CNF Online Journal 2: “Wilfredo Pascual’s Animalia”
Non-fiction was never something I voluntarily read. I never developed a taste for it. I guess I had the wrong notion of it being uninteresting because it didn’t have the royal drama or killer mystery or the heart-pounding action of the usual novels I read. Wilfredo Pascual’s Animalia changed this for me.
Pascual had a way with his words that it evoked so much emotion even by just hinting at it. His subjectivity was subtle but his words brimmed with sentiments he wanted to share with the readers.
I believe together with this approach, the use of a first person-point-of-view also helped me as a reader to empathize with Pascual. The point-of-view helped bring me as a reader into each scene with him. It helped me connect to each event that was otherwise foreign to me as well as connect to his realization scattered around each anecdote.
In each anecdote, I noticed how curiosity was a reoccurring thing. Pascual used this to connect each animal to a realization about life and our likeness to animals. In the first anecdote, he recounts:
“Many years later, I read about bats and remembered that night. I wondered how the tiny creatures made sense of their ultrasonic cries, bouncing hard and fast, providing a picture of our bedroom, their cries too loud and high beyond human hearing.”
From there, he gives us a conclusion I could never word more profoundly:
“I will always remember that night when we killed the bats because that is how I later came to realize why some stories would never be silenced. Humans don’t hear well enough. But that’s not the point. Each waking moment a voice screams, sometimes whispers, and a story bounces back against a landscape, a political event, and the whole of humanity and what it fails and aspires to be, all of these echo back to the source, year after year — amidst typhoons, migrations, fiestas, death, revolution, and romance — and it is all that matters.”
It is this first anecdote that really got me. From queries on how bats navigated the world, he turned it into something we can contemplate about our world — how some stories would never be silenced.
This made me feel some kind of rush. It was astonishing for me that two very much diverse events were able to have a connection, a similarity. I marveled at how Pascual saw this connection as well as all those links he mentioned in every other anecdote he made.
While reading the text, Disney’s Colors of the Wind was constantly at the back of my mind. We were all connected by some means like how Pascual felt a connection with Bracky, or how we humans have the same sense of memory as turtles do, or how we all carry a personal wilderness inside us. We are all, deep down, creatures of this Earth.
