Letting Go of Belonging: Reorienting the Human in Akwaeke Emezi's Pet

Abstract: Akwaeke Emezi's young adult novel Pet , a finalist for the National Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award in 2019, was one of the first novels published by Christopher Myers's new imprint with Random House, Make Me a World. The novel can be read in relation to larger theoretical questions about the radical potential of art and literary representation to resist the existing cultural logics of oppression. My analysis overlaps categories of age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability because of the myriad of ways they rely on one another for coherence and definition as difference. I show how the novel Pet reconceives difference itself, portraying the ordinariness of variation instead, and unravels the logics of antiblackness through the character of Pet. I argue that Emezi's novel—and the multiplicity of modes of beingness it represents—is not a bid for inclusion in Western conceptions of the human; it is a reorientation.