Bird flu has appeared in Australia. Chickens at farms in Victoria have tested positive for one of the strains of the virus. Other, more virulent strains have been tearing through wild birds around the world, causing mass deaths of penguins and pelicans. They’ve crossed into other species: dairy cattle in the US, sea lions in Australia, people. Just like COVID-19, bird flu is spilling over from its usual hosts, yet another illustration of the nexus of environmental destruction and human health that scientists have been warning us about for decades.
In Abandon Every Hope though, Hayley Singer causes us to consider the chickens near the beginning of this cascade, the around 800,000 hens that government agency Agriculture Victoria has said are now being “safely disposed of”. She begins in February 2022, asking us to think about words, how “we butcher language, or else stuff words into each other’s mouths … how questions of language can also be questions of life”. What is hidden inside or among those words? How do they hide the slaughter of animals? In these “essays for the dead” Singer wants us “pull down the warm blanket of it does not really matter“.
Why don’t we speak or think of what happens in abattoirs and slaughterhouses, the places that take animals apart into their components so that they can be consumed? Singer’s proposal is that it is, at least partly, a narrative problem. The industrial slaughter of animals is so awful that we’ve come up with all sorts of ways to talk around it. “Safely disposed of” is actually rather blunt and crass, a bit obvious, in the philology of killing. But as Singer argues, slaughter has also infected every part of our political, social and economic lives, our words and stories, “the endless transformation of the world into a killing machine” like “banal-seeing technologies … truck-fence-knife”. “Slaughter is a the product of the war,” she writes. “I am not speaking in metaphor”. Like war, animal slaughter has its cannon-fodder, the frontline workers who witness the trauma of animals as well as bearing the brunt of diseases like bird flu and COVID-19.
I’m reminded of Richard Mosse’s video installation Broken Spectre, in which he draws vivid parallels between the taking apart of the Amazon rainforest and the taking apart of the cattle that the forest is being destroyed to make way for. Mostly black-and-white, at times he falsely colours the video red to indicate the storage of vast amounts of carbon in the forest, but with the effect of soaking the landscape in a blood-red hue, which reminds me in turn of Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum’s recent manifesto against deforestation, another kind of slaughter. Abandon Every Hope stimulates such leaps of connection; these are all part of the same story in any case, one that pits (some) humans against nature, one that insists that (some) humans are above nature and the rest, closer to animals, are to be exploited. These essays insist on restoring the animal-ness of the pieces of meat found in our supermarkets, but our own too.
Singer (no relation of Peter) traces the evolution of industrial killing, from the first slaughterhouses in Chicago through live exports through the mad cow epidemic of the 1990s (a product of feeding cows “mammalian protein“, Singer reminds us). Along the way she writes of teaching through the COVID-19 pandemic, wrestling with the isolation, anxieties and challenges to meaning it has brought. She introduces thinkers, texts and theories to explain how the slaughter of animals is a black hole at the heart of the way we live today, a totalising absence that nonetheless we must find ways to delineate.
What does being “disposed of” look like? I have no idea how a Victorian chicken farmer might kill thousands of chickens (a product not just of avoidance but also of so-called ag-gag laws), but Singer provides numerous examples. Take sheep aboard a ship travelling trade routes to slaughter:
the temperature outside the ship, say forty degrees, is the temperature at which the ship is, so-called, ventilated. Sheep on the deck might reasonably ask if the wind’s been put to sleep. This ship sails for twenty-one days. Those unable to reach food and water, unable to lie down, unable to regulate their body temperature collapse in excrement. One and then another and another and another slam down, on their knees. The hot shock of falling on your knees; one and then another; of taking three hundred breaths per minute; of foaming at the mouth. Four thousand die this way. The very air puts a stop to their breathing.
I want to say they are “stomach-churning” but that doesn’t quite cut it. The reaction is beyond words, or under words, or a hole in words, a silence or a depth that is near-impossible to sound. Words fail to describe; that is partly Singer’s point and mode. To reveal the violence of what is done to animals, Singer employs an abject poetics, like she popped open her most anxious nightmares and instead of trying to forget them followed them to the end of their nightmarish logic. “Resist the seductions of narrative coherence,” she warns, and Abandon Every Hope is indeed a testing collection, skipping, meandering, digressing, tangling. But all building, or better, descending, to a concluding essay that I will not easily be able to shake.
Gay rating: not gay.
The Library Is Open 