Today Marshmallow reviews a little book with a big message: No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon, published first in 2022.
Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you like books that make you realize how horrible the world is while simultaneously teaching you how to stay hopeful, then this is the book for you!
Marshmallow’s Summary (with Spoilers): Julian Aguon is an Indigenous human rights lawyer and defender from Guam. He founded Blue Ocean Law to serve at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, which will tell you what the main focus of this book is.
Through poems, speeches, and articles, Aguon shows the continual impacts of colonialism in Guam, the Marshall Islands, and so many other territories and sovereign states in similar situations. Specifically, he starts by showing how the U.S. government completely ignored protestors in Guam who were advocating to protect acres of beautiful limestone forest. In order to build yet another military base, the U.S. army bulldozed away the land home to the dying eight-spot butterfly. This is where the titular phrase “no country for eight-spot butterflies” comes from.
Citing the works of other great authors (he admits to particularly revering Arundhati Roy in a fashion similar to how one would adore a celebrity crush), Aguon presents the modern dilemma before the people facing the worst and most immediate impacts of climate change. Small island nations are not the ones contributing to the climate crisis, yet they are the ones already feeling its wrath.
Through this book, Aguon captures how truly horrific human nature can be and how violence and pain are running rampant everywhere around the world. He argues that one must learn to overcome speechlessness: the phenomenon of being left silent by atrocities because verbalizing them is simply too terrifying or graphic or painful.
No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is Aguon’s way of verbalizing the pain of his people and all those who are in a similarly hopeless situation. Global superpowers, he points out, do not care about the little guys who wield no weapons and have no power to stop them. He still has hope though and argues that the most dangerous thing in the world would be a generation of young people who have lost hope. In line with his ideals, I would suggest reading this book to each and every person who is ready to understand the scale of global suffering and is ready to accept our shared responsibility of alleviating it.
Marshmallow’s Review: I want to preface this by saying that No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is not a good book for young children. I was not expecting it to be as graphic and somewhat disturbing as it got to be at certain points. Because he has tasked himself with telling the story of our global circumstances accurately, Aguon must also show our worst demons. I cannot describe how purely evil some of these events reveal humans to be. Whether clothed in suits, surrounded by smooth, slimy words or brutishly, maliciously armed with machetes, human evil has never been as visible to me as it was in this book. I must admit I was not prepared, and I am infinitely grateful to be a bunny who has had no comparable experiences.
The fact that the author still has hope though should tell you something. As someone who has seen so much evidence that could convince even the most optimistic that hope is rather useless, the author somehow still believes that there are things worth fighting for and that hope has to survive.
This testimony of experiences shows another side of humanity that many have likely never heard of before. Reading No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies reveals just how deeply humans are and have been suffering. But at the same time, despite it all, Aguon begs us to believe in goodness. I believe that if he still has faith in humanity, we all must too.
Marshmallow’s Rating: 111%.
