The seeing eye, the narrating I: Animals in Eben Venter’s Decima (2023)

Eben Venter’s 2023 novel, Decima, centres on the titular rhinoceros living in the Great Fish River Reserve, South Africa, under constant threat of poachers after her horn. Decima shares the narrative with human characters, some out to harm her (poachers, the rhinoceros-horn kingpin, practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine—TCM) and those willing to protect her (scientists intent on debunking the efficacy of TCM, conservationists working at the reserve). The novel’s remarkable quirk is that we are privy to Decima’s thoughts, feelings and her perceptions. The relationship between how animals look and how that looking is narrated, by both the narrator and the animals themselves, is the concern of this article. The various eyes that look within and look out of the text serve to validate the experiences of the beings who observe. This is especially true of the novel’s animals—Venter reminds us through their eyes, which the novel designates as indexes of life and power, that animals can look back, that what they perceive in the material world and internally with their mind’s eye is a story of which they are in full possession, but one we may never know completely.