Torres was Right -- We are Animals

By:  Megan Grossi

On September 19^th, acclaimed author Justin Torres visited Salem State. Students of Professor Carey’s “Craft of Fiction” course and Professor Scrimgeour’s “Intro to College Writing” course were lucky enough to meet and speak with Torres personally during their class periods. He answered questions, listened to and critiqued students’ writing, and talked about his well-renowned book We the Animals. Later in the evening the public joined Torres in the Bertolon Recital Hall for a formal reading by the author. There, he shared a new piece of creative nonfiction with us, focused on a time in his life when he had to walk dogs just to make ends meet. After he finished his humorous story―he admitted to being jealous of a rich man’s dog, which lived so much better than he did, explaining that he once had to go out and buy the pet a real leather jacket.

We the Animals, published in 2011, is a beautiful coming-of-age story. However, it does not follow the path of a traditional bildungsroman. We the Animals follows the life of an unnamed narrator and his two older brothers, Manny and Joel. The Puerto Rican-American “mutts,” as their father calls them, grow up in incredibly poor conditions, hardly having enough to eat and having less than enough care from their parents. The narrator as the youngest member of the pack is the most impressionable, and we see him take in his world through developmental eyes: he watches the manic relationship of his parents go from intensely passionate to intensely aggressive and back; he watches his brothers act as deviants, skipping school and disrespecting adults; he watches a neighborhood friend tremble in fear before his father, only to defy his orders once he is gone. The real-life instances and problems we all experience are seen in awe through the eyes of an ignorant child.

Like a traditional coming-of-age story, we see how external influences shaped the narrator’s life. However, we only see his earliest years. Early in the novel he is identified as seven-years old, and a generous guess would be that he grows to about 11-years old, two thirds into the narrative. At that mark, he jumps years.

His age is purposefully ambiguous, but he is old enough to smoke, drink, swear, and have sex. We miss out on everything in between that time, and don’t know the steps that led him to where he is. The only influence that the audience sees is that of his family―a unit of three brothers, a sometimes-absent father, and a weak, scatter-brained mother. The only adult influence we see that “makes him,” as he calls it, is his first experience with a man. The passionate book follows the narrator’s battle to find his own place in a twisted world surrounded by twisted influences and forced to keep his family’s status quo or become an animal.

This is the shocking work that Justin Torres read for us. We the audience threw out requests for him; I wanted to hear my favorite chapter, “Ducks,” and I found that he read quite differently from the tone that I read the chapter. I had read it in a child’s tone. Torres read passionately, giving every word significance. And every word was significant. Torres read as the embodiment of a rule every English major has heard: Everything the author writes is important to the story. Every moment contributed to how the narrator grew up. Everything is important to a formative, moldable child.

So how does this apply to us now? What lesson can we take from Torres’s novel? On Thursday, October 5^th, Salem State held an event to help unify our campus community to discuss the offensive graffiti on the baseball field (it was not mandatory, but all classes during that time period had been cancelled). President John Keenan hopes to create a space where we can come together, express discomfort, and try to make sense of the hate invading our world/our campus right now. This event was also timely in light of the tragedy at Las Vegas. Our Salem State community as well as our national community is experiencing a lot of hate and disunity in a short period of time. And reflecting on it all, I find myself agreeing with Torres―we are all animals.

At the very end of his book (an emotional passage he did not read at his event but discussed), the narrator’s family discovers his personal notebook, wherein he describes graphic things he would like to do with other men as well as the deep hatred and disgust he has in his family. The anger, embarrassment, and fear take over him, and he lashes out violently at his own family, biting, punching, scratching, like a wild animal. He goes so mad that his family institutionalizes him and exiles him from his pack. He’s not like everybody else in his community, and so he must be fixed.

The difference is, in the story we know why he lashes out. We don’t know what inspires people to commit hate crimes. But whether it’s meant to be an aggressive act or an attempt at a crude prank, it affects us all.

Acts like the one that took place on our own campus turn us all into animals; we join together as a pack when predators spew prejudice and we stand up to it. Just as Torres and his narrator have had to stand up in the face of adversity, so should we stand together as a collective. If Torres’s narrator has taught us anything, it’s that nobody wants to be separate from their pack.