Marginal Voices: Ying Chen’s Ecocritical Discourse in Ahimsa

Through the conceit of reincarnation, Ying Chen reprises the narrative representation of animals in Ahimsa (2023), giving voice to a rat, fly and snake. She reveals their mutual connection with “le Maître” in their past life, an enlightened being who is revealed to be Mahatma Gandhi and who lived and preached according to “ahimsa”, the principle of pacificism, compassion and respect for all living things. The individual stories of the creatures’ respective relationships with “le Maître” are interspersed with his teachings of non-violence and cooperation alongside an ecocritical discourse on urban expansion, environmental damage, climate change and the disappearance of species. From the movement between past and present, human and animal, fact and fiction, the importance of margins emerges. The translingual author chooses maligned creatures that are rarely attributed literary agency to be at the heart of her narrative and to represent marginalized people – those who are infirm, or failures and misfits, or from an inferior caste. The first section of the article interrogates this employment of individual animal narrators and examines how the forms, existences and lifeworlds of these creatures are presented, as well as their relationship to humanity. It takes into account recent theories about unnatural narration and current ecocriticism in China, particularly the branch of “spiritual ecology” and the practice of “environing at the margins”. The second section examines Chen’s ecocritical discourse expressed by collective voices and the politics and aesthetics of what/who is included and excluded. After exploring the environmental issues depicted, it investigates how nonhuman subjects are taken into ethical consideration. By coupling unnatural narratology with ecocriticism, this article not only analyses a very recent work of animal narrative fiction in francophone Canadian literature from a perspective on the margins, but also reappraises what we know, or assume, in the West about human-animal relations.