Pet

In art, Houses often represent home, family, and safety. This is no different in Emezi’s Pet, where Jam has an almost telepathic communication with her house, which communicates through creaks and groans. Jam’s connection to her home speaks to the comfort and love that she feels in Lucille. Jam’s tightknit relationship with her family and the safety and belonging that she feels in her home are positive experiences, but they also prevent her from understanding how others may have a different experience from her own. When she learns of the monster in Redemption’s house, she thinks how, “they’d gone home—Jam to her whispering floorboards and Redemption to what Jam now saw as a sweetlaced trap, his home that was a monster harbor” (52). Emezi contrasts Jam and Redemption’s houses and how they have both taken on different meanings in the protagonist’s mind. What was initially a place that she could also find safety in has turned into a place that harbors monsters.

Jam’s relationship to her house also represents the interrelatedness of the community of Lucille. In Emezi’s description of Jam and the house after Pet’s arrival they write, “Pet was a loud secret in [Jam], a wrong note in the usual harmony of her house, making it discordant, guilty” (88).