Ocean vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother; the narrator recounts his life together with his mother and grandmother as refugees in America after the American war in Vietnam; it is also a queer coming-of-age story where the narrator negotiates his racialized intimacy with an American whiteboy, Trevor, in suburban Connecticut. In On Earth, the narrator employs the trope of animality (in the evocations of monarch butterflies, dog, cat, bees, macaque/monkey, buffalo/veal/heifer)—as detour, metaphor, analogy—to make sense of his people’s migrating history, of his loved ones’ character, and to evoke the environmental disaster. The narrator aptly claims at the end of the novel: “What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals” (242).
The southwards migration of monarch butterflies from Canada or the United States to Mexico for refuge in the winter is juxtaposed next to the recount of Vietnamese refugees’ presence in America. Vuong uses the metaphor of this monarch migration to think of the migration of Vietnamese refugees to the United States as (temporally) precarious and dangerous: “It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation [of monarchs]. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing” (4). In the middle of the novel’s section I, we are told that the men in the village, where the narrator’s grandma is from, enact the custom of splitting live macaques’ skulls wide open and feed directly from the animal in order to enhance their virility; at the same, the narrator’s mother, Hong, is also born in the year of the monkey–she characterizes herself as such: “I’m a monkey,” she says (240); amid the violence of war, bestiality, and the violent American working-condition upon Hong’s body, we cannot help but see the history violence subsumed and embedded into the metaphoric animality.
Beyond evoking the characteristic migration of another species to parallel that of humans, the animal can also merge with or is attached to the human’s character. Once, in the middle of the night, the narrator wakes up to “the sound of an animal in distress”; he traces the sound, speculating that it might be “a cat wounded,” but finds out it is actually his (adopted) grandfather crying in the kitchen; “There are no animals here but us,” the narrators says (45-6). Moreover, Trevor, the narrator’s lover, is characterized as “the hunter,” “the carnivore” but who would never eat veal because “ the difference between veal and beef is the children [; t]he veal are the children”–Trevor’s toxic masculinity embedded in the “carnivore” is offset/destabilized by his (homo)sexuality in his refusal to eat “veal” (155). The narrator’s real name is never revealed—instead, he is referred to as “Little Dog,” a term of endearment as well as of protection his maternal grandmother fashions for him, so that the evil spirits (who only hunt for pretty and strong children), will hear it and think him diminutive and leave him alone. Thus, the narrator is also characterized by the animal.
Alongside the human history of migration and the human character, the evocation of animality is also the warning for environmental disasters. The narrator’s grandfather laments that the bees “are dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months” (53). When Trevor and Little Dog first have anal sex, it was outside the barn; amid coitus, hovering above them were moths; however, “[t]he pesticides left over from the fields killed [the moths] soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves” (203). So, the act of human pleasure exists alongside the destruction of animals. In the trope of animality, the narrator doesn’t just use animals to think of humans’ life, but he highlights also the violence humans have enacted upon animals’ life, and subsequently the Earth they inhabit.
Work Cited: Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Books, 2019.
Brain, I am so fascinated by the work of Ocean Vuong from your posts and that we have read for class. As I read more about his use of animal imagery, I can’t help but think of this in terms of ecofeminism and solidarity with the nonhuman. The metaphor about monarch butterfly migration is so beautiful in how it handles diaspora and framing it as “natural,” which is interesting in that the migration of people is often due to unnatural violence or displacement. Your last line about how Vuong addresses how human violence impacts animals and, consequently the earth, is beautifully done and I totally see that connection. I wonder how that’s complicated by the fact that humans are animals, too, and how we are essentially committing acts of violence against ourselves. There is a source from my research that came up called Toward a Queer Ecofeminism by Greta Gaard, which deals with natural imagery, oppression, and gender and sexuality; I feel like could be interesting in relation to Vuong’s work and I would be happy to share my PDF- let me know if that would be helpful and I am so excited to see your thesis come together!
Brain, I am so fascinated by the work of Ocean Vuong from your posts and that we have read for class. As I read more about his use of animal imagery, I can’t help but think of this in terms of ecofeminism and solidarity with the nonhuman. The metaphor about monarch butterfly migration is so beautiful in how it handles diaspora and framing it as “natural,” which is interesting in that the migration of people is often due to unnatural violence or displacement. Your last line about how Vuong addresses how human violence impacts animals and, consequently the earth, is beautifully done and I totally see that connection. I wonder how that’s complicated by the fact that humans are animals, too, and how we are essentially committing acts of violence against ourselves. There is a source from my research that came up called Toward a Queer Ecofeminism by Greta Gaard, which I feel like could be interesting in relation to Vuong’s work and I would be happy to share my PDF- let me know if that would be helpful and I am so excited to see your thesis come together!