Using Beauty to Overpower Racism
/Book Review: World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed Editions, 2020)
Aimee Nezhukumatathil‘s World of Wonders
“World of Wonders is a captivating book, immensely powerful in the quiet way with which it celebrates the natural world and what it is to love and to belong. The beautiful writing is complimented by lovely illustrations in what is a celebration also of the art of book design. I join the booksellers of Barnes and Noble in recommending unreservedly this very special book.” So, says Barnes and Noble CEO James Daunt in the company press release.
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments weds the life reflections of an award-winning poet to the natural world. An exceptional book is the sort in which an index finger can be stabbed into a random signature and reliably happen upon a scene or a thought to carry with you into the afterlife. Page 45, for instance, uses the axolotl, a Mexican salamander, to describe the irritation of intractable prejudice:
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“An axolotl can help you smile as an adult even if someone on your tenure committee puts his palms together as if in prayer every time he sees you off-campus, and does a quick, short bow, and calls out, Namaste! Even though you’ve told him several times already that you actually attend a Methodist church. But it’s as if he doesn’t hear you or he does and doesn’t care, chuckling to himself as he shuffles across the icy parking lot, hands jammed into his pockets. Wide and thin, the axolotl’s smile runs from one end of the amphibian’s face to the other, curving at each end ever so gently upward.”
The tenure committee and self-satisfied faculty member Aimee references are inside the English and MFA creative writing program at the University of Mississippi. World of Wonders takes readers not only to her job, but also colleges in Ohio and Wisconsin, childhood homes in Phoenix where her father once worked as a NICU respiratory therapist, Iowa, western New York, on the grounds of Larned State Hospital in Kansas where her mother practiced psychiatry, and places she visited overseas as a youngster then as an adult, including her father’s native Kerala in southwestern India and mother’s homeland of northern Philippines.
It’s Not Easy Being Brown
A central theme of her book is the struggle to earn acceptance while growing up in American towns where brown girls are unusual. In our interview, she says, “I’m definitely not unique in terms of wanting to fit in and feeling a bit like a misfit during my teens, but what I hope comes across is how much I found solace and comfort observing the natural world around me. None of the plants or animals I loved observing asked me the dreaded ‘What are you?’ or ‘Where are you really from?’”
Above, I state “earn acceptance” because while her peripatetic childhood wasn’t the norm, she had more in common with normal kids than with story-tale characters in Netflix movies who win campus-wide favor by asserting their individuality. Asians in the honor roll when portrayed realistically seldom disrupt the student body status quo.
Even with the onslaught of high school shows featuring Asian characters, we don’t anticipate ever bingeing on this Kansas memory captured in World of Wonders:
“As we neared home, I saw my mom in our driveway, unpacking groceries from the car. A chunky blond boy on the bus asked if my mom was Chinese. When I said no, she was actually Filipino, he flipped his eyelids inside out.” Aimee further recalled, “As if flipping his eyelids wasn’t enough, he tugged at the skin at the corner of his eyes and pulled it to his ears. I bet she’s Chinese. Her eyes don’t even look like yours!”
While she acknowledged her Kansas years have little in common with Dorothy’s Oz, she realized before her mother and sister joined her father in Phoenix, “There were good kids here. Kids who, no matter what they learned from television or their own parents, would reach out for my hand, for a hug, who would miss me on the playground, the way I loved to hang upside-down from the monkey bars with my knees and yelp at the clouds at my feet.”
This concept that what a child feels can be more honest and profound than what he hears may not be earth shattering. It is at the very least groundbreaking.
In tribute to her father, Mathew, who was during the same period working in faraway Arizona, Aimee elaborated, “I learned that all sunflowers eventually turn toward the sun. Sunflowers so full, my mom would stop her little Chevy Chevette on the side of the road and snap pictures of me and my sister in front of a whole field to send to my dad. We are doing fine in Kansas, but we miss you and will see you soon.”
Can Beauty Turn a Movement into a Revolution?
America continues to be split between the quiet majority who oppose racism and the uninhibited few who abet it. One reality that books like World of Wonders drive home is: Skin color is absolutely never the determinant of inferiority. Pettiness is.
If that thought were some beautiful revelation, I would have ended this story there. Her book isn’t a polemic wielding nature as a bazooka against bigotry. A book by an Asian-American professor married to a white professor named Dustin with two sons in middle school is hardly the manifesto for a revolution. Aimee’s book has more to do with the unobtrusive yet buoying presence of fauna and flora even when our personal circumstances are unfair and seem unbearable. For such a contrarian view, subtlety is critical, and subtlety is the realm of a poet.
Nobody is better suited to this challenge than Aimee Nezhukumatathil. “As a kid,” she recalls, “I was always fascinated with the outdoors, reading everything I could get my hands on like the giant squid, shells, and rocks, for example. In other words, I’m a big nerd. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. As a poet, I leaned on vocabulary and diction of the natural world for use in making metaphors so it was a natural transition to essays.”
World of Wonders is what philosophers mean when they say “beauty is truth.” The beauty Aimee creates can help bridge the expanse between Americans with roots in South Asia to those in East Asia toward one diverse community of Asians who now realize that they have nothing to lose by being themselves. Being liked was always a flimsy bulwark against anti-Asian hate.
Anthony Maddela
Anthony Maddela is a Positively Filipino Staff Correspondent who is always working on his fiction. It’s why he appreciates the break he gets from compelling works like this one Aimee has already written for a small but farsighted press like Milkweed and her books to come.
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