ABSTRACT

This chapter is a collage of reflections on death, grief, animals and communion with “thingified” kin in the context of literature, cinema, postcolonial politics and the author’s own experiences of caring for her parents as they died. With ghosts and other anti-Humans wielding signposts along the way, these haunted meditations range from pigs in slaughterhouses, to sparrows her mother carried to their deaths, to Juma the Jaguar, of whom Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd writes, “This Olympic travesty of 2016 will be most remembered as the farce that murdered a jaguar and as such I could not care less who wins one of those silly gold, silver or bronze medals. All that I will remember is a noble animal lying in a pool of her own blood with a Brazilian soldier standing over her with a smoking rifle.” Inspired by Carol Adams’s “feminist-vegetarian interruptions,” Joy Williams’ “rants” and João Guimarães Rosa’s meows and growls, the explorations in this chapter are sustained by Elizabeth Costello’s observation that storytelling is more formidable than rational argumentation in stimulating an empathic response.