Wild Seed

When Doro first meets Anyanwu, they compare names and traditions. Anyanwu, diverted by Doro’s unusual intelligence, tells him about her name first, which means “the sun” in her Igbo dialect. Later, Doro explains his own name. “Among my people, it means the east—the direction from which the sun comes,” he says (7). Thus, upon their first meeting, Doro absorbs Anyanwu, rhetorically making himself a center around which the sun revolves.

Anyanwu has the extraordinary ability to transform herself into an animal. However, this is a power touched by perversity—“abomination,” as Anyanwu’s tradition would have it. Anyanwu comes across many things in the world that she finds to be an “abomination.” Some of these prescribed ethical concerns will correspond to the reader’s own, such as Anyanwu’s prohibition against bestiality and incest. Others are less universal. “If your people wish to debase themselves by drinking the milk of animals, I will turn my head,” says Anyanwu to Doro, in arguably her strongest reaction to an ethical taboo in the book (130).

These abominations have to do, each in one way or another, with animal sexuality. Likewise, what defines Doro in his most extreme cruelty is animality.