The Animals of My Earth School
By Mildred Kiconco Barya
Terrapin Books | 2023 | 96 pages
Stag beetle, antelope, hummingbird, and alligator are among the many creatures that dazzle and instruct us in the poems of Mildred Kiconco Barya’s new collection, The Animals of My Earth School, published by Terrapin Books in 2023. Originally from Uganda and now living in North Carolina, Barya writes with a deep awareness of the many creatures with whom we share this planet. In a historical moment that is seeing the alarming decline of insects, amphibians, mammals, and birds, Barya’s animal poems not only breathe life into individual animals but also explore the nature and the role of the human animal living alongside them. The creatures in Barya’s collection, divided into sections about insects, birds, and mammals, serve alternately as objects of wonder, as myth, as teachers, and most importantly, as themselves. The voice behind these poems is not moralizing, but inviting… telling story after story that the reader can reflect upon and examine their own humanness.
In much that is written about the Earth’s animals, there is a tendency to simplify animals or use them solely as one-dimensional symbols, but Barya’s poems resist reducing other living creatures to a simple metaphor. An eagle in the United States might be reduced to the image of freedom, for example. The animals in Barya’s collection are real beings performing their daily activities: eating, resting, copulating, each in their own unique and incredible bodies. In “The Heart, the Heart, the Hunger,” for instance, the poet describes an experience of wonder as she meets the Etruscan shrew, “the living mammal with the smallest heart.” She writes, “I incline my ears to the little mammal. 1200 to 1500 heartbeats per minute.”
In “Heads are Unnecessary for Copulation,” the reader learns of mantises that the female kills the male after mating, but also notes that their perceptions are perhaps much richer and more varied than that of the human. “With five eyes, their wisdom compound, and when night comes, the light / in their vision changes colors. / Imagine what humans could do with such stimuli and perception of depth.” And in “Factors” she describes a strange quality of the lizard who is in danger. “Lizards will on purpose sever their tails when in stressful or dangerous situations. Even after the tail is cast off, it goes on wriggling, hence distracting the lizard’s attacker.” While the reader can glean a lot of factual information about the main characters of these poems, the book’s title, The Animals of My Earth School, invites us to meditate on what we humans can learn from these various and wondrous lives.
In Barya’s hands the animals can be teachers: little wren has boldness and precision, hedgehog has staying power, and hyena “knows her primal place in the system of things, untouched by slander / and misgivings.” To wolf, the poet writes, “Everything human and animal vibrates in you: violence, intelligence, hot sex, insatiable appetite—always hungry” whose howl “causes our tired bones to rise, knowing too well our primal fears and bringing us renewal” but who also “pledges devotion.”
The human being is as much a part of these poems as any other animal. We learn the fairyfly has the smallest insect heart: ”Parasitic wasp. You’d need a microscope to see its heart. The human heart is like that sometimes.” The human animal is not ethically superior to the other animals, and in fact is capable of being ruthless, violent, and power-hungry. But, like the other animals, the human is complicated. The human being can sometimes act like its heart is microscopic and yet is still capable of restraint.
In “City of Antelope,” Barya opens the poem with “The antelope is missing / from the national air. There’s a flag instead with a / crested crane in a white disk.” The city of Kampala, capital of Uganda, her home country, has a new flag that represents a transition of power the country experienced over the last century. The poem muses on how natural spaces are changed through time by different groups of people: “Dictators and liberators dream / the city into new memories / and abandon the one they grew up with.” The animal after which the city is named is no longer to be found there. “Where is the impala that / gave the city its name when / the first plunderers asked / What place is this / full of impala.” Barya points to the colonial enterprise that created cities where once Indigenous peoples and a multitude of animals were thriving. The human tendency in this poem is to have waves of war and destruction followed by resurgence and rebuilding. “Time to time, political wars plunge the city into chaos… but fresh dreams rebuild the city with hope.” As we understand, humans have the capacity to dream and be unique and yet we must be mindful of our power. The poem ends:
Someday, there will be another
imagined city burgeoning from the
placenta like years on a tree trunk. But
the freedom fighter whose limb was
amputated will see a stump braced with
a substitute pushing in and out of strides.
The narrator of these poems acknowledges complicity, and humans live always with choices of when to consume, when to destroy, when to protect. In “Coccinellidae” the narrator finds a ladybug “that reminds me of an ex. Small head / and tiny legs dragging along a large body. I could squash it / between my thumb and index finger. The thought / does not startle me.” Again, in “Will There Be Chickens in Paradise,” the narrator shows restraint when handed an egg, which holds inside a body “diaphanous and white” with “faint beating heart… I squeeze the ball lightly and my heart skips a beat.” A reference in the next lines to Lot’s wife connects these individual choices to the larger choices humans have in our societies. We can restrain the urge to destroy. We can choose goodness.
In The Animals of My Earth School, humans are capable of terrible things. We use violence to oppress each other, as in during dictatorship and war. In those times, “Blood flows in the rivers, valleys, and alleyways where the people once danced and made love.” In other poems in the collection, Barya reminds us that many of us are carnivores and use our power over other animals, as well. In “Ode to the Sheep,” the narrator is the slightly resistant recipient of a sacrifice on a celebration in honor of her 16th birthday. The narrator speaks as she watches the ritual killing:
The meat is great,
but that’s not what
this is about. We kill
for texture—
to feel the other
beneath our feet.
I watch my father
ramming fists into you,
membrane tearing,
pushing against your
skin, until you’re bare—
a glossy redness.
You’re the son sacrificed
for a daughter. I want
to say, Thank you.
But your blood
collecting into the pan
stops me. I’ll be sixteen,
is what I whisper
as I close your eyes.
You’re in me,
I’m in you.
The poem explores the strange emotional tightrope the narrator walks as an animal she feels compassion for—a sibling kinship with, even—is used for ritual and for meat. And in “The Meat-loving God.” Barya further examines the killing-nature of humans that is sometimes acted out in the name of a god:
In the end, I admit, the jealous hand
wields the knife and slices the throat.
Anger management is rarely taught.
At what point did we turn you into
a monster? All those animals murdered
for you—
And yet, we also have the capacity for compassion, for tenderness. In “Guilted Tenderness,” a farmer tries to save a calf who is not thriving:
Mother cow gives birth to a small baby.
A few hours later the calf struggles to stand.
Mother licks it clean and moves her teats
closer, but it’s ignorant of suckling.
A man in black work boots and faded blue
overalls brings a lump of moldy cheese,
perhaps to trigger its sense of smell
but the calf declines to eat.
The narrator of this poem has a “rush of compassion” even as in the last lines she reminds the reader that these cows are alive in service of humans, humans who drink cow’s milk.
Perhaps the most idyllic vision of human/nonhuman animal relations comes in a memory from the poet’s childhood, where the “valley is bursting with abundance—mangoes, avocados, oranges, and wild blackberries.” Barya shares the story of a child who loses a bull that belonged to a friend’s family. She had “glanced at the bull. Two white / egrets perched on its back catching insects, / the bull contentedly chewing cud” but the child dozes off in the elephant grass, and the bull slips away. The poem suggests no urgency to regain control of the bull. The narrator and a friend concoct a story about how the bull charged, so no one is at fault. The bull maintains his agency. The insects, the egrets, the bull, and the child are all living their lives, interconnected, and thriving.
Readers are offered an opportunity to reimagine a world that is not completely under the control of humans nor destroyed by greed and lack of restraint. The poems in The Animals of My Earth School offer an awareness of the possibility of a peaceful coexistence and of the wonder all around us. Ultimately, Mildred Kiconco Barya reminds us that:
Right now
someone somewhere
is dying. The earth itself is
unfinished. How then
to love this moment,
even this moment—
dare to celebrate it.
Heather Swan’s nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State University Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, will be published in spring 2024. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, The Hopper, Midwestern Gothic, and Cold Mountain, and in many anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and Dandelion (Terrapin Books, 2023). She is also a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinshenk Award, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, and an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison, Wisconsin.
Read three poems by Heather Swan appearing in Terrain.org.
Header image by Yumeee, courtesy Shutterstock.
