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Podcast by: Sonakshi Srivastava

Arboreal Em/bodiment:
Subjectivity, Silence, and Vegetal Future in Han Kang

Content Warning: rape, suicide
Keywords: cannibalism, consumption, body, arboreal, fantasy

When Yeong-hye, the protagonist of Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, makes a dietary choice independent of any prior discussion with her husband, and maternal family, everyone is taken by surprise. The choice of giving up meat and animal products (eggs and milk) induces much anxiety amongst her kin, who fail to rationalise her aberrant behaviour and see reason in her “dreams” – ultimately incarcerating her in a psychic hospital.
The disobedient act of giving up meat and ultimately food itself along with Yeong-hye’s refusal to “speak” about this choice trigger the action in the novel since the act of eating with the family provides a ready setting in which “individual personalities develop, kinship obligations emerge, and the customs of the group are reinforced” (Fiddes). We routinely use food to express relationships among ourselves and with our environment. The obtaining and consuming of food can be an eloquent statement of shared ideology.
Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat, and her refusal to inhabit her “fleshly body” is seen as an “interruption” in the regular routine of the ordinary world of her husband, and family.
Yeong-hye gradually begins to make an escape from the regular world and begins to believe that she is turning into a tree – her fantastical construction of an alternative reality forms the crux of this paper. I will attempt to delineate how such radical imaginings serve to pronounce underlying inequalities in inhabiting gendered bodies that also inform acts of consumption. What does Yeong-hye’s fantastic arboreal world tell us about our entangled living(s)? By referencing Sumana Roy’s and Kiran Desai’s works, I will attempt to answer these questions.

About the Author: Sonakshi Srivastava is a writing tutor at Ashoka University, and an MPhil scholar at Indraprastha University. Her research is at the intersection of food futures, speculative fictions, and the Anthropocene. She is a South Asia Speaks Translation Fellow from the class of 2021, and was also shortlisted for the Food Serendipity Lab.

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