BOOK REVIEW
Flash in the Dark:
On Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s
World of Wonders
When considering our relationship to the natural world, our responsibility is not so different from that of the poet. It is a role that starts with and depends on a deep well of attention.
In her debut essay collection, World of Wonders: In Praise of fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s prose exalts a heighted practice of attention by leading readers through a stunning menagerie of curious species, from dancing frogs and vampire squids to corpse flowers and dragon fruit—creatures that often seem alien and otherworldly, but reveal so much about what it means to be a co-inhibitor of this planet.
A child of an Indian father and Filipina mother, and resident of many states and regions, from Arizona to New York, Midwest to deep south, Nezhukumatathil’s personal essays reveal the lessons and consistency of the natural world, found in all the places she’s learned to call home. In the desert, she “trusted in the cactus wren, in one who knew how to hollow out a space for itself in a most uninhabitable place.” When looking to the potoo bird of Central and South America, a master of camouflage and stillness but known for its audacious call, the author learns, “There is a time for stillness, but who hasn’t also wanted to scream with delight at being outside? To simply announce themselves and say, I’m here, I exist?” In majority white regions where the author’s family was the clear minority, she muses that “Like the potoo, I grew up wanting to blend in—in my case, with my blonde counterparts. I felt most seen in my childhood not by any television shows or movies but rather when I was outdoors.”
The essays themselves, brief meditations titled after specific species, are highly reminiscent of Nezhukumatathil’s poetry, particularly her last collection, Oceanic, where the self and the natural world converge through form and metaphor. A weaving of research and personal narrative, the result is a blurring of boundaries between bodies until the result is no longer strictly animal or human. With language that imitates the clever grasping of tentacles and delicacy of the comb jelly, with words that mimic the color and camouflage and lyrical lightness of feathers, the author looks to the natural world for tools to understand and defend her own existence under threat, like with the catalpa tree whose large leaves could protect brown skin from Kansas sun and shield a face from questions of “What are you? and Where are you from?”
These lessons follow the author from childhood into adulthood as she learns to react to threats not only due to race but to gender, like being a young woman living on her own for the first time, dancing with girlfriends all nights of the week, “like flamingos flying long-distance, mostly at night,” even though other girls don’t make it safely home, “a darkness beneath all that fun color.” Later the author ponders mimosa pudica, otherwise known as the Touch Me Not plant, which shudders and closes when touched. “How I wish I could fold inward and shut down and shake off predators with one touch. What a skill, what a thrill that could be: Touch me not on the dance floor, touch me not in the subway; touch me not in the green room right before I go on stage, touch me not at a faculty party, touch me not if you are a visiting writer, touch me not at the post office while I’m waiting to send a letter to my grandmother.”
In species both fantastical and common, Nezhukumatathil finds not only skills for adaptation and survival, but for relationship and homing, like the narwhal with his “horn” of 10 million nerve endings, used for some of the most directed echo location of any animal. In a move to Kansas, the author thinks of that horn, really an oversized tooth, and tries to “listen for those clicks of connection, that echo reverberating back to me.” Later, when seeking out what place will be home for her family, Nezhukumatathil looks to the red-spotted newt and its homing instincts, a creature who uses its innate magnetic compass to return to its birth pond.
Though Nezhukumatathil’s collection is so deeply connected to the natural world—emotionally, relationally, geographically—it is just as much about our growing disconnect from nature, and what the consequences of those disconnects may be. The author recalls visiting an elementary school classroom to teach poetry, and writes, “It was indeed a sad day when I had to bring up a video online to prove that fireflies do indeed exist and to show what a field of them looks like at night. Seventeen students of twenty-two had never seen a firefly. Never even heard of them. Never caught one to slide into an empty jam jar, never had one glow in their sweaty hands.” Unfortunately, Nezhukumatathil notes, the decreased familiarity with the natural world is present even in her college-level environmental writing classes, with less and less students able to put names to the flowers they see, or tell a maple tree from an oak.
There are more gaps and self-made barriers between us and the natural world than ever before. We are consistently severed by screens, our cities, the exploitation of our natural resources, all of which prevents us from seeing ourselves within an interdependent ecosystem with the rest of the world. We are becoming less accustomed to participation in nature, less knowledgeable about bodies other than our own, more distant from the wealth of diversity found in plants and animals attempting to share our environments. Nezhukumatatil’s essays make great efforts to close some of that distance and call us back.
With great concern the author wonders, “What is lost when you grow up not knowing the names for different varieties of fireflies? Shadow Ghost, Sidewinder, The Florida Sprite...Murky Flash-train, Texas Tinies, a July Comet, the Wiggle Dancer?” Nezhukumatathil encourages us to ask of ourselves, how do we begin to properly care for and invest in the creatures of the world? How do we learn to value disappearing species that don’t immediately appear to benefit or profit or entertain us? Often the damage already done feels too great, the distance between us and the natural world too far. “How can one even imagine us getting back to a place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day? A place where ‘a bird’ navigating a dewy meadow is transformed into something more specific, something we can hold onto by feeling its name on our tongues: brown thrasher. Or ‘that big tree’: catalpa.”
Nezhukumatatil’s answer is to start small. To start with what we loved as kids. She encourages us to return once again to wonder—to our child selves who stood enraptured and in total awe of the curiosity and outrageous color of the world. To reconnect by once again learning to pay attention to the incredible variety of life surrounding us, to let our amazement guide us in protecting and preserving species for the next generation of firefly chasers and bird watchers. She writes, “It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world.”
Though firefly populations continue to dwindle a little more each year, a now familiar result of habitat loss, toxic chemicals, and light pollution, Nezhukumatatil knows she will continue to search for fireflies all the rest of her days, dreaming of that precious luminescence, the wink in the dark that glows and extinguishes, “as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again.” With a note of wistfulness, she adds, “Perhaps I can will it to be so,” a kind of stubborn reaching beyond a bleak and darkening reality. Hoping for the world’s restoration often feels feeble as the small firefly’s spark. But if you stare long enough into the dark, you may just glimpse a small light beating in time to a heartbeat, reminding us that if any healing is to come to this earth, it must begin, first and foremost, with love.
Emma Kaiser is winner of the 2017 Norton Writers Prize. Her work is forthcoming or featured in River Teeth, Rock & Sling, Stoneboat, & elsewhere. She is the author of two children's nonfiction books and a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota.