When the Body Speaks Before Language: Nelly Vee & Võ Thị Như Mai Reflect on C.J. Sahadeo’s “Embodying Animal Instincts”

Read the magazine feature first, then continue into the two cultural reflections below.

The Work at the Center

What Happens Before We Have Words for Fear?

C.J. Sahadeo’s piece begins in the body. Skin tightens. Breath changes. Sound grows sharper. Movement becomes calculation before the mind has finished naming what is happening. The story asks a deceptively simple question: when danger strips away language, etiquette, and explanation, what remains?

The sympathetic nervous system helps prepare the body for intense physical demand, often described in everyday language as the “fight or flight” response (Alshak & Das, 2023). Sahadeo turns that physiology into literature, giving instinct a shape, a pace, and eventually a voice of its own.

Nelly’s Lens • Instinct, Identity & Control

Civilization Does Not Erase the Animal

What stands out to me is the collision between the person we believe ourselves to be and the organism underneath that identity. Most of daily life rewards composure. We are expected to explain ourselves, negotiate, measure our reactions, and keep emotion inside recognizable social boundaries. But Sahadeo’s character enters a moment where those rules become secondary to survival.

That does not make the character less human. It makes the story more honest about how layered human behavior is. Thought, morality, culture, memory, and instinct do not exist in separate rooms. Under pressure, they compete for the same body.

The line that stays with me is the idea that “prey is not synonymous with helplessness.” The shift is psychological before it is physical. The hunted person stops understanding herself only through the hunter’s power. Resistance begins when identity changes from something being acted upon to someone still capable of choosing a response.

— Nelly Vee

Mai’s Lens • Restraint, Relationship & Cultural Meaning

Instinct May Be Universal; Its Expression Is Not

I read the story through a second question: even if fear begins in the body, who teaches us what we are allowed to do with it? Culture does not create the nervous system, but culture helps shape what emotional expression means—when anger is acceptable, when restraint is admired, when endurance is expected, and when visible fear may be treated as weakness.

Research on emotion regulation supports this distinction. Cultural values can influence which emotions people try to regulate, how they express them, and how those strategies are interpreted within relationships (Ford & Mauss, 2015). De Leersnyder, Boiger, and Mesquita (2013) likewise describe emotional life as shaped not only by individual choices but also by relationships and social structures.

That makes Sahadeo’s transformation especially interesting. Her character does not stop being social or cultural simply because instinct takes over. Instead, the story shows the moment when the body interrupts every script at once. The result is not a rejection of culture. It is a reminder that beneath every learned rule is a living body that can react before permission arrives.

— Võ Thị Như Mai

Where Our Perspectives Meet

Culture Meets Biology in the Same Body

The most useful way to read this piece is not as a contest between biology and culture. Biology provides capacities: arousal, vigilance, movement, fear, resistance. Culture gives those capacities social meaning. One community may praise visible assertiveness; another may prize restraint. One family may teach that fear should be hidden; another may treat naming fear as wisdom. None of these patterns describes every person inside a culture, and no culture is psychologically uniform.

That caution matters because cultural psychology is strongest when it explains tendencies without turning people into stereotypes. Ford and Mauss (2015) note that an individual’s orientation toward particular cultural values may predict emotion regulation more meaningfully than simple group membership. In other words, culture influences us, but it does not mechanically decide us.

Sahadeo’s hunted figure therefore becomes more than an action image. She becomes a meeting place between inherited biology, learned behavior, social expectation, and immediate choice. The body knows danger. The person still has to decide what survival will mean.

Reader Reflection

What Does Your Body Know Before You Explain It?

Think about a moment when your body reacted before you had words. Then ask a second question: which part of what happened next came from instinct, and which part came from what you had been taught about fear, control, dignity, or strength?

Issue 3 Connection

July — Become • Stage IV: Flight

This feature belongs in July because its movement is from hunted vulnerability toward agency. “Flight” here is not merely escape. It is the discovery that instinct, thought, and identity can reorganize under pressure.

Explore July — Become • Visit the living Issue 3

References

Alshak, M. N., & Das, J. M. (2023). Neuroanatomy, sympathetic nervous system. StatPearls. NCBI Bookshelf.

De Leersnyder, J., Boiger, M., & Mesquita, B. (2013). Cultural regulation of emotion: Individual, relational, and structural sources. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 55. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00055.

Ford, B. Q., & Mauss, I. B. (2015). Culture and emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 3, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2014.12.004.