43 pages • 1 hour read
Aimee NezhukumatathilWorld of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Wonder for the Natural World
The title of World of Wonders reflects its primary goal: to examine, celebrate, and share a sense of wonder for the natural world. Nezhukumatathil achieves this goal both literally and stylistically—reflecting on stories of her own growth and development of wonder while describing the natural world with poetic reverence and eloquence.
Nezhukumatathil is a poet. Just as much as World of Wonders is about her and her stories, it is a display of vivid language and a compendium of unique natural phenomena. Every chapter contains a vivid description of its titular organism. The touch-me-not has “delightful pinnation, [a] double-leaf pattern feathering outward then inward from both sides of a single stem, and [...] spherical lavender-pink flowers” (25). The bird of paradise boasts “one of the showiest displays in the entire animal kingdom. Iridescent blue feathers on the superb’s head flash extra blue as they catch the sun, little eyes against the black oval of its nape” (134). For Nezhukumatathil, these descriptions aren’t just important, they’re the main event. She is concerned with sharing her sense of wonder, and she does this by indulging the reader with expressive, colorful descriptions of nature.
Unusual and superlative aspects of particular species also pique Nezhukumatathil’s interest, and she includes them to further convince readers of the wonders of nature. The corpse flower “has the largest inflorescence in the world, with its total height averaging eight to then feet tall” (69), red-spotted newts have impressive homing capabilities, and the southern cassowary has a keratin casque on its head that grows to “a whopping seven inches” (146). Nezhukumatathil includes measurements and facts because they are metaphorical devices in her stories, but also because they might spark wonder and curiosity for readers.
Crucial to Nezhukumatathil’s concept of wonder is that it can be shared and passed on over generations. This aspect explains the descriptive language and the book’s form as a collection of short, digestible essays. It is also a central theme in many chapters. In both “Firefly” and “Firefly (Redux),” the experience of gazing at fields of fireflies at night is shared by nuclear families, with Nezhukumatathil first as daughter, then mother. In “Comb Jelly,” she reflects on being “drawn to color—the hue and cry of joy” in part because of the glass bracelets her grandmother gave her (21). For Nezhukumatathil, wonder is passed down. She inherits her sense of wonder for nature from her grandmother and father and instills the same sense in her sons and students. “Monarch Butterfly” begins with an explanation of a strange phenomenon in which migrating butterflies make a sharp turn in the middle of a lake, where a long-since eroded mountain once stood. In Nezhukumatathil’s own life, wonder, love, and cultural memory are likewise passed between generations. While an experience of awe for the natural world may feel personal, it is also something to experience communally, bond over, and pass on to others.
Im)migration, Identity, and Belonging
Nezhukumatathil is the daughter of American immigrants. As a child, she often feels out of place and acutely aware of her skin color. Her family also “migrates” several times within the United States, and her sense of home is constantly in flux. Throughout grade school, Nezhukumatathil deals with her insecurity by hiding and blending in; later, she grows to accept and embrace her personality.
When she feels singled out as a child, Nezhukumatathil’s instinct is to hide or assimilate. When a classmate makes a racist comment about her mother on the bus, she wants to disappear and “dive deep, deep into the darkest of seas” (38). She refers to her junior year of high school as her “cephalopod year” because she was new at school and avoided as much interaction as she could, like a squid escaping a predator. “Vampire Squid” ends, however, with Nezhukumatathil making friends and beginning to write poetry, making it through the “darkest and loneliest year of [her] youth” (56). She sees Catalpa trees on campus in Mississippi but no longer feels the need to hide behind their leaves. In individual chapters and across World of Wonders, Nezhukumatathil learns to take pride in her wonder, curiosity, and love of bright colors.
Growing up, Nezhukumatathil never feels a strong sense of home. In Arizona, she envies the cactus wren’s security, while she herself has to move to Kansas and back. She reflects on her upbringing in “Potoo:” “Potoos are one of the few birds that never build a nest […] Like the potoo, I grew up wanting to blend in—in my case, with my blonde counterparts—and why would I know anything else?” (95). She spends a while in New York State starting her family but feels restless, likening her desire to move to the homing instincts of the red-spotted newt. Like Nezhukumatathil’s personal journey with confidence, the search for a home has a happy ending. Her parents retire to Florida and plant trees, and she starts a family and settles nearby in Mississippi, where she finally feels an instinctual sense of belonging: “I could feel a shift in my body the first day we opened the door and stepped foot in Oxford, like tiny magnets in me lined up and snapped to attention because I was finally where I needed to be” (143). Growing up for Nezhukumatathil is a story both of embracing her colorful personality and heritage and of finding and coming to terms with a landscape that she can fall in love with.
Precarity and Extinction
Many chapters in World of Wonders contain sober warnings about the precarious situation of endangered species. In stories about her life, Nezhukumatathil demonstrates and contemplates her fear of abduction and sudden, accidental death. Taken together, these recurring depictions of danger paint a picture of life, both human and ecological, as something precious and vulnerable, liable to be snuffed out at any moment.
Nezhukumatathil is particularly concerned with raising awareness about the impact of human activity on wildlife. The narwhal population is “classified as ‘almost threatened,’ because humans hunt them for their teeth and valuable fat supply” (38). Axolotls are no longer found in the wild. In “Dancing Frog,” the 14 new species of frog discovered are already classified as endangered due to record temperatures, deforestation, and pollution. Firefly populations are decreasing, and cassowaries are frequently killed in car accidents. Nezhukumatathil repeats and emphasizes these facts to drive home the scale and repercussions of human impact on the environment.
In several chapters, Nezhukumatathil fixates on a fear of kidnapping. In “Cactus Wren,” she recalls being taught to avoid strangers in school. She feels she has to be tough and careful, “ready for a fight in case we ever needed to stand and face a shadow lurking over us” (33). In “Flamingo” she likens young, college-age women going out at night to flamingos, vulnerable to abduction and violence. Finally, while swimming in an aquarium tank with the whale shark, she has a sudden fear of being eaten and leaving her son motherless, despite her knowledge that whale sharks only eat plankton. Her fears aren’t based on her experiences or statistics, but on the unknown. Rather than allow these fears to handicap her life, she incorporates them into an understanding of life’s precarity and learns to take nothing for granted. Nezhukumatathil’s fear of abduction can be understood as a metaphor for ecological extinction, and vice versa.
In a political sense, the depth of Nezhukumatathil’s wonder for the natural world is both a reaction and an answer to the urgency of the global climate crisis. She is upset that many of her students haven’t heard of fireflies not just because they are missing out on something beautiful, but also because their ignorance is a microcosm of the disregard for wildlife inherent in humankind’s accelerating destruction of the planet.
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By Aimee Nezhukumatathil
