Vernacular Animalities: Reading Multispecies Ethics in Hasan Azizul Haque’s Short Stories

AbstractThis essay foregrounds new vernacular aesthetics of multispecies ethics through close readings of two short stories – “Shokun” (“Vulture”) and “Amrityu Ajibon” (“Till Death, Through Life”) – by Bengali writer Hasan Azizul Haque (1939–2021). Postcolonial literary criticism has predominantly focused on Haque’s incisive portrayal of the consequences of the Partition of India and Bangladesh Liberation War on affected minorities, but his depictions of other-than-human subjects and interspecies relationalities implicated in postcolonial power dynamics have not received the critical attention that they merit. This essay draws on the analytical frameworks offered by interdisciplinary animal studies to demonstrate the agential roles of animals in Haque’s stories. Through literary speculations on animal alterities and entangled human–animal vulnerabilities, the short stories studied in this essay articulate the impact of feudal economic structures and inter-class hierarchies on landless peasants and debt-bonded labourers in post-Partition Bengal. They elaborate the mechanisms through which vernacular knowledges about human–animal coexistence, communication, and co-constitution provide textual corollaries for subaltern consciousness, resistance, and moral upliftment. I argue that the material and semiotic dimensions of literary animal figures in the stories produce unique narrative instances of recuperative animal agencies through sustained attention to the corporeal dynamics and affective logics of interspecies interactions. I also argue that while the material aspects of interspecies relationships are manifested through embodied affect, their symbolic aspects become conspicuous through the textual preeminence of metonymic animals over their metaphoric configurations. I show that through different textual iterations of transspecies relatedness stemming from (but not limited to) two kinds of physical contiguity – a vulture’s peck and a snake’s bite – Haque’s short stories critique both uncritical consolidation and outright disavowal of interspecies difference.Keywords: AnimalsHaqueHasan Azizulmetaphormetonymymultispecies ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Radhika Govindrajan outlines the optic of otherwildness as “a world of tentative and difficult fellowship” in which “animals are not always and already imbricated in human projects but come to interspecies relationship as beings whose histories, though linked to humans, are not exhaustively contained by them” (Citation2018, 123).2 I borrow these two phrases from Neetu Khanna’s trenchant portrayal of the visceral exchanges between colonized and colonizing subjects in The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. See Khanna (Citation2020, 6).3 All translations from Hasan Azizul Haque’s original Bengali short stories are mine.4 I use the pronoun “it” to refer to the vulture in this particular context because it aligns with the author’s usage in the original, and is in accordance with the boys’ perceptual realm in which the vulture thrives in the liminal zone between subject and object. In all the other instances, I have used the gender-neutral pronoun “they” because the text does not specify the vulture’s gendered identity.5 My writing of the “other” as upper-case Other or lower-case other aligns with how Levinas and Derrida have used them in the cited excerpts. In general, I use lower-case other to refer to the singular animal.6 Anat Pick proposes that humans can grapple with what is animal within themselves through a gesture of contraction, which is about sharing the human world of subjectivity with animals and acknowledging the disavowed animality within human subjectivity (Citation2011, 6).7 Bénédicte Boisseron argues that dog-bite is “an expression of the animal’s voice, no matter how conditioned the biting act itself has been” and “a constant reminder that the human being is also an animal that can be eaten” (Citation2018, 70, 71). If inflicting pain is “the only way for the dog to testify to his own abuse through the scream of the victim proxy", then the bite is “the most primal way to make this Other literally part of oneself” (Boisseron Citation2018, 70).8 Haque makes no explicit references about the snake’s gendered identity. However, he uses masculine adjectives like prācīn (ancient) and prabīn (elderly) instead of their feminine counterparts in Bengali to describe the snake.9 Jean M. Langford suggests that stories of animals as magical beings “illuminate forms of animal consciousness that otherwise would remain opaque. A turn to fabulous animals or fabulous aspects of ‘actual’ animals facilitates the imagination of animal desires, emotions, and communications that may be otherwise inaccessible” (Citation2020, 211).10 Derrida observes that the ethical code of hospitality is produced through honoring the first comer, coming after the other, and helping oneself after the other, whoever the other might be (Citation2009, 239).11 The cobra's physical appearance and the material consequences of his embodied presence resist an exclusively metaphorical reading of his character. Instead, there is a transition from his initial metonymic appearance as feudal landlord to his final metonymic identity as a zoomorphic deity.