Hello everyone and welcome to a strange
wee bonus posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry
workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject
animal other.
After our conversation last session
about the hydra (thanks again Sylvie, for a stellar poem), I went away thinking
about our fabulous and impossible animal symbols, starting with the seven-headed
hydra-like cobra of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army). Briefly, for those
who might not be familiar, the SLA were a hard-left, anti-racist vanguard
movement in America during the 1970s. They were committed to direct action and what
they saw as revolutionary violence. You might know them best as the force
behind the kidnapping (and subsequent radicalisation) of heiress Patty Hearst.
If you’d like to know a bit more, the links below will take you to a couple of
useful resources, one a brief history of how the movement emerged:
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00782.x
And
another, placing it in the context of its time, linking them to the development
of other vanguard movements across the world, including the Angry Brigade, here
in the UK:
https://my-blackout.com/2018/09/16/the-angry-brigade-communiques-and-documents/
But our interest in the SLA really begins with their use of the seven-headed
cobra, and with this opening salvo from their manifesto, the catchily titled ‘Symbionese
Liberation Army Declaration of Revolutionary War & the Symbionese Program’:
The name “symbionese” is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its
meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving
harmony and partnership in the best interest of all within the body.
It’s the idea of ‘a body of
dissimilar bodies’ that really struck me. In the context of the SLA this refers
to the symbiosis, or bringing together, of various left-wing struggles –
feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, etc.– but also to the spontaneous and
autonomous functioning of individuals and small groups, working separately,
disparately, but towards the same radical and collective ends. Yet the ‘dissimilar
bodies’ are also the literal bodies of those involved in the struggle: racialised
bodies, gendered bodies, classed bodies, queer bodies, imprisoned bodies, and those
bodies marked by the military industrial complex. While the biological figure
for political movements is an old one, I’d argue that it in this instance it is
performing highly specific work: summoning those bodies abjected by difference,
and foregrounding the obtruding presence of those the state in its majesty prefers
not to acknowledge, or regards merely as surplus or as waste. The idea of hybrid
bodies, especially within the context of black struggle, also gestures to white
hysteria surrounding miscegenation, as well as to the idea of queer contagion.
The seven-headed cobra is both
abject and spectacular. To the SLA’s establishment enemies it represents a form
of threatening feral excess. Not merely a serpent (the most persistently
reviled of all literary and symbolic animals), but a mutated and “unnatural” version
of the same. And yet, among its members and to those sympathetic to its aims
and objectives, the cobra has positive connotations, each head representing one
of the seven principles of Kwanzaa: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination),
Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative
economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity) and Imani
(faith). The SLA featured this image on their publications. The image has also
been linked to ancient Indian seven-headed nāga, half-human hybrids that
inhabit the netherworld – a potent allegory for the revolutionary underground
if ever there was one.
All of which leads me back to
animals, and to what Donna Haraway, writing in When Species Meet (University
of Minnesota Press, 2008) calls our ‘becoming with’. Haraway argues that every
organism is connected, bound together in what she calls ‘material-semiotic
nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another’. Body
of dissimilar bodies, right? A connection that is prior to the individual
organism because every individual organism is constituted in and through ‘intra-and
interaction’. In other words, all organisms are constituted in relation to many
others, blurring the lines between an individual and a community of diverse
organisms (pp.3-4).
Haraway’s way of thinking has implications
for politics and for the way we look at (and write about/ with) animal others.
She posits an ‘intra-action’, or an ‘encounter’ between human and nonhuman organisms
from which we might learn ‘an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing
of significant otherness’ (p.90). The aim of such an ethics is:
The coming into being of something
unexpected, something new and free, something outside the rules of function and
calculation, something not ruled by the logic of the reproduction of the same (p.223).
So far, so fabulous, but my mind
was already away off down another impossible animal rabbit hole, pondering
first, these guys: alternately the lavender rhino (1974) and “Progress Shark”
(2022).
