Pet

Angels and monsters are central to Pet; they literalize Emezi’s critique of binaries and exploration of appearance and reality. After the revolution, “angel” and “monster” become labels that the people of Lucille use as placeholders for all things good and evil, erasing moral nuance and their awareness of what evil truly looks like. What replaces this knowledge are stereotypes that rewrite history and place angels and monsters on a binary, with one side being wholly good, and the other being wholly evil. Jam asks, “Angels had to be innocent, right? Wasn’t that the whole point of them, to be good and innocent and righteous?” (18). Jam’s mindset at the beginning of the novel epitomizes this understanding of what angels and monsters symbolize to the people of Lucille. Without the specifics of the revolution and its history, Jam does not know that angels and monsters are both capable of good and bad things. Over the course of the novel, Jam learns that angels and monsters symbolize regular people who are capable of both good and bath things, but who choose one over the other. Jam is initially unable to understand how angels could do terrible things, but when Pet appears and they begin the hunt, she soon realizes what her mother meant. Emezi writes, “Jam thought about how Bitter had said the angels had to do dark things […] Was this what it had felt like for them? To go against what you usually believed, to betray yourself and the people you loved in small pieces?” (133). Despite these difficult things that Jam must do, what she accomplishes in the end—saving Moss, supporting Redemption, and convincing Pet to spare Hibiscus—all help Lucille learn from its mistakes. Jam’s actions and choices directly lead to the future protection of other children and vulnerable people.

Pet, even as a complicated angel, attempts to deny a similar complexity to monsters. Pet repeatedly tries to convince Jam that “A monster is a monster. A hunt is a hunt. It is simple that way” when Jam wonders, “Were there levels of monsters? Were some worse than others? Was that even the kind of thing you could measure?” (116). Both simple and impossible to explain, monsters and angels are symbols in Pet that change in their meaning from moment to moment, context to context. They can represent people who are capable of good and evil deeds, the very core of good and evil, and supernatural beings. The different meanings that angels and monsters can take on speak to Emezi’s main point: these words and names can mean anything to anyone. The definitions of these terms can change, and it is thus vital that history and events of the past are not erased and replaced by oversimplified terms.