"Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely"
About this Quote
Two clipped sentences, one species, and a whole civilization peeking through the bars. Russell Banks writes "Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely" with the bluntness of a field report, but the real force is literary: the period is doing the moral work. It refuses the reader the comfort of nuance, the soothing drift into abstraction. Endangered isn’t a vibe here; it’s a verdict. Then "Severely" lands like an afterthought that isn’t an afterthought at all, the way we tack on urgency only when we can no longer pretend we didn’t know.
Banks, a novelist with a long record of drilling into American self-mythology, likely isn’t just flagging a conservation fact. He’s using the chimpanzee as a mirror species: close enough to us to make the loss feel like self-amputation, distant enough that we can keep treating it as collateral. The line’s minimalism hints at exasperation with how language gets used to launder culpability. "Endangered" is the polite label. "Severely" is the stripped-down reality.
The context, culturally, is a world where environmental crisis has become background noise, competing with everything and therefore losing to everything. Banks counters that numbness by writing like someone who’s done negotiating with denial. The subtext is accusation without theatrics: the animals are not mysteriously vanishing; they’re being pushed. And the most unsettling implication is that the sentence could be repurposed, soon, for far more than chimpanzees.
Banks, a novelist with a long record of drilling into American self-mythology, likely isn’t just flagging a conservation fact. He’s using the chimpanzee as a mirror species: close enough to us to make the loss feel like self-amputation, distant enough that we can keep treating it as collateral. The line’s minimalism hints at exasperation with how language gets used to launder culpability. "Endangered" is the polite label. "Severely" is the stripped-down reality.
The context, culturally, is a world where environmental crisis has become background noise, competing with everything and therefore losing to everything. Banks counters that numbness by writing like someone who’s done negotiating with denial. The subtext is accusation without theatrics: the animals are not mysteriously vanishing; they’re being pushed. And the most unsettling implication is that the sentence could be repurposed, soon, for far more than chimpanzees.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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