{"id":813,"date":"2021-10-07T00:48:33","date_gmt":"2021-10-07T04:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=813"},"modified":"2021-10-07T01:13:22","modified_gmt":"2021-10-07T05:13:22","slug":"the-animals-we-are-trope-of-animality-in-ocean-vuongs-on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2021\/10\/07\/the-animals-we-are-trope-of-animality-in-ocean-vuongs-on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous\/","title":{"rendered":"The Animals We Are: Trope of Animality in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ocean vuong\u2019s On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous<\/em> 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<\/em>, the narrator employs the trope of animality (in the evocations of monarch butterflies, dog, cat, bees, macaque\/monkey, buffalo\/veal\/heifer)\u2014as detour, metaphor, analogy\u2014to make sense of his people\u2019s migrating history, of his loved ones\u2019 character, and to evoke the environmental disaster. The narrator aptly claims at the end of the novel: \u201cWhat we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story\u2014when our lives are in themselves the story of animals\u201d (242).<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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: \u201cIt only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation [of monarchs]. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing\u201d (4). In the middle of the novel’s section I, we are told that the men in the village, where the narrator\u2019s grandma is from, enact the custom of splitting live macaques\u2019 skulls wide open and feed directly from the animal in order to enhance their virility; at the same, the narrator\u2019s 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\u2019s body, we cannot help but see the history violence subsumed and embedded into the metaphoric animality.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe sound of an animal in distress\u201d; he traces the sound, speculating that it might be \u201ca cat wounded,\u201d but finds out it is actually his (adopted) grandfather crying in the kitchen; \u201cThere are no animals here but us,\u201d the narrators says (45-6). Moreover, Trevor, the narrator\u2019s lover, is characterized as \u201cthe hunter,\u201d \u201cthe carnivore\u201d but who would never eat veal because \u201c the difference between veal and beef is the children [; t]he veal are the children\u201d–Trevor\u2019s toxic masculinity embedded in the \u201ccarnivore\u201d is offset\/destabilized by his (homo)sexuality in his refusal to eat \u201cveal\u201d \u00a0(155). The narrator\u2019s real name is never revealed\u2014instead, he is referred to as \u201cLittle Dog,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Alongside the human history of migration and the human character, the evocation of animality is also the warning for environmental disasters. \u00a0The narrator\u2019s grandfather laments that the bees \u201care dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months\u201d (53). When Trevor and Little Dog first have anal sex, it was outside the barn; amid coitus, hovering above them were moths; however, \u201c[t]he pesticides left over from the fields killed [the moths] soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves\u201d (203). So, the act of human pleasure exists alongside the destruction of animals. In the trope of animality, the narrator doesn\u2019t just use animals to think of humans\u2019 life, but he highlights also the violence humans have enacted upon animals\u2019 life, and subsequently the Earth they inhabit.<\/p>\n

Work Cited: Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/em>. Penguin Books, 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ocean vuong\u2019s On Earth We\u2019re 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 … Continue reading The Animals We Are: Trope of Animality in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3852,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145909],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3852"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}