This Whale Has Something to Say

Remember the orca revolt? Late last spring, media outlets began reporting that a group of orca whales were ramming seacraft near the Strait of Gibraltar. Although most encounters ended without incident, a number of boats were damaged. Three sank from the attacks. The phenomenon went viral, especially after more than one observer suggested that the attacks appeared to be coordinated. “Experts suspect,” a reporter for the website Live Science wrote, that a female orca, which researchers had dubbed “White Gladis,” “suffered a ‘critical moment of agony’—a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing—that flipped a behavioral switch.” Possibly, she was pregnant. In the aftermath of such a trauma, it was conjectured, she may have initiated an orcan resistance, vengeance as open-ocean passion play.     

I’d like to imagine White Gladis as a spiritual godmother of Lolita, the captive orca who plays an outsize role (no pun intended) in Jennine Capó Crucet’s second novel, . Crucet is also the author of a story collection and a book of essays,, that explores her experience as the first-generation child of Cuban refugees and the complex, and often contradictory, challenges of immigration, although here Crucet applies a broader filter to the narrative, creating something of a chorus in which point of view shifts from character to character: a collective consciousness, if you will. And central among those voices is Lolita, who for many decades has been confined to a small tank not much larger than her body at the Miami Seaquarium. There, she essentially dreams—I know no other way to describe it—the story we are being told in this novel.