Who Are You, Chicken? Am I Seeing You?

In many ways chickens aren’t terribly different from us. They’re brave, not “chicken,” fierce in defense of their chicks. They’re gregarious and social, inventive. They have all sorts of individual personalities. Chickens were evolving long before we were. Their ancestor, the Gallus, ran though the forests of South-East Asia for 50 million years. They slept in trees, climbing the bark. They passed their wisdom on through the generations. When the glaciers divided them, new species formed. Civilizations of chickens rose and fell. Even today in their stunted, destroyed communities, they have 30 categories of conversation. They have close friendships, creative games, a culture of rituals. They teach their children. Hens sing to their eggs and the embryos twitter back through their shells.

(I think of our own early human iterations, our lost selves as nomadic tribes crossing fields and forests, now living in cages of concrete, rebar, and plastic, crumbling governance, touch-screens, in a vast warming pot.)

[---]

I wanted to write Bwwaauk so that she was very much a chicken, but I didn’t want her to represent all chickens. I wanted her to be entirely her own character, her unique self. I wrote and wrote, groping through this forest, but in the final analysis, at the core of Bwwaauk was a mystery. I didn’t know if I was getting at chicken-ness.

[---]

It’s a modernist question. How can I see a thing for what it really is with this human veil over my face? Maybe we can see only in terms of human narcissism.

Well, I am old-fashioned. I want to remove the veil. I want to pull off chains, emerge from Plato’s Cave, wince and blink in the light. I want to see the thing separate from myself and my use of it. I believe that in the effort lies true empathy—and we are so bad at empathy, however much we talk about it these days.

This is what drove me: If I can see this one thing, this humble hen, just for a moment, maybe I could see more, maybe I could see the web that connects us (and maybe I will try harder not to rip it to shreds?).

And if I can’t see the hen? Maybe I can at least see that I don’t see. Maybe I can sit and look at what I don’t understand and yet share so much with.

(Where are my loyalties? With humans or with the universe? With knowing or not-knowing?)

I wrote it all into the book, the knowing, the not-knowing.

- That beauty is from Deb Olin Unferth author of the new book Barn 8: A Novel