168OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDWe often think of predation as the epitome of animality—ruthless,
thoughtless, and amoral—and this horrifies and fascinates us. Repre-
senting this moment instead as one of beauty and love can suggest a
celebration of the natural, of this fundamental aspect of the natural
world, in which all organisms survive by consuming others. Or it might
suggest the modernist idealization of hunting that I discussed in chap-
ter 2. To me it suggests something of the paradox of the speaking ani-
mal, that this most extreme form of anthropomorphism is both a desire
to bridge the gap between animal and human and an awareness that this
form of becoming animal is impossible and absurd. The poem thus con-
tains a pointed irony in the lioness taking the words from the speaker’s
throat and a broader satire of our desire to romanticize the animal.
The hybridity I have been exploring in this chapter hinges on the idea
that language is both a barrier in coming to know and represent the ani-
mal and poetry’s primary asset. A solution to this paradox is, as we have
seen, to create an explicitly artificial space, an imagined hybridity, where
common ground between human and animal might be explored. Giving
animals language, speaking as one of them, is one strategy. Rather than
having the animal be the speaker of the poem, however, Pattiann Rogers
imagines that an animal might be taught to speak in “Teaching a Sea
Turtle Suddenly Given the Power of Language, I Begin by Saying.” The
poem is in the second-person, a direct address to the unspecific sea
turtle, who is hybrid in understanding English and in being both
human (since we are the actual readers) and turtle (since readers are
asked to imagine themselves as turtle). The speaker’s intent is seem-
ingly benign, to give the turtle names for “everything you didn’t know
/ you knew before your voice.”^23 Each new word or phrase, the speaker
insists, is “bringing a salt-pulsing neuron simultaneously / into exis-
tence,” thus giving the turtle something substantial, new understand-
ing and a change in its brain. This will bring about the “creation of
yourself,” a new self-awareness, but also the creation of a new hybrid
creature, a talking turtle. So the turtle’s environment, “this green trans-
lucent continuance / through which you turn and function, rolling and
twisting /... is called “The Great Sea.” In the second stanza, the speaker
reveals that she is gently touching the turtle, “tracing all the boundaries