“Now is the Time of Monsters.” Reflections on Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” These lines are by Italian philosopher, politician, and linguist Antonio Gramsci, written from within a Fascist prison. Amitav Ghosh points out that Gramsci would have had difficulty comprehending the monsters of our time. A cultural anthropology take on the quote and its meaning can be found here.
It turns out that a closer translation of the Gramsci aphorism is a little less catchy: “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Both versions speak aptly to our here and now. Mind you, it feels optimistic to hope that 47’s regime in the United States is an interregnum. Often it feels more like an autocoup whose perpetrators are intent on clawing their way into permanence. Policies of cruelty are being unleashed on a country that might have once thought itself impervious to authoritarian rule. Remember the America that prided itself upon its democratic system? Until now, that country could convince itself that Trump 1 was a one-off phenomenon. Yet now the system is failing as we witness it, and well-meaning people feel impotent to take action. Ordinary Americans are taking to the streets because they can see the symptoms of morbidity and they do not want a future in which they must live their lives around them and in spite of them.
Looking for a YA novel speaking to the idea of monsters in a near-future world, I found Pet by Akwaeke Emezi. The world of Pet is a near-future creation, set in a place called Lucille where monsters have been defeated. Angels are in charge, assuring the young there is no need to fear: they are well protected, well guarded. Fear is a thing of the past, a thing defeated by the revolution. If you’re sensing this conclusion is premature, it seems that’s exactly the suspicion Emezi intends to plant.
On page after page, the narrative suggests that appearances deceive and things are not as they seem.
p. 13. Angels had to be innocent, right? Wasn't that the whole point of them, to be good and innocent and righteous?
p. 20… the problem is, when you think you've been without monsters for so long sometimes you forget what they look like, what they sound like, no matter how much remembering your education urges you to do.
And here’s an unforgettable line:
Forgetting is how the monsters come back.
The family in the story is loving and giving. They normalize and accept their trans daughter—surely a model for some liberal utopia. And yet a fierce and terrifying creature bursts out of Jam’s mother’s painting and tells her that it is here to hunt a monster down. In this place, in this time? The protagonist’s shocked incomprehension could be a stand-in for our own in America’s 21st century time of monsters.
Pet is a bold and admirable book. I found myself questioning the protagonist’s age. Is she really 17 as the CIP page informs us? She sounds so much younger. Emezi is new to the form of the YA novel and perhaps this is why their evocation of a teenaged voice sometimes feels uneven. Not enough to stop me reading, though.
The monster here is sexual abuse, and its uncovering is sensitively handled, as are the events that bring the perpetrator to justice. There’s no denying the power of this writer’s prose, as the story insists on its own way of unfolding. Even the setting carries the narrative forward: e.g., “the studio door opened without a sound, like it was conniving with her.”
Rituals gesture safety. Even when you know it’s illusory and about to be shattered, there’s an implication that the story will find its way back into the light, that there will be a way to carry on. In the book, as in our time, there are indeed a “variety of morbid symptoms.” Yet the story compels the turn of its pages and sweeps annoying objections away. It reminded me of the opening lines of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower:
Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
Pet kept me reading until I began to understand the parable it contained.