The former became a symbol of gay
resistance in 1970s Boston, and in the picture you can see them imagined as a parade
float at Boston Pride in 1974. Two Boston artists, Daniel Thaxton and Bernie
Toale, created the rhino for a public ad campaign helmed by Gay Media
Action-Advertising. Toale explained that the rhino was chosen because “it is a
much maligned and misunderstood animal” and that the colour came from the
mixture of pink and blue, a symbolic merger of the masculine and feminine. The
rhino featured in ads that were meant to encourage the visibility of the LGBTQ
community in Boston. There’s an article about the history (and controversy) of our
big lavender friend here:
https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/06/03/lavender-rhino-gay-resistance-boston
The latter, you may already be
familiar with. They are, of course, Sydney Museum’s unofficial mascot for
Australia’s month-long WorldPride Festival this year: a ten meter model of a
great white shark, clad (obvs) in rainbow Lycra. Described as “absurd and
wonderful”, the statue, dubbed “Progress Shark” has gathered legions of fans
and a good deal of social media notoriety. You can read more about them here:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/feb/17/progress-shark-sydney-worldpride-2023-icon
They’re relevant to us because they
provide a useful lens for thinking about the ways in which animals are
recruited as symbols for human relations and human concerns. In the case of the
lavender rhino and “Progress Shark” I actually quite like them because they do
gesture towards their own artificiality and highly constructed nature. They don’t
pretend to represent the actual animal, and in some ways I think they
offer a commentary on the act of representation itself. I don’t know if you can
see in the photo, but the sign around the lavender rhino’s neck says: ‘A
lavender rhinoceros is not imposerous’ – as in a cute misspelling of ‘impossible’.
I think this speaks to the trope of queer ‘emergence’, the idea that queer bodies
and communities are impossible under prevailing conditions of neo-liberal
homophobia, yet always being born, belonging absolutely to the now, creating themselves
a new each moment. The lavender rhino posits a queer futurity in which ‘absurd’
or unlikely bodies and relations might indeed come to the fore, expanding the
canon of the natural, and forcing the unhomely home to make room for them. “Progress
Shark” is slightly different: the great white is typically represented as
predatory and threatening, but its appearance in western language and culture tie
it to qualities heterosexual men have traditionally admired, identified with,
and sought to emulate (aggression, domination, individualism, etc.). In
shifting the scope of that identification to include queer traits and
embodiments, “Progress Shark” points to the absurdity of identifying oneself
with an animal at all. In their ostentatious Lycra one-piece, “Progress Shark”
makes a mockery of our heteronormative projections, using ridicule and joyous
campery. So, in a nutshell, I like both these symbols because they provide scope
for thinking critically about the ways in which nonhuman animals are enrolled
in the construction of (human) gendered identities.
As Margot Noris writes in the
fabulous foundational animal studies text Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985): ‘It seems that nowhere in literature are
animals to be allowed to be themselves, to refer to Nature and to their own
animality without being pressed into symbolic service as metaphors, or as
figures in fable or allegory (invariably of some aspect of the human)’ (p.17).
This is true, but I think there’s still a value in figuring the non (and post)
human. Such figures can perhaps point to the tangled nature of everyday life,
compelling us toward more generous – what Haraway calls ‘polite’ – relations with
animal others. Here’s Haraway again this time in Simians, cyborgs and women:
The reinvention of nature (Routledge, 1991): ‘forbidding
comparative stories about people and animals would impoverish public discourse...
But not just
any story will
do’ (pp.106-107). Figures cannot categorically
belong to the polarised camps of predator or prey, human, or animal, but instead
might be compounds of natures and forms.
It occurs to me that this is a useful
moment to bring in some zoopetics: asking us to look beyond the metaphorical,
symbolic and allegorical meanings of the literary animal; to see them not as
ciphers for the “real” or intended meaning of a text, but as active agents and
potential collaborators within a text.
For those who have never
encountered it before, the term ‘zoopoetics’ was first coined by our old friend
Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham University
Press, 2008) and he used it to talk about the pervasive presence of animals in
the work of Franz Kafka. Kafka identifies animals as ‘repositories of the forgotten,
and an integral part of his writing is the revelation of that which has been
forgotten, an operation that is inseparably connected to the notion of animal. Derrida’s
conception of zoopoetics requires attentive listening in order to reveal what has
been forgotten or repressed. With me so far?
The field of zoopoetics has been
increasingly theorised since Derrida, and a really useful thinker here is Aaron
M. Moe who, in his 2012 essay ‘Zoopoetics: a look at Cummings, Merwin, &
the expanding field of ecocriticism’, he states that it is: ‘best understood as
a poetry that revisits, examines, perplexes, provokes, and explores the agency
of the nonhuman animal.’ Humans, Moe states, are not the only beings who
exhibit agency within their environment. Further, language, for Moe, is no
longer a hallmark of human exceptionality.
Animals, according to Moe,
communicate not only with signs but also through their embedded capacity to use
gestures. In doing so, animals take parts in the process of ‘bodily poiesis.’ If
we're truly attentive to the ‘gestures and vocalisations of nonhuman animals’
then the poem can be a kind of ‘multispecies event’, where the presence of the
animal has shaped and is inscribed upon the poem, perhaps through the way sound
is pattered and carried in the poem, how an animal's movement might be part of
the structure of the text, the kinds of ‘words’ an animal might think in.
