Mitsima

Mitsima is an elder of Malpais who teaches John to work clay and make pottery. Their lessons offer John a sustained experience of learning by hand: he watches, imitates, laughs at his imperfect first attempt, and starts again. In a life shaped by estrangement, Mitsima’s patient instruction gives him both a craft and a rare, absorbing pleasure.

Identity and Teaching

Mitsima appears as an experienced craftworker and teacher. When John is fifteen, Mitsima tells him he may learn to work clay, then squats with him beside the river. The lesson is practical and gradual: Mitsima demonstrates each stage while John follows, learning through close observation and repetition.

The Pottery Lesson

Mitsima begins with a lump of wetted clay, pressing it into a disk and raising its edges to form a shallow cup. He rolls more clay into flexible cylinders and lays them around the rim, building the vessel upward ring by ring. He squeezes, pats, strokes, and scrapes the clay until his pot takes the familiar water-pot shape of Malpais, creamy white and still soft, rather than the customary black.

John’s own effort beside it is crooked and awkward. The contrast makes him laugh, but not retreat: he says the next one will be better and moistens another piece of clay. The lesson treats imperfection as part of practice, with Mitsima’s finished pot serving not as a rebuke but as a model John can continue working toward.

Work, Pleasure, and Cultural Contrast

As John fashions the clay, he takes extraordinary pleasure in feeling his fingers gain skill and power. He sings fragments of conditioning slogans while Mitsima sings a song about killing a bear; their different songs accompany a shared day of work. John is filled with intense, absorbing happiness, a feeling rooted in making something rather than in passive distraction.

Mitsima’s teaching also gives John a place within the knowledge and practices of Malpais. He promises to teach him to make a bow the following winter, extending the craft apprenticeship beyond pottery. The scene’s quiet rhythm—demonstration, imitation, a flawed result, and another attempt—sets manual learning against the slogans and standardized conditioning that John knows from the World State.