A role of literature has always been to draw a voice out of the unspoken; in our Spring 2023 issue, we acted on this mandate to collect a variety of texts that place the non-human at their centre. This consideration of our planetary cohabitants is not only a powerful expression of imagination, but also an exercise of ethical care, exemplified by these chosen writers as a way to not only instill wonder, but also to facilitate deeper consideration of our role in protecting and honouring these lifeforms. To further elucidate the educational power of this ecologically-oriented literature, we present a three-part series in which Charlie Ng, co-editor of the feature, discuss in depth the context and the activism innate in these texts.
“Song of the Whale-road”, one of the pieces in the animal-themed feature of Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, consists of excerpts taken from Yolanda González’s recent novel Oceánica. Mesmerising in its lyrical tone, the text reveals the primordial unity of the human and nature, which has eventually dissociated as mankind developed their own civilization, and life and death—originally stages of a natural cycle—came to be laden with anthropogenic threats and massacres. The novel opens with an epigraph that consists of three quotations: from the Genesis book of the Bible, Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia, and Raúl Zurita’s poem “Las cataratas del Pacifico”, revealing the novel’s environmentalism immediately to the reader.
As was written in Genesis, God’s command of procreation and the passing over of Earth’s dominion to Man reminds us of our stewardship of nature—but the irony is that the multiplication of mankind has brought catastrophe to the other lifeforms sharing the planet with us. The whale, often regarded as an environmental symbol, embodies the image of endangered animals and the importance of protecting keystone species for the purposes of biodiversity and combating climate change. They also appeal to our imagination for both their massive size and their biological significance as mammals living in the depths of the ocean, making them all at once mysterious, fearful, and attractive. In Western culture, whales are sometimes known as “leviathans”, sea monsters mentioned in the Bible that represent the uncontrollable power of nature. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is arguably the most well-known work of oceanic literature that makes use of such a profound, epic, human-whale relationship, while in contemporary literature, cetacean narratives such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller play a crucial role in offering localised perspectives that contrast mainstream Western environmentalism.
González’s Oceánica is referred to as an “ecothriller” that reflects on the climate crisis and environmental protection, ambitious in its scope of two narratives, connected by whales: one on the stranding of a whale on the beach of Hondarribia before a G7 summit in Biarritz, and the subsequent political commotion; the other on sixteenth-century Basque whaling and the danger of seafaring. The Basque Country, located at the border of Spain and France, is the geographical counterpoint of the two narratives linking the contemporary to history, and in both time periods, González calls our attention to the human disturbance to ocean lives: the plastic waste now often found inside stranded whales, and the once-prosperous Basque whaling industry that had hunted whales to exploit their oil. Although whaling is an ancient practice that exists in many cultures, the Basques were the first documented commercial whalers, then dominating the European market. Overhunting not only led to the decline of the industry but also the near extinction of right whales, a common prey species. Christine Echeverria Bender’s The Whaler’s Forge is a predecessor in historical fiction that features Basque whaling in the plot, and Sjón’s From the Mouth of the Whale is an Icelandic fantasy novel that also mentions Basque whalers in relation to their conflicts with Icelanders. However, Oceánica is unique in its narrative hybridity—especially with the inclusion of the whales’ own songs addressing humans, demonstrating the novel’s non-anthropocentric attempt at telling whale stories.
The language of “Song of the Whale-road” is highly poetic, beautifully rendered by Robin Munby’s lucid translation, presenting the voices of whales themselves. Putting words into the mouths of animals is an age-old literary technique—what we’ve usually called anthropomorphism. The critiques of this stylisation often focus on the issue of imposing human thinking and language on animals, or making use of animals to convey human messages, which is common in the tradition of fables and fairy tales. However, “Song of the Whale-road” is an interesting experiment of representing whales, making use of the interstitial space between the two main human-centric narratives to configure whale song as an otherly and yet distinctive voice talking back. The experiment harnesses formal elements of special text alignment (centralised in the original print and right-aligned in the translation) and a black background to imitate oceanic darkness. The presence of whales is compellingly foregrounded, making their voice impossible to ignore.
Although the language of whales has not always been recognised as such, science shows that whales express themselves and communicate through patterned sounds, which can be considered songs for their unique frequencies and rhythmic quality. The songs, when functioning as echolocation, are important for hunting and navigation—though, due to their supposedly melancholic aura, they also enforce the romantic notion that whales are an embodiment of loneliness. The 52-hertz whale is popularised as a lonely existence in the immensity of the ocean, living its long life waiting to be heard and understood. However, whales in reality are quite social, often traveling in pods, and this idea of group journeying is invoked from the onset of “Song of the Whale-road”: “We swim on beside her, though we know that she won’t make it, that she will succumb, surrender herself to the waves and currents. It is a story we know well.” The beginning instigates a feeling of sadness as a straggler whale gets lost, eventually becoming the beached whale of the main narrative. What makes this tale more heart-wrenching is that such occurrences have become commonplace, and González evokes a further pathos by emphasizing that the whales are accustomed to this.
Speaking on behalf of animals is imagination working as translation. Such translations require a thorough integration of knowledge about the subject animals, and a vivid language when iterating their significance in human-animal interactions. González’s whales display natural behaviour as well as the reverberation of evolutionary memories as they struggle to survive in the history of human hostility: “We are travelling to where it all began, to the paradise waters where the first of us were born; we are following the roads of our ancestors, abandoned after the massacre, its memory etched into their lineage.” What is special about the voice here is how the collective monologue is lyrically expressive in its melancholic response, representing the whales who may seek to communicate with human beings; González’s reflection is enacted through this song, letting the whales speak for themselves in the first-person to create a sense of immediacy—which is also a way to acknowledge their subjectivity. The whales are intelligent not only in their discernment of the newfound challenges within their living environment, but also their cognition of the biological closeness between humans and whales—which we have all but severed as our arrogance grew in the attempts to rise above all other living things and conquer nature:
We are reforging the links in the chain of death, piecing it back to its origin, when the defenceless ape emerged from the forests and fought with other beasts for its pound of flesh; and later, when it grew tired of waiting for gifts from the gods and hurled itself against the waves in a walnut shell, armed with rope and pointed iron, to kill the queen of the waves;
González’s text is a fine example of empathy at work, not only because of the deeply moving tone of plights and pleas from the whales themselves, but also in the way that the creatures seek to commune with human beings, seeing through the hubris and pathetic natures of mankind: “We follow in their luminous wake, alert to the invisible threads that weave the fine mesh holding your world together. The mesh of light that sustains you and imprisons you.” The light created by human beings symbolises reason and civilization, in contrast with the wild darkness of the ocean; yet at the same time, we are living under a shadow of our own making when natural disasters come as repercussions. Tragedy is common to whales and humans, but humans bear a greater responsibility in our exercise of power.
The pronouns of “we” and “you” used by the whales is a way of creating kinship with mankind instead of establishing oppositions—an effort to emphasise our ecological interconnectedness: “We bring the corpses with us to lay at your feet, because they are yours, because they are a part of you; a mountain of landless bodies, and you, in your slumber, will join them too, when the luminous dream we fuelled no longer offers any refuge. You. Us.” The whales, whose dwelling place is the receptive and enigmatic ocean—a symbol of the collective unconscious—beckon here at human instincts, hoping to align us back to an eternal natural cycle and order.
Charlie Ng is currently an assistant professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences of Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She obtained her BA in English and MPhil in English (Literary Studies) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and graduated with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. This article is part of her research project, supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project Reference Number: UGC/FDS16/H18/22).