you have to take caution, some days are better for running than others, you have to train running muscles, etc…
Step 4: Analyze what you’ve written. Consider how what you know about this thing can help you talk about your “hard thing.” What connections can be drawn? Pull a metaphor out of the scene of the hard stuff.
Example: Friendship is not always easy, there are ups and downs, mistakes will be made and you have to be able to both prepare for and learn from those mistakes, sometimes you need to take a break from a friendship in order to heal certain parts of you, in order to be a better friend, etc…
Step 5: Continue writing, but this time, keep your “hard thing” in your mind as you talk about the other thing. See what happens when those things communicate with each other. Was this easier than approaching the “hard thing” head on? Did it help you understand the “hard thing” better?
Roman Hughes is a current graduate student at Ball State working toward his MA in English Studies. When he is not writing, teaching, or working in the Writing Center, he can be found watching movies with friends and reading books to his cat, Baz..
Photo courtesy of Ryan Porter via Unsplash