That’s quite enough of that, but if
you wanted some more, here is a link to Moe in all his glory:
file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/moe.pdf
You might also want to check out
his 2013 book Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (Lexington
Books, 2013).
But for now, our takeaway is that
the literary animal is a place where language and the material world; the body
and the text, the animal and the human are all entangled. It's a really complex
and fraught intersection, and art is never engaged in value-neutral
representation of the animal, but involved and enmeshed in metaphor, myth,
hierarchy, embodiment, materiality, all in contention, all jostling together.
[DRAMATIC PAWS]
Okay, one more. Not a fabulous
nonnormative animal, but still a pretty marvellous one. Meet Loukanikos, the
Greek “riot dog”. Loukanikos “participated” in almost every anti-austerity
protest in Greece. He was commonly known for joining protests, barking at
police, helping in street battles with the Greek police as well as
participating in anarchist rallies and picket lines. When he died, he received
a tremendous public out-pouring of grief and sympathy, and his image became
symbolic of the anti-austerity movement. It could be suggested, in fact, that
grieving the dog became a way to express solidarity, to coalesce around a
beloved figure; and to mourn also the unrealised aims of protest, which would
include a world more generous, tolerant and fair to human and nonhuman subjects
alike.
Can our animal figures enact a
solidarity? What about our strange animal amalgams or hybrids? The ‘composite
beasts’ of the bestiary? I’ve been thinking about a few of these, in particular,
the manticore, who’s image opened this post. Not unlike my favourite resident
of the bestiary – the hyena – the manticore was thought to be able to change sex.
An occasion for anxiety in and of itself, the idea of “unclean” sexual
transformation also functioned as a way to code and abject racialised others.
Here’s a quote from The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the
Renaissance by Leah DeVun (2021):
Eating the flesh of
humans, in particular, signalled both monstrosity and inhumanity. […] for
instance, a manticore wears a Phrygian hat— often interpreted as a sign of
Jewishness— as it devours a severed human leg. […] The scholar Peter Hulme
suggests that cannibalism has often been imagined as a category diametrically
opposed to humanity, a barbaric other against which human civilization strives.
By featuring an allegedly Jewish hybrid beast consuming human flesh, a bestiary
could portray a non-Christian figure as a violator of the fundamental taboos
that defined humankind (pp.73-74).
This depiction of the manticore had
me thinking about other literary and cultural cannibals, particularly the Irish,
from as early Strabo, Greek geographer and historian, during the reign of the Roman
empire:
Besides some small
islands round about Britain, there is also a large island, Ierne, which
stretches parallel to Britain on the north, its breadth being greater than its
length. Concerning this island I have nothing certain to tell, except that its inhabitants
are more savage than the Britons, since they are man-eaters as well as heavy
eaters, and since, further, they count it an
honourable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them, and openly to
have intercourse, not only with the other women, but also with their mothers
and sisters; but I am saying this only with the understanding that I have no
trustworthy witnesses for it; and yet, as for the matter of man-eating, that is
said to be a custom of the Scythians also, and, in cases of necessity forced by
sieges, the Celti, the Iberians, and several other peoples are said
to have practised it. (Strabo 4.5.4)
Through to our favourite bête noire
Edmund spencer, and this happy character, Barnaby Rich, an English writer and a
soldier who served in Ireland, writing in 1610 in his odious A New Description of
Ireland:
the time hath been, when they lived
like Barbarians, in woods, in bogs, and in desolate places, without politic
law, or civil government, neither embracing religion, law or mutual love. That
which is hateful to all the world besides is only beloved and embraced by the
Irish, I mean civil wars and domestical dissensions. The wild Scythians, do
forbear to be cruel the one against the other. The Cannibals, devourers of
men’s Flesh, do learn to be fierce amongst themselves, but the Irish, without
all respect, are ever more cruel to their very neighbours. (Liz Curtis, ‘Nothing
but the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism’, Information on
Ireland, 1984).
The idea of the uncanny cannibal composite
(try saying that fast) as both a representational and rhetorical construction that
threatens even as it justifies the oppressor’s binary constructions of superior/inferior,
strong/weak, intelligent/foolish, male/ female, etc, has been much on my mind,
and I’ve been wondering about how to write through these ambiguous polymorphous
figures, who seem to embody the mixture of human and animal forms or capacities
that Haraway and Moe cite as potentially liberatory. We’ll put a pin in that for now, and return on Wednesday with Claude Cahun,
performativity, creation and destruction, but I’ll leave you with a poetic
attempt on a manticore, and the prompt to uncover a composite figure and write
through them.
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