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Book Review: Only a Little While Here by María Ospina

A masterpiece of ecological fiction and an award-winning novel that gives a powerful voice to the sensitive and resilient animals of the Americas. We enter the minds of both domesticated and wild animals and discover a human world in desperate need of change.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Ecological fiction, animal rights, stories from the perpsective of non-human beings

Publisher: Scribner

Review in one word: Masterpiece

María Ospina Pizano’s novel Only a Little While Here was originally published in Spanish as Solo un poco aqui. It is a stunning work of fiction that centres non-human beings as the protagonists of their stories in amongst a ferocious human world that is rapidly unravelled due to climate change, deforestation, human overpopulation. The novel takes the form of several short but evocative stories told from the perspective of a stray dog in Colombia. Along with a migratory scarlet tanager who attempts a brave and perilous journey from North America to central American breeding grounds. A lone beetle who is transported far on the leaf of a Swiss Chard into a human kitchen. And finally an orphaned porcupine who is saved from cruelty by a human.

At the centre of this narrative is how vulnerable, resilient and keenly intelligent each animal is in navigating their world. This book is a masterpiece that observes and understands animals with the kind of acute sensitivity and attention to detail that other writer’s couldn’t match.

“There is no way to know how he manages to cross the water without stopping. Or the substance of the impulse that hurls him through its vapors. What power has convinced him he can survive on the energy provided by insects and berries? What zeal in his wings tells him the enormous pit over which he flies for days and nights isn’t the end of every world but rather a murmur announcing new flora? Where does the flame in his belly come from that assures him he can face any storm? These are days of furtive propulsion. Stellar and magnetic. Who knows—this we will never know—whether they are happy days.

He flies over the coast guard and other hulking ships that defend fantasies of dominating the waters. Who knows if he notices them from up high, as they flicker with an orphan glow that tries to distract him from the stars. He stops during the day with thousands more in a forest in the Cayman Islands, taking shelter from a storm that nearly broke while he was airborne.

As the sun begins to set, he escapes the lurking peregrine falcon that swallows a hutia on the same branch of the copperwood where he is perched. Perhaps relief floods his chest when he alights on another tree. He shits. Before nightfall, he eats a dragonfly, three beetles, and numerous ants.

When he recovers his course across the open sea, he passes above a fugitive crocodile swimming north in search of an island. Neither one will see the other, of course, busy as they are scanning opposite horizons from air and water.

No cosmic eye is needed to glean that at some point in the night, in the intimacy of tide and vapor, bird and reptile are connected nonetheless. The tanager, beating the air with anxious wings in search of solid ground where the highland forest awaits him.

The crocodile, furiously beating the water with webbed feet in search of a shore far from the river where they tried to kill and skin him for handbags. They are bound together too by the cloudy waters where the crocodile stirred sediment and history, which flow into the same unfamiliar sea that the bird will cross on his way to respite on mountains that survive by mist from that river.”

Excerpt from Only a Little While Here by María Ospina

The novel challenges human supremacy and instead turns this on its head. Suddenly we are able to see from the perspective of animals just how insane the destruction of our world is, for the greed and wealth of very few people, while all other people and especially animals – suffer the consequences.

Additionally, there is a theme of the porosity of borders in the Americas, animals do not respect borders and they will fly, walk, crawl and swim across them without respect to the enormous machinery of propaganda around migration especially coming from the toxic orange man-child and his henchmen.

There is no way to know how the tanager recognizes his usual mountain among all the cloud-logged crests. What flight nerve tells him he has reached the dwelling that welcomed him before, that he has arrived at the end of the road? He crosses the fog to descend into the forest of his past. Who knows if disappointment or doubt creeps in when he finds in its place a tiered pasture that announces the extermination of romerones, oaks, gaques, encenillos, higuerón and arrayán trees, suscas, cedars, and black pines. Now, eleven cows desirous of grass graze among the corpses of huge trunks. The tanager has no way of knowing what has happened to the trees that years earlier held him and so many beetles and spiders, porcupines, butterflies[…]”

“The tanager has no way of knowing what has happened to the trees that years earlier held him and so many beetles and spiders, porcupines, butterflies, and moths. How the mineral intelligence of millions of roots hungrily seeking the center of the earth was abruptly extinguished.

Can he sense the sorrow emanating from what was razed? Maybe the question of this absence arises in him, somehow.

Perhaps the tanager recognizes the surviving oak in the middle of the pasture when he lands there as if searching for somewhere to recover from the confusion. Maybe he knows that he perched there before and feels the welcome of the living tree still embraced by bromeliads, fungi, and ferns. Who knows if he hears a vaporous bewilderment rise from its leaves or if he senses its cries over the absence of its tribe, over bonds cleaved by a chain saw. Maybe he can understand, resting on the muscles of the trunk, the consternation of roots that search for other living tentacles and find none.

The still-intact desire to interweave with others. The rebellious drive of age-old branches that continue tossing out new seeds and birthing enthusiastic offspring, though the cows relentlessly chew them up.

Interdependence is a theme as well. The idea that humans are interdependent on animals and our natural world. Likewise that animals are interdependent upon us as humans and likewise the natural world. The gigantic and inspirational ecology of nature is glimpsed through the humble lives of animals and as an aside humans are also glimpsed in the background.

