Abstract: This essay, in a special issue of Pacific Coast Philology devoted to the environmental humanities, considers how modes of reading (e.g., reading animal allegory as a reflection of strictly human concerns) are disrupted in narratives of environmental harm, which oblige us view the connections between the human and non-human realms. The essay uses Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Les neuf consciences du malfini, an animal tale centrally concerned with habitat toxicity in Martinique, as its exemplary text.