Chickens eating duck: animal personhood and multicultural critique in Gerry Alanguilan’s graphic novel Elmer

ABSTRACT

This article explores the figuration of animal personhood in Gerry Alanguilan’s graphic novel Elmer, in which chickens suddenly become as intelligent as humans. Alanguilan breaks with the visual tradition of anthropomorphising talking animals, challenging readers to reconcile personhood with an animal body. However, the intelligent chickens in Elmer conform to a fundamentally human-centric model of personhood. The text’s argument for the reclassification of intelligent chickens as persons is grounded in an assumption of an underlying sameness between chickens and humans. This assumption gives rise to a problematic vision of animal personhood, which in turn suggests a minority critique of human multiculturalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Personhood
• multiculturalism
• animal personhood
• Filipino culture

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) for the opportunity to share an early version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See also Singer (1979, 75–6).

2. For discussion of animal personhood, see Singer (1979, 93–9). For a philosophical critique of the humanism that stands in the way of animal personhood, see Wolfe. For animal personhood in popular culture, see Horsman. For posthuman personhood, see Wennemann (2013, 24–31 and 40–58).

3. For more scholarship on the animal comic, see Brown, Cremins, and Gardner.

4. For a discussion of the significance of animal suffering, see Singer (1975, 8–18). He proposes:

If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being. (8).

5. For a discussion of the longstanding comparison between the killing of animals and the Holocaust, see MacDonald.

6. Elmer shares much common ground with Spiegelman’s Maus. In both texts, a son apprehends and reconstructs a violent period in history through his father’s memories. Moreover, in both texts, the choice of animals through which the victims of atrocity are represented are historically determined. Herman notes that by encoding Jews as mice Spiegelman engages received anti-Semitic ‘animal-to-human mappings’ (2012, 97 n. 4). Elmer’s treatment of intelligent chickens that find themselves reduced to the status of a consumable resource is eloquent of the Philippines’ long history of being a colonial possession. This colonial history has shaped the country’s widespread appetite for chicken; for example, the founder of Max’s Restaurant, a fast-casual chain of restaurants, began making fried chicken for American soldiers in Manila in 1945 (Raphael 2016). For a discussion of the visualisation of trauma in the graphic novel, see Romano-Jódar (2017, 20–7).

7. Singer admits that not every form of life is capable of suffering, and therefore killing such a life form is not ethically complicated. He writes:

…the problem of drawing the line is the problem of deciding when we are justified in assuming that a being is incapable of suffering. …I suggested two indicators of this capacity: the behavior of the being, whether it writhes, utters cries, attempts to escape from the source of pain…and the similarity of the nervous system of the being to our own. (1975, 176)

While we do not see the death of the duck that Jake’s family eats, we can assume that the nervous systems of chickens and ducks are similar.

8. For scholarship on multiculturalism and comics and graphic novels, see Aldama (2010) as well as Ayaka and Hague (2015).

9. See Derrida’s discussion of animals and the oppression inherent in being given a name (2008, 19–20).

10. Joseph’s resistance to a human-centric definition of personhood is the strongest postcolonial note sounded in Elmer. Further, when read in the context of the Filipino diaspora, Alanguilan’s choice of chickens as the species whose personhood is contested is telling. For example, in Hawaiian pidgin, a ‘bokbok’ or ‘bukbuk’ – a term meant to reproduce the clucking of a chicken – signifies an unassimilated Filipino. The term can be pejorative, but it also connotes an inordinate pride in Filipino identity. See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=buk-buk.

11. For discussions of the relationship between racism and speciesism, see Ahuja (2014), Cavalieri (2001, 142–42), Kim, (2015, 31–60), MacDonald, and Yancy and Singer (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucas Tromly

Lucas Tromly is an associate professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He teaches American literature, Modernism, and Asian-American literature. He has published on William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, the American captivity narrative, and on contemporary Asian-American literature.