The banality of meat

A quietly ambitious book about suffering

Ben Brooker

Abandon Every Hope

by Hayley Singer Upswell $29.99 pb, 165 pp

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.

Abandon Every Hope, the first book by Hayley Singer (no relation to Peter, doyen of animal rights in this country), is a short, experimental collection of fragmentary essays. It both deploys well-worn tropes of slaughterhouse literature and attempts to nudge the form forwards or, perhaps more accurately, sideways. Ellipses and caesuras dot the mostly brief paragraphs, bespeaking the absences that define Singer’s subject.

Primarily, Abandon Every Hope is a book concerned with the idea of disappearance, how the plight of animals raised for human consumption is elided by obfuscation and euphemism (while reading, I was periodically reminded of David Brooks’s writings on how language shapes and distorts animal–human relations). It is a sort of thanatological diary, an accounting of the unaccounted for – a lament for the unlamented.

‘That was my first experience of disappearance,’ Singer writes about when her grandmother would feed her corned tongue sandwiches, ‘old-world Jewish comfort food’, about which she felt not revulsion but curiosity. ‘It had,’ she reflects, ‘been neatened’, utterly divorced from its origins, a process Singer describes as ‘banal magic’.

Just as the provenance of meat is made to disappear, so too are the means of its production, its conjuring. Singer writes fascinatingly of how slaughtering facilities gradually shifted out of public view in the mid-nineteenth century, including in Melbourne, where they were pushed further and further into outer urban communities to the west and south-east of the city centre. This creep has catalysed, according to Singer, ‘abattoir amnesia – a forgotten place of wrong. Not a secret, but a disregarded depth.’

With the fervour of a polemicist and the lyricism of a poet, Singer plunges us into these depths, forces us to look. Lab experiments on animal suicides. The slaughterhouse’s ‘sensorium of horrific sounds’. The way cows are suspended upside down, have their jugular veins cut by not one but two knives. The language of mass death abounds: eviscerate. Eliminate. Depopulate. ‘How can I speak the mutilated world without mutilating it further?’ Singer wonders, her writing never less than visceral. The attempt takes its toll on author as well as reader. ‘I get the feeling that tiny pieces of glass are stuck in my throat,’ she writes. ‘Writing does things to every body.’

Singer is frank about her self-medication with alcohol. She drinks a lot, and no wonder. A university lecturer, she ruminates on how, by the time a two-hour tutorial is over, two thousand chickens will have been killed – not just killed, but hung, dragged, electrified, neck-slit, and boiled – in a single abattoir in Australia. Singer writes:

I sit alone with this fact and I’m filled with the sense of touching an infinity of dead others. I get the jolt of an urge to build altars of pure and tangible shock, of unending absence, of meaninglessness itself, of sadness and all that holds it back. As if this will restore the broken order of things.

Abandon Every Hope, though, is not merely a catalogue of extant horrors. It is also intensely generative, and asks the reader to envision what a society might look like in which animal suffering was not relegated to the fringes of its imaginary. In one passage, Singer outlines the three acts of a summer blockbuster about slaughterhouses. In another, a novel on the pain of horses kept in so-called ‘pee barns’, where their urine is harvested for the production of a hormone replacement therapy drug. These are intriguing and provocative thought experiments. As Singer observes in one essay, ‘narrative is one of the theatres in which the war on animals is fought’.

Despite its brevity and piecemeal form, Abandon Every Hope is a quietly ambitious book. Singer opines that ‘writing, if it is capable of doing anything at all, has to incite total animal liberation. Has to move society towards a new form of existence, or it will be a failure.’ By this measure, is Singer’s book a failure? I think not.

Where it succeeds is in stripping away the banality of meat, and reinscribing it with the shocking violence that is its true source. In its way, the book also reminds us that the project of animal liberation is intimately entangled with our own freedom – from the ‘need’ to kill on an industrial scale, and the psychic wounds that factory-farmed meat can’t help but inflict on those who produce and consume it. The pain of animals, Singer makes clear, is written on the human body too.

In the final essay, titled ‘Inferno’, Singer writes of the mass euthanasia of animals in North American slaughterhouses during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Pigs,’ we’re told, ‘[were] shot, gassed, administered an anaesthetic overdose or killed with blunt force trauma, which means piglets [had] their heads slammed against the ground.’ Workers contracted the virus en masse but were ordered to stay on, manning the production lines while feverish or vomiting. A man whose job it was to saw the legs off pig carcasses died alone in hospital.

The book ends abruptly, jarringly, as though we might still be anywhere within it. This, too, is a kind of abandonment, a brokenness ours now to restore. g