How Local Meets Global These Days
A Review of Zoo World
What is this world I live in? Who am I, living in this world? Among whom do I live? How should I live among them? None of these questions are explicitly formulated in Mary Quade’s essay collection Zoo World, but each arises in the experience of reading it. Zoo World is observant in both primary meanings of that word: in the sense of paying attention to the world around us, and in pursuing engagement rather than nominal affiliation.
Readers familiar with Quade’s two poetry collections, Guide to Native Beasts (2003) and Local Extinctions (2016), will not be surprised to experience a sense of wonder in Zoo World, prompted by a vast range of oddities: a leaning barn held up by a cable looped around the base of a steel basketball-hoop-holding pole; a foot-and-a-half-long pink rubber double-headed dildo found in her father-in-law’s bedroom after his death; Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island subspecies of Galápagos tortoise; fresh-grilled guinea pigs for sale in the market at Loja, Ecuador; hedgehog galls on oak leaves.
What mainly characterizes Zoo World, though, is not just these innumerable curiosities, but its inexhaustible curiosity. The things Quade notices are not collected, like relics in an antique store or stamps in an album, they are collated, seen in relation to one another, experienced as an interactive whole rather than in isolation. Zoo World is not an assortment; it is an arrangement. The insatiability of Quade’s curiosity allows Zoo World to ask, from a point of view no less wise than it is quirky, how the local and the global affect one another these days. Using the braided essay form, the first essay, “Hatch,” weaves together the three mallards nesting in Quade’s barn in rural northeastern Ohio with the Deepwater Horizon explosion that occurred during the same week when “the hens began sitting in earnest” (1). Despite discrepancies in location and scale (the speaker’s knowledge by acquaintance with the nests and knowledge by description of the oil spill), these seemingly far-fetched connections work because Quade lives in both worlds, the world with a mallard nesting next to the rototiller and the world with a four-story concrete “containment dome” that didn’t contain the leaking oil. The essay doesn’t try to tell the reader what to think, it just sees what is there, and comes to terms with it. The essay ends with the matter-of-fact lament of one who did what she could for an injured duckling for whom nothing could be done,
There’s no way to know an undamaged world. How many pelicans would live without oil spills? How long will reminders persist? There’s no way to calculate the span of damage for certain, only its magnitude and direction.
How many times can a thing reach the verge and return? How many times can I bear to watch? And must I? This duckling is the toughest duckling I’ve known. Yet I have other things to do — the usual messes to clean up. I leave the duck alone. Later, in the evening, fifty-seven hours after I found it alive, I find it again, a puff on the floor, finally dead (16).
This last paragraph shows the speaker at a loss, as she not only experiences the loss of the duckling but is also unable to prevent it from occurring.
The other essays in the collection also take advantage of braiding as a mode of inquiry: weaving views of “the big wide world” through the lens of the author’s immediate surroundings, views of “my little patch of ground” against the backdrop of global goings-on. As a way of thinking, Quade’s braiding is dynamic. On rare occasions, it produces encapsulated reflections, as when, in an essay that includes a bird stall in Hà Nội and mass incarcerations in the U.S., Quade pauses to say, “When you put something in a cage, it becomes your responsibility. The burden of being caged is on the caged. The burden of the cage is on you” (94). Being caged harms, physically and psychologically, the one who is caged; the act of caging harms, morally, the one who does the caging.
More often, Quade’s braiding finds ways to lend immediacy to the unimaginable, as when she puts numbers to the amount of garbage that an American adult her age has produced in a lifetime: “89,500 pounds of garbage thus far, or 1.4 humpback whales” (68). If I were choosing one passage to represent the whole of Zoo World, it would be this one, recounting an experience in Phnom Penh. In it, Quade is in the position that recurs throughout the book: she is an attentive observer, acutely attuned to what she sees but also fully cognizant that it has its own life and isn’t there only for her.
That morning, as my husband and I stood outside the walls of the Royal Palace on the stretch of Sothearos Boulevard closed to traffic, a child who couldn’t have been more than two appeared in the middle of the empty six-lane road. I don’t know where she came from. With hair cropped close, she wore only an oversized pink dress made for a much bigger child. She could’ve been a boy. I wasn’t sure. The pink dress was my only clue. Her shadow moved along the pavement, longer than she was tall. She had bare feet and placed them carefully, one in front of the other, on the white lines marking the lanes, following the line past us and to the barriers that held back morning traffic. There was no one else around…. I wasn’t sure what to do. The girl seemed to know where she was going, or at least know that she was following the white line. I spoke no Khmer and stood frozen, baffled. She reached the traffic barrier at the end of the block, turned left, rounded the corner, and disappeared behind the palace walls (125).
In this anecdote, as so often in Zoo World, the speaker is in more than one way “at a loss.” It is a way of being in a world incomprehensibly bigger than oneself, a way of being that is shaped by humility and generosity, a way of being that I for one find admirable and edifying.
