Developing Animal Theology: An Engagement with Leonardo Boff by Clair Linzey (review)

Abstract

sense of empathy between humans and nonhumans, often oscillating between sincere participation and humour noir. A good example of the latter is a short poem that narrates the escape of a bull from the slaughterhouse. Instead of being an account of idealistic freedom, the bull is understandably scared in the urban traffic and, while the workers—including the author—chase him “branding knives / stun rods and beer,” the nonhuman creature finds a moment of solace when “he lies on a thin veil of grass / and whispers something to the flies” (p. 36). The former is instead more pervasive and involves portraying death as a nexus, where human and nonhuman embodiments meet and exchange “in the race to the absolute” (p. 28). This sense of sharing a common experience of physical vulnerability is the protagonist of the short pieces that end the volume, collected under the subtitle “The Death-Wife.” In this series of short poems Ferrari published in 2013, the illness and eventual death of the poet’s wife triggers a process of becoming animal that is not degrading but—as Gilebbi remarks in his introduction—so intimate “that any interspecific separation fades to give way to the images of humans and animals existing, feeling, suffering, and dying in the same manner” (p. 17). Slaughterhouse is a powerful and uncomfortable book, and we must thank Gilebbi for translating Ferrari’s poetry into English for the first time. This slim volume challenges in fact not only how we farm and consume animal flesh but also all the unspoken emotions we might have about both our right to kill other animals and the justifications we give ourselves when we do it. In poetically bearing witness to the slaughterhouse from the inside, Ferrari’s poems make it impossible for us to attribute the horror of butchering animals exclusively to others. Instead, they force readers to acknowledge that, either practically or through a set of shared cultural assumptions, we all participate in it. Yet, such a discomforting testimony also suggests that another form of participation is perhaps possible, one in which the label “animal” is not a sign of degradation but the first step toward a deeper convergence among different finite beings.