Personal Narrative Analysis

A few months before I first moved to the United States from Jordan at the age of 13, my family rescued and took in a stray two-week-old, grey-striped kitten. I agreed to be the main caretaker of it, wishfully thinking that it would be all fun and games. We named it Maya, which is the Arabic word for water since we found it by our pool, and placed its little bed and towel in my room at the far end of the apartment. I soon realized that raising a living creature was a difficult task, and this happened on one of our first nights together. I woke up in the middle of the night to loud, high-pitched squeaking sounds. I tried to ignore it and hoped that it would go away, but the cries persisted for a good fifteen minutes. It was in the middle of the night, I had school in the morning, and I was not in the mood to entertain my new companion.

Since she could not speak the way humans do, in addition to us not being directly in front of each other, this was the only way for her to convey her stress and hunger to me. After seeing this, I used referred to prior knowledge in attempt to find out what I could do to help her, and was ultimately successful in receiving and processing her message. This could be considered “good” communication, because even though the context wasn’t good and it took me a while, I was able to figure out what she needed based on those signals alone, and successfully give it to her. This shows that interspecies communication is definitely possible, even if it is different and difficult. Rather than speech, interspecies communication can be carried out with both manual signals, such as nudging or nodding, and aural signals, like growls and whimpers. These alone won’t convey much other than emotions and warnings, but even at this level, members of different species are still able to transmit very basic and important messages to each