Meat Country (Please Do Not Feed Baboons and Wild Animals)

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Notes

¹ Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening,” 6.

² Aristotle's observation (cited in Napolitano) that humans are “more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animal” implies that the political distinction between humans and animals might be thought as one of degree rather than kind, no matter how hard this shared politics may be to imagine. For an attempt to bring the nonhuman into a shared politics, see Latour, The Politics of Nature.

³ Phillips's account of elephant communication implicitly recasts human as an adjectival modifier for language (i.e., human language, as one kind of language) rather than an appositive (i.e., human, language; human = language).

⁴ Note Phillips's observation that in Barbara Gowdy's novel The White Bone, the process of speciation dividing humans from elephants was also spurred by a misdemeanor involving meat, although there the fault was on the emerging human side.

⁵ Indeed, that baboons occupy a singular, medial place in interspecies relations, somewhere between human and animal, is implied in a sign at the Aventura resort in Mpumalanga, “Please Do Not Feed Baboons and Wild Animals,” from which I have borrowed my title.

⁶ For a discussion of the distinction in the Euro-American tradition between the legal category of personhood and the moral category of humanity, see Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.

⁷ In vastly different contexts, both Klopper and Napolitano note that the blurring of the animal/human divide can be driven as much by a racism that bestializes humans as by a “pro-animal” stance that humanizes animals. I have argued elsewhere that John Edgar Wideman's novel The Cattle Killing contrasts the ennobling, metonymic identification of people with cattle in the Xhosa worldview with the dehumanizing, metaphoric equation of people with cattle in capitalist slavery. For the amaXhosa, there can be no life without cattle. (“Cattle are the race; they being dead the race dies.” “Inkomo luhlanga; zifile luyakufa uhlanga.”) When people are bought, sold, and bred like mere cattle, however, life is scarcely worth living. See Wenzel, “The Problem of Metaphor: Tropic Logic in Cattle-Killing Prophecies and their Afterlives.”

⁸ Although the immediate geographic referent in J. M. Coetzee's essay “Meat Country” is Texas (and by extension the United States), he does ponder a mode of historical explanation in which peace is associated with sufficient protein; he numbers among the reasons for European emigration to the colonies “the promise that there they could have meat whenever they wanted” (51-2).

⁹ It must be said that German Romanticism has a rather different trajectory in South African imaginings of relationships to nature, underwriting Afrikaner claims of an exclusive bond to land. See Coetzee, White Writing.

¹⁰ I have in mind the debates about the ideology of nature opened up by New Historicist readings of Wordsworth; see especially Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems and McGann, The Romantic Ideology.

¹¹ Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech,” 99.

¹² Coetzee, “Meat Country,” 52.

¹³ For an example of the environmental import of Coetzee beyond the animal rights question and before the late work, see Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond.

¹⁴ The “big five” are the prized trophy species of African safaris: lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard, and rhinoceros.

¹⁵ On theory-phobia, see SueEllen Campbell, “The Land and Language of Desire.” On literary form, see Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology.

¹⁶ The “District 9” scenes of the film were shot in Chiawelo, an informal settlement outside of Soweto, whose residents were scheduled for removal (presumably by the state rather than a multinational corporation) in late 2009. See Smith, “The Real District 9.”

¹⁷ See Morton, Ecology without Nature.

¹⁸ Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K, 182.