I noticed when reading Cecilia Vicuna’s poetry that there was a focus on animals.
“TAH they go like that.” It seemed to me as though the language of the birds was being ultratranslated in a discomfortable way. On page 306, Cecilia said: “imagine the worth / of the whole / net / as a new / net worth.” She also spoke of “walkers on a dry sea / on a deep blue sea” and the “dark oily sea.” I began to think of Animal Rights, and what makes us different from them. Is a big part of it language? I thought of how we live in a time where we have such a focus on human rights, as we should, but we often leave out other creatures. It is a major pattern in racism where a target race is diminished as “animalistic.” But who ever said that to be less human is to be less? Speciesism is a term that has been coined to illustrate this issue. Cecilia’s lines about the net worth, and about the dry ocean made me think of overfishing and how we will live in a world with a fishless ocean by 2048. If the ocean dies, so will humans. My favorite oceanographer, the badass Sylvia Earle often says “No blue, no green.” She points out how humans suck the sea dry of resources and pollute it because it is so vast that it seems impossible there is anything we can do to affect it. Except that is well within our power. We are changing our planet so drastically that our generation will likely face wars over resources and extinction within our lifetime. We already are warring this over oil. But I am talking about clean water and food. I am talking about how irrational it is to burn down your own house.
The poems from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha also talked about “rainbow kerosene stain floating on rain puddles” and how “i went fishing i had a tackle a line a hook i caught one. it was jumping. i tried to take it off i tore its mouth it flaps it feels something it bleeds i can’t do it.” I thought some more about clean water and taking what is not ours to take. I started to think about animals as food, and how most of us are only complicit in the killing of animals for food out of habit, misinformation, and because of distance from the actual death involved. I thought of what the world might be like if we could hear the language of the animals we dominated. I decided to ultratranslate a common language of pain and fear to evoke an emotional response. I also chose to underline how irrational and unintelligent much of human behavior is in order to engage people’s pragmatic sides. I used a discomfortable subject matter, and when ultratranslating for chickens, I used a lack of spaces to reflect the lack of space factory farmed animals have and to create a frantic energy. I tried to do this similarly to how Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left out capitalization when describing her encounter with the fish. As a vegan I often try really hard to not offend people with my opinions or make people feel like my ideology has been “stuffed down their throats” because I don’t want to be forceful or make them feel defensive. It was very refreshing to be given permission to make people discomfortable with something they should probably feel ethically and rationally uncomfortable about out of a sense of self-preservation.
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