Pet 1/2 Reflection

 Fisk Candau

Dr Ellis

EN376

15 Nov 2023

Pet First 1/2 Reflection

    The thing that struck me the most during the first half was the Awaeke Emezi's style when writing the first half of Pet. Everything is worded so simply that it feels like I'm reading a book designed for elementary schoolers, but it still held the same emotional gut-punch I would expect from the super long emotional similes in classics and things like that. Emezi has mastered the art of delivering super difficult concepts/ideas in super easy and digestable ways where she doesn't mince words in the slightest, even when she doesn't even say exactly what was happening (like when she writes that Bitter is the result of a "monster's monstering" (7)). Reading this section, I had to pause so many times to digest what Emezi wrote and to try not to cry in public. 

    I think it's super interesting the way that everything is also presented as just how things are without any space for debate, which honestly was really refreshing to read (I'm not trying to say that nuance is a bad thing or anything like that, just that the way things were presented was so direct that it was nice to read and be able to just say 'yeah, that's how it is period'). This was especially prevalent in the sections describing the dead and having respect for them, like when Emezi writes "the shaky fotage that was splashed everywhere of their deaths (a thing that wasn't allowed anymore, that gruesome dissemination of someone's child gasping in their final moments, bubbling air or blood or grief––the angels respected the dead and their loved ones)" (3). Reading it presented so plainly was like a slap in the face to the constant quasi-torture porn that people on social media right now share whenever something tragic happens, and people don't really tend to stop and think about how seeing that is not only making an object of spectacle a person's death, but also how it might affect people who face the same violence or the family and friends of that person. I also really liked the way that the replacing of old harmful statues with new ones representing the victims of violence was presented, because Emezi writes like that change is something easy and obvious. 

    Reading the book and the simple ways that all these things are presented, it feels like Emezi telling us that these solutions really are that simple and it's not that hard to deal with the problems we're facing today, people just refuse to see it that way and want to complicate the issues and debate back and forth to infinity instead of actually solving the problems. 

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