Regina Rheda's Humanimals: Humana Festa and the Postslavery Novel

AutorAlexandra Isfahani-Hammond
CargoProfessor at University of California, San Diego
Páginas281-306

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Regina Rheda’s Humana Festa (The Human Feast, 2008) is a pioneering comedy of manners that delineates the foundations of animal abolitionism in relation to class struggle, the plight of the landless (Movimento Sem Terra), the world-system and environmental devastation.2It weaves together two parallel settings-the bible-thumping, NRA-loving milieu of the Florida hinterland, and São Paulo’s neo-plantation, agro-business interior, where estates worked by slaves have been replaced by intensive cattle and pig farms operated by underpaid laborers and subsidized by U.S. conglomerates. As in Rheda’s short story, "The Sanctuary" (2002), Humana Festa locates the question of the animal within a web of interlocking socioeconomic and post-imperial relations. With its juxtaposition of the two largest post-slavery polities in the Americas, and its climactic direct action on a São Paulo

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fazenda, Rheda situates animal abolitionism in the context of struggles against African enslavement and globalization as well as within the long tradition of comparative analyses of U.S. and Brazilian slavery.3 Her narrative of south/ north struggles to expand the parameters of personhood decenters the U.S. as the hub for the transmission of avant-garde ideals while simultaneously unhinging the notion of "animal whites,"4the pervasive allegation that animal rights is a frivolous preoccupation of single-issue U.S. and European elites who "care more about animals than people."

Humana Festa centers on two vegan women, characters drawn with wit and irony without depreciating their commitment to abolishing animal exploitation. Whereas animal rights activists have appeared in contemporary literature and film, they are invariably either frivolous or intensely neurotic