Mythology stitches fascinating patterns into the tapestry of human experience. Every culture and generation has its own set of myths—sacred, secular, fictional, factual, about humankind, animals, nature—and despite how transcultural, translingual, and transtemporal these myths are, they have a universal appeal. It would be a Sisyphean task to try to explain the many functions for the creation and reinvention of myths; however, a good place to start is the role of mythology in shaping and explaining the unknown. In “Myth and Fable: Their Place in Poetry,” Carl Phillips writes that a myth is “a verbal mapping out of what is known but not understood–or wasn’t understood, anyway, at the time of the myth’s origin” (7). Phillips lists several phenomena that have been “explained” in mythology, such as drought, incest, sudden rage, why the Nile flows upward, and death. Myths also do not come down to us in pure form, rather, each retelling is shaped through the lens of our own experience and in this sense, we inherit and invent a revised version of a myth, which Phillips explains as “a simultaneous keeping alive and pushing forward of an inherited tradition of what is to be human” (11). Just like mythology, poetry also creates a story to attempt to explain a human experience.
Donika Kelly’s poetry collection, Bestiary, presents readers with a catalogue of animals, beasts, and other mythological creatures, such as the chimera, whale, centaur, and siren. When I first encountered this collection, I knew nothing about Kelly, her work, or her proximity to me (we are on the same campus!) and though I do enjoy reading and writing poetry, it was the cover art alone that intrigued me: a folio from the thirteenth-century, Northumberland Bestiary depicting Adam naming the animals. Except in this version, Adam is not pictured. After looking at the digitized manuscript on the Getty Museum’s website, I realized that the title of the collection and name of the author supplants his figure. Fittingly, it is Kelly who names and invokes these creatures, not Adam. Even more interesting, as I read the collection, I realized that Kelly was not only cataloging these mythological beasts but cataloging, evoking, and working through trauma.
Unleashing the Beasts: The Medieval and Modern Bestiary Genre
Apart from the Northumberland Bestiary image that is pictured on the cover, it is unclear what kind of research, if any, Kelly conducted for her own catalogue of beasts. This is not to say that you need to delve into the archives to write a collection of poetry like this one, but how Kelly does or does not maintain the bestiary tradition is worth unraveling. Kelly mentions that her knowledge about Greek mythology does not derive from Ovid or Homer, but rather, D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, which she remembers reading when she was in eighth grade (Pratt Writer’s Forum). While looking back at her childhood and her trauma, it made sense to scaffold these memories onto Greek myth, especially onto mythological creatures that had been previously used to explain what the Greeks could not understand. It is important to note that medieval bestiaries also mined Greek sources to compile their own catalogs of beasts.
The medieval bestiary was popular during twelfth and thirteenth century England and was considered a collected anthology of older sources—classical, secular, and Christian— that detailed the characteristics and behavior of different kinds of animals. The primary function of this genre was to provide moral instruction for its audience, usually monks and sermon attendees. The animals, beasts, and monstrous races presented in these catalogues were embedded with allegorical meaning and passages from Scripture, which attempted to explain (and warn against) beastly behavior in humans, such as pride and lust. Most, if not all medieval bestiaries, extracted their material from the second century (CE) Greek text, Physiologus, and Isidore of Seville’s seventh century (CE) Latin text, Etymologiae. Because the Physiologus contains an assortment of animals, vegetables, minerals, humans, and mythical creatures, it is considered less a book of beasts, and more a “Book of Nature” that is shaped through a Christian lens (Morrison 33). The structure of Etymologiae also influenced the medieval bestiary tradition: “the name or etymology of the animal in question is described in relation to its natural habits or characteristics, and then other information about the creature is presented in an encyclopedic, nonmoralized manner” (Hassig 6). The function of the bestiary, however, changed with each new readership. More women were able to join cloisters in the thirteenth century, and Hassig suspects that a plausible explanation for the increase of female representation in bestiaries, both as creatures and as human characters in scene depictions (for example, a woman milking a cow), is because of a growing female readership. Bestiaries also bear witness to the political tension and intolerance of the medieval period, Elizabeth Morrison asserts that “anti-Semitism, xenophobia, misogyny, classicism are expressed as implicit biases throughout the bestiary, although more often in its text than in its imagery (visible examples would include the darkened facial type given to a man attacking the noble unicorn. . .)” (11). Therefore, the images and text in bestiaries can reveal much about mythical creatures and the culture that ascribes its human qualities onto them.
Before Bestiary hunted me down, I had not realized how pervasive the legacy of bestiaries was until I started my research. Though the genre is medieval in origin, the term “bestiary” is now widely applied to any collection of animals, textual or visual, with or without allegorical or Christian meaning. The revival of the modern bestiary occurred in the beginning of the twentieth century and many artists introduced “elements from their own time, place, and visual environment” to this genre (Grollemond 283). In the Middle Ages, allegorical and spiritual meaning was linked to particular animals, for example, the resurrection of the phoenix was associated with the resurrection of Christ thus, this creature was good. The idea that animals are good or evil in nature also occurs in Claire Owen’s 1987 printed book, Seven Gods, Seven Demons: Bestiary. In the etching and catalogue entry, the bear reminds the reader of a pre and post-Edenic time, where there were no names, no single faith, no good or evil, nor any hierarchies between animals and humans. This representation not only raises the question of humanity’s relationship to nature, but how spirituality, in turn, changed our relationship to the world. Some copies of medieval bestiaries, like the MS Harley 4751 at the Bodleian Library, placed the scene of Adam naming the animals at the beginning of the bestiary. The placement of this scene is similar to that of the Bible (and Kelly’s cover art for the collection). Sarah Kay explains that the Adam/naming motif “provides a theoretical endpoint for etymological inquiry, as if the names of creatures could be traced back to before the fall, to the first ever instance of human speech” (478). Owen’s adaptation, on the other hand, departs from this medieval bestiary motif by offering a critique of the naming process and the adoption of a Christian geography through the voice of a bear.
Anthropomorphization is also a common theme in both modern and medieval bestiaries, where animals are ascribed human virtues and vices. Humans tend to see themselves as animals, or even, see other humans as animals, which is the case for sculptor Kate Clark and her collection of taxidermied hybrid creatures. In the work entitled Pray, an antelope with the face of a young Black girl is enclosed in a glass box. Not only does this work invite us to consider how the fusion of the animal and the human presents “characteristics that unite disparate animal kingdoms,” but makes the dehumanization of Black bodies more visible (Grollemond 287). Like these two visual examples, Kelly also considers what it means to be a person in her exploration of beasts.
One of the major questions that Kelly sifts through in her collection is what does it mean to be human or, in her own terms, “how do I see myself in the world when I’ve been told through these narratives that I don’t matter, that I’m not completely human?” (PBS NewsHour). Unable to find a narrative that accommodates her hybrid identity and experiences as a Black, queer, working-class, woman, Kelly turned toward the figures and narratives of mythical creatures. On this unique appropriation, poet Nikki Finney remarks,
there are hundreds of years of unreliable others imagining and appropriating the desires of Black girls, eschewing their hopes and dreams as poets and people, their birth-marked stories, their personal migrations. . .[those] have never had anything to do with Black girls and whales, Black girls and riots, Black girls and minotaurs, centaurs, satyrs, mermaids…” (xi). As Finney suggests, Kelly’s appropriation paves the way for a Black girl mythology. Using mythological beasts to ponder humanity is an old tradition, however, Kelly leaves us with a new poetic report that uses these beasts to write about and work through personal trauma.
(Dis)Located Trauma: Beast and Image
Kelly begins her catalogue of beasts out west, in the Los Angeles of her past, with a cluster of poems about childhood. These three consecutive poems offer the reader three different flashbacks and manifestations of the same trauma, namely, the sexual abuse of the father. In the context of cinema, Roger Luckhurst defines the flashback as “an intrusive, anachronic image that throws off the linear temporality of the story. . .[a] brutal splicing of temporally disadjusted images is the cinema’s rendition of the frozen moment of the traumatic impact” (Luckhurst 180). I would argue that the images that Kelly conjures in the shaping of this traumatic experience also imitates the intrusive and disorientating images presented to viewers throughout cinematic narratives, where meaning cannot be made until all the fragmented parts are connected by the spectator or reader. Indeed, this flashback and trauma shifts shape throughout the cluster of poems: first, the sexual abuse is referenced in passing, second, it is described in more concrete terms, an excavation process where the self is removed to make space for the intruder, and third, to understand this forced entry and their inborn relationship, Kelly evokes the first mythical beast in the collection: the chimera.
In the poem titled “Fourth Grade Autobiography,” the speaker introduces us to their family, the “we,” beginning with “We live in Los Angeles, California, / We have a front and a backyard,” and then introduces the “I,” who likes cartwheels, salted plums, and playing catch with her dad (Kelly 8). These pronouns are used interchangeably as we learn more details about the speaker and their family, but the middle of the poem focuses on the individual speaker, they write:
. . . I am afraid
of riots and falling and the dark.
The sunset of flames ringing our block,
groceries and Asian-owned storefronts. No one
to catch me. Midnight walks from his room to mine.
I believe in the devil” (Kelly 8).
In this group of lines, the sexual abuse is made known albeit in passing with the line “Midnight walks from his room to mine.” It is also worth mentioning that the speaker places this traumatic event within an even larger one: the 1992 LA Riots. Like the sexual abuse, the racial trauma from the recorded beating of Rodney King, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and the violence that erupted between the Black and Korean community in Los Angeles is also spoken in passing and not referenced again in any other poem. However, it is reasonable to suspect that like the violation to her body at the hands of the father, the speaker does not yet understand the larger violence inflicted on other Black bodies. In this passage, the speaker expresses fear of the flames and the father, both close in proximity on the page and at the time, to the speaker. In the following poem, one of the fears manifests.
The flashback in “Where she is opened. Where she is closed.” makes the sexual trauma visible. The speaker describes being opened: her chest separated, her ribs broken, her organs scooped out, her body hollowed, so that he can climb inside her. The protest is silent,
But she is not ready for the dry bulk
of his body curled inside her own.
She is not ready to exhale
his breath, cannot bear both him and herself,
but he says, Carry me. . .He is the heart now,
the lungs and stomach she cannot live without (Kelly 9).
The trauma here is altered—it is not just something spoken in passing, rather, it inhabits the speaker. The breach is made clear through the reimagining of this forced entry as a violent excavation of the self. In the passage above, we see that the familial boundaries between the speaker and the father have collapsed, but despite this, the daughter remains motionless, stuck in filial responsibility. She is silent and when he demands to be carried, she carries him. This shows that the speaker does not understand why these boundaries were breached, and continues to try to maintain them by carrying the weight of his choice and of their collectivity, the “we.”
Although this poem does not explicitly identify the male subject as the father, this flashback can be informed by other poems in the collection, further reinforcing how Bestiary presents fractured memories to be pieced together by the reader. In “Handsome Is,” the speaker describes a dream where the father hides “inside another man’s body.” Though he changes shape, she recognizes him by his hands.. In this dream, she builds a room to hold him, but “he picks all the locks” (Kelly 19) and the traumatic event repeats. This dream shows how the trauma in the poem “Where she is opened…” haunts the speaker. This breach also animates the evocation of the mythical chimera.
To know and see the speaker’s sexual trauma in these poems is one thing, but to try to understand it, is another story. For Kelly, that other story is the myth of the chimera. The chimera is a monstrous, fantastical hybrid that blurs the boundaries between human, animal, and divine. In Greek mythology, Chimera is the daughter of Echidna, a half-serpent, half-woman, and Typhon, a serpentine giant, who is often depicted as a half-man too. These parents are fruitful in producing monsters, for example, Orthrus (a multi-headed dog), Colchian (a hundred-headed dragon), and the Sphinx. Despite her serpentine-human parents, Chimera is an amalgamation of three different animals: she has the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. In the abbreviated version of this myth, Chimera terrorizes the Lycian countryside vomiting fire from her three different mouths. The son of Poseidon, Bellerophon, along with the help of the Pegasus and goddess Athena, kill Chimera. Like most Greek myths, the story of Chimera has been appropriated many times over for different purposes. For example, the word “chimeric” is now used to describe any hybrid creature like harpies, sirens, and griffons. Even more compelling is the chimera and its union to the fields of embryology, medical transplants, and technology assisted reproduction, where it functions as a hybrid organism with two different sets of DNA. Roberto Marchesini explains the importance of this latter chimera, asserting, “The production of chimeras is concerned with indexing the vast typological family of the catalogue, creating new medicines, constructing new machines, amplifying the territory of the human invasion, satisfying the protein hunger of 7 billion people, and offering new explanations for old questions”(108). Although I could not find Chimera in any medieval bestiary (this might be a point of further study), the Chimera di Arezzo (pictured below) seems to be the image closest to Kelly’s own description.
The spliced image of the chimera into the speaker’s narrative of sexual trauma, I would argue, is a means to continue shaping and narrativizing the traumatic event by dislocating and scaffolding that trauma onto the image of a mythological beast. The image of the chimera follows the poem “Where she is opened. Where she is closed.,” and its description of the abuse; however, trauma functions differently in this third poem. Rather than try to reproduce the experience of this traumatic event as it is (to some extent) in the previous poem, “Love Poem: Chimera” presents a dilemma: How do you navigate a familial relationship after the boundaries have been breached? The poem begins:
I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought
myself body enough for two, for we.
Found comfort in never being lonely.
What burst from by back, from my bones, what lived
along the ridge from crown to crown, from mane
to forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamor
we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble
at the splitting, at the horned and beard,
at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back.
What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie
are we. What we’ve made ourselves (Kelly 10).
The “we” in this poem is not the collective introduced to us in “Fourth Grade Autobiography,” that is, the speaker, mother, father, and two siblings. In their review of the collection, Xandra Phillips suggests, “Kelly positions the self as plural, while scripting agency onto creation. . .The chimera resides at the intersections between human and animal, between myth and matter. It builds itself in reference to the wilderness in and outside of itself. The spiritual possibility begged: if the self is multiple and wild, what strange, wonderful, romance can self-love breed?” (wildness). Though an interesting interpretation of the pronoun usage, in fact, I had not considered this poem as emphasizing self-love, I do think the “we” here is informed by the collective “we” of the previous poem, “Where she is opened…,” and I would argue that the “we” is that of the speaker, the intruder, and the trauma that now inhabits her.
In this rendition of the chimera, Kelly changes the shape of the beast—at first, it is a hybrid lion and serpent. These first three lines suggest that the speaker tried to reconcile with the breaching and the carrying of the two bodies, finding “comfort in never being lonely;” however, her shape is altered again when she gives birth to a goat head. I would like to suggest that the appearance of the goat head represents the inherent latency of the traumatic event. In her description of latency in post-traumatic stress disorder, Cathy Caruth explains, “The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4-5). In the first three lines of the poem, the speaker represses and conceals her abuse to maintain the filial bond, and like the flashback, we are offered a moment of suspension here. This suspension and latency period does not last though. The goat head must emerge.
In her use of the chimera to show how sexual trauma altered her, Kelly also reshapes the Greek myth. As mentioned previously, the chimera in the poem consists of two parts: the lion and serpent. From this unlikely union, the lion and serpent, the daughter and father, another beast emerges—the goat. Like the speaker, the chimera too is altered by its circumstances and only becomes its full beastly form when it cannot contain the two extant creatures. The birthing of the goat is just as violent as the scene where the body is broken, scraped, hollowed and inhabited. Thus, the birth is also a breach. The speaker describes the goat head as bursting from her back, eliciting a “clamor,” “hiss,” and “rumble,” an event which demands to be heard (Kelly 10). These two scenes, namely, the bodily transformation in the excavation scene and the chimeric transmutation, read together show how a subject shifts shape upon experiencing a traumatic event. For the speaker, the trauma is the sexual abuse, the goat head that emerges and binds both the lion and serpent, daughter and father; for the chimera, it is the realization that it does not have enough body for two, let alone, a third beast. In this rendition, the chimera and its beastly form is not a product of its divine, human, and animal parentage as suggested by the Greek myth. Indeed, it has no origin but is shaped and made beastly through experience. Most importantly, in seeing herself, her father, and her trauma as a chimera, as a “menagerie,” it shows how Kelly considered the question of the collective: what does it mean to contain this trauma? To belong to this “we”? The chimera, thus, embodies the speaker’s post-traumatic metamorphosis.
***
It takes courage to look back at the many rooms of memory and evoke the mythical creatures in bestiaries. It is unclear whether the speaker was able to understand their father’s abuse by projecting it onto Greek myths, but what is understood is that in the process of healing, the telling of the story changes its shape. Kelly’s collection not only reconfigures the medieval bestiary genre, but also paves a new path for how to write, visualize, and confront trauma. This collection was an act of self-exploration written during various therapy sessions (in fact, Kelly dedicates this collection to her therapists), however, as in the tradition of medieval bestiaries as pedagogical tools, I too, learned much from Kelly’s beasts. The various transformations in the collection show trauma’s impact on the body and self, how the “I” is subsumed by a “we” both in moments of violence, like the sexual abuse, and moments of comfort, where the whale and woman can provide empathy for one another. It also shows how trauma is circular: it comes back in disguise and demands to be recognized. To continue to open and close the door for these beasts, these traumas, is an act of survival and reclamation—the “I” had always been present.
Works Cited
Book of Beasts: A facsimile of MS Bodley 764. Bodleian Library, 2008.
Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The John Hopkins University Press, 1995. 3-12.
Chimera di Arezzo, c. 400 B.C.E., bronze. Florence: Museo Archeologico Nazionale.
Clark, Kate. Pray. 2012. Antelope hides, horns, foam, clay, pins, thread, rubber eyes. Palm Springs: Collection of Jerry Slipman and Chet Robachinski.
Finney, Nikky. “A Conversation Between Nikky Finney and Donika Kelly.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 14 November 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/conversation-nikky-finney-donika-kelly/
“Donika Kelly: Influence of Mythology.” YouTube, uploaded by Pratt Writer’s Forum, 8 April 2018, https://youtu.be/YGSPjK_CzIM
Hassig, Debra. Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Kelly, Donika. Bestiary. Graywolf Press, 2016.
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008.
Marchesini, Roberto. “POSTMODERN CHIMERAS,” Angelaki (2016) 21:1. 95-109. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1163829
Morrison, Elizabeth and Grollemond, Larisa. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019.
Owens, Claire. Seven Gods, Seven Demons: Bestiary. 1987. Gouche on watercolor paper. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute.
Phillips, Carl. “Myth and Fable: Their Place in Poetry.” Coin of the Realm. Graywolf Press, 2004.
Phillips, Xandria. “Bestiary by Donika Kelly.” Wildness: Platypus Press https://readwildness.com/reviews/bestiary
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