Indigenous elders and curanderos of the Americas are shown as fully understanding the depth of interconnected life and how the animals are humans are truly one. This centres a different kind of relationship that is more healthy with the natural world.

“The Emberá shaman struggles to decipher the species of the tallest trees from above; trees whose whereabouts have been indicated by a satellite and that he has agreed to identify by name.

He—who has since his childhood climbed so many trunks and clung to so many branches; who has spoken with the spirits of the rain forest and knows the curative souls of leaves, roots, and seeds; who sees visions of subterranean networks and branchings and has spent fifty years looking upward; who knows the different waters carried on the air by how they feel in his pores, who knows its foundations of muds and roots and the breath of its leaves when they are worried or glad—questions whether he knows his own forest. In their expeditions on foot, he has already identified wild cashews and shown them the oldest bongo and tonka trees he knows near their reserve.

“But now, far from the mud that supports them and the seeds that are their future, with the rumble of the aircraft silencing all animal chatter, inside a plastic enclosure that cancels out all the odors of the earth, at this altitude that is not his, the jaibaná loses his bearings.”

“The tanager is among the flurry of birds stirred into flight by the aircraft. When the pilot announces that they are approaching the border with Colombia and need to turn back, the shaman will again remember his tree in Salaquí, on the other side of this limit imposed by others, where he lived before the war forced him to flee into Panama with the rest of his town.

He will interrupt the scientists’ conversation about carbon, sensors, and satellites to tell them about the enormous wild cashew tree on the banks of the Jurachira that protected the reserve where he was born. In his uneven Spanish he will describe the broad, straight trunk bigger than any they have measured. He will liken its roots to walls and will say that he has never seen anyone like that being of vast, soft branches that flouts misfortune despite the centuries that pass. His grandparents of flesh and bone taught him that this leafy kin watched over his ancestors before the kampuniás came to colonize them. The wild cashew was the people’s watchtower when the whites appeared with their horses and their thirst for war.

He will explain how it has been the elders’ duty ever since that tragic time to remind the others of this fact with their stories.
“Wise is that tree in Salaquí, that grandfather of mine.”

One of the scientists will explain to him that of the fifty-two trees they registered that morning, several are probably between three and six centuries old.

She will promise that when they process their data, they will make a model and an estimate of how many were alive before Columbus.

That they will circulate the discovery in newspapers and magazines, and it will be good for the forest. She will be sorry they can’t cross the border to measure his wild cashew. He will be sorry he can’t run his hand over it fondly.

“For a moment, the man will be grateful that someone has called the tree from which he is exiled his tree, though he knows it isn’t true.

He will imagine the joy of touching this relation again, of checking to see if it still weeps its aromatic sap, if grinding its leaves still releases the scent of sweet fruit, if it still changes each of its parts with the same zeal over the long passage of time. He will wonder, again, if it still accompanies anyone there or if it felt abandoned after the exodus. If someone came to try and cut it down or collect the cosmos held in its seeds. He will feel relieved that the scientists will not measure it, even if he doesn’t say so.

The aircraft heads north over the dome of leaves and the threshold of petals that the tanager passed through not long before on his way south, in search of more food and less noise.

The shaman senses him there, together with so many more, just like he does with his ancestors and kin, even if the bird remains unseen.”

Excerpt from Only a Little While Here by María Ospina

“At one point, she will encounter a real toucan in the wild animal sanctuary where her teachers at the foundation for displaced children will take her on a field trip. Before this unsettling vision, she will see other creatures that escaped catastrophe. She will feel relieved that the jaguar gnawing on a bone seems happy not to be the pet of a drug lord anymore, though his new landscape is also fenced in. And that the sloth seems to be at peace, even though the truck that ran him over left him with only three paws. That the seven morrocoy turtles can swim to their hearts’ content in the sanctuary’s channels after years of living in jars and crates. That the iguana can deftly climb an orange tree instead of spending her days trying to ignore the rocks thrown at her through the bars of her cage in a hotel in Capurganá. ”

“That the capuchin monkeys, especially the one whose hand had been mutilated, are swinging from branches instead of being chained to the arms of the men who tried to sell them along the road to Urabá. That the macaw with the shattered beak no longer needs to face his tormentor or dream of breaking free from the cord that bound him for so long to a metal bar.

That the orange-winged parrots can take solace in the trees growing under nets as they wait to be returned to the Amazon after surviving weeks of darkness inside boxes that slammed against one another in trucks and propeller planes; that they escaped the fate of being sent to Europe in the cargo hold of a ship loaded with sugar.

“Only at the end, when the girl is searching for somewhere to sit and cry, will she see her perched on the branch of a wild cashew tree, her huge beak bursting shameless from her yellow face. A sword that seems like pure artifice, as if the bird’s body existed only to support that riot of color. In awe, the girl will press herself against the bars of the cage to watch her shred a papaya while flouting any notion of camouflage.

She will admire the red, orange, and blue spots that interrupt the green of her beak, as if new colors were about to be born there, colors she’d never seen before. She will wonder if someone painted the fine lines that cross it and whether the bird drinks blood every day to keep its tip that shade of crimson.

She will think of that beak as shears to cut even the strongest flower: a magical box, a queenly blade. She will envy that bright case, which protects a long tongue able to taste whatever it desires, something she cannot do.”

Excerpt from Only a Little While Here by María Ospina

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