Animacy in Ifeanyichukwu Eze’s “You Are One of Them”
The story's muddling of animacy further heightens the intensity of the violent final scene.
The short story “You Are One of Them” by Ifeanyichukwu Eze unfolds during a single morning. That initially quiet morning culminates in an attack by bandits on a Nigerian community. Most of the story is told in first-person present tense from the point of view of the protagonist, an adolescent student, in scenes with her mother and father. The perspective of the opening paragraph of the story, however, uses a wider lens. The story opens: “Everyone here is new.” The narrator counts herself among “everyone” and uses a broad first-person plural in the sentences that follow, repeating the subject “Some of us…”.
In addition to this this initial blurring of singular and plural, melding of the binary of animacy also happens. Similar to the way Zumas uses muddled animacy in her novel The Listeners to reveal her protagonist’s troubled inner world, this story leverages the interplay of animacy and inanimacy to create a sense of vulnerability and chaos.
In a previous post, I examined animacy as exploited in the incantation of one of the witches in Macbeth. As briefly described there, animacy is a feature of nouns that are living or sentient. Some languages make multiple (grammatically significant) distinctions according to a gradient hierarchy. For English, the simple relevant scale is:
human > animate > inanimate
We are familiar with the boundary of animacy being transgressed by authors and poets when they use the device of personification. In this story, which builds to a violent scene, death weaves through the fabric of the narrative to remind the reader of the fragility of life.
In linguistics, animacy is usually represented as a binary feature of nouns, [+/- animate]. Some verbs and adjectives impose animacy restrictions, positive or negative, on the noun within their phrase. For example, injured only modifies a noun that is [+animate], e.g. driver, politician, hamster, but not *car, *faucet, *book. Similarly, broken will modify a noun that is [-animate], e.g. candlestick, bus, mirror, but not *aunt, *baby, *camel. Sometimes, such phrases (*injured faucet, *broken camel, etc.) fail because there is no context to help the reader make sense of the disagreement about animacy status. Sometimes words can switch value in a figurative sense (as with objectification in the phrases “broken person” or “broken spirit”). However, the examples here reach beyond everyday figures of speech.
I use the phrase “animacy muddling” in cases where expectations around animacy conflict and yet that disagreement does not render the phrase infelicitous. When an author muddles animacy with skill (even if unintentionally), the impact reveals an intriguing spectrum for the reader and raises questions of the role of animacy in the story.
In the initial paragraph of “You Are One of Them,” the short story establishes a muddling of animacy that further heightens the intensity of the violence to come. In the opening section, different city wards are described, each with a single, distinguishing image:
Examples where [-animate] → [+animate]
Some of us are from Unguwan Gobe Da Nisa where peace lives in graveyards.
Some of us are from Unguwan Wakoki where the only road to the city has belched a forest.
Some of us are from Unguwan Guza where the river loves our houses more than its banks.
Some of us are from Unguwan Sai Ka Dage where the sun fries our bodies as though our humanity was an irritant.
The verbs in italics are normally used with animate agent subjects: to live, to belch, to love, to fry. Inanimate “peace” is said to “live,” violating the expectation that the subject of live be animate. (That peace is said to do so in graveyards, where animate things are taken when they are no longer animate, is ironic.) The verb “belch” also typically takes a subject that is animate, leading to personification of the road. In the next example, the verb “loves” takes a subject that is capable of emoting, thus personifying the river. The final example may be open to interpretation. However, the word “irritant” intrigues me in this context. Whereas the idea of the sun “frying” people figuratively is not new, the addition of a motive – that the residents’ humanity was irritating to the sun – underscores the conveyed agency, not to mention the animacy, of the sun.
As with the Zumas novel, the story involves the full spectrum of animacy, not simple personification. Although Eze uses personification more often than objectification to achieve the muddling in the opening paragraph, this example from the same paragraph shows that the flipping of animacy goes in both directions:
Example where [-animate] → [+animate] and then [+ animate] → [- animate]
Some of us are from Unguwan Karatu where our schools bask under Dogon Yaro trees and our teachers are leaves falling off.
Here we have another example of animacy conferred on inanimate objects, schools, which “bask.” However, in the same sentence, teachers are equated with inanimate leaves that are falling off trees. Animacy shifts in both directions within this single sentence.
This personification-rich opening stands in opposition to the story’s penultimate paragraph, which offers several examples of objectification. That paragraph uses a long run-on sentence full of images that blur animacy to illustrate the agony and extreme violence of the bandits’ attack.
More Examples where [+animate] → [-animate]
…the scatterings of booms and bangs and bodies like morsels of a rushed meal…
…the whine of missing children, families, my classmates who are now poems of names…
…the men who come to chew our bodies with machetes…
In this paragraph where a cold tone delivers these devastating images, emphasis falls now on the lack of animacy where we would otherwise expect it. “Bodies” in the first example have presumably transformed from “people” in the bloody act of their scattering; their inanimacy is underscored by the comparison to “morsels of a rushed meal,” mere food. “Classmates” are reduced to inanimate “poems” of names; and “bodies” again, this time as a substance being “chewed,” reduced from human to food once more—food, in this case, for machetes. The pronoun “our” in this phrase also calls back to the collective “some of us” repeated in the opening paragraph.
Animacy in this story is best viewed as a point on a spectrum rather than as something merely present or absent. The careful muddling of the reader’s expectations of animacy and inanimacy compounds the emotional impact of the violent bandits’ attack in the final scene. Demanding fluidity of animacy, the author explores community, terrorizing aggression, and death. Recognizing animacy as a spectrum rather than as a quality with an on/off switch leads to deeper understanding of this lyric story, and may also lead to clarification of other literary examples that extract degrees of animacy, or to inspiration for writers to mindfully muddle it for our own artistic ends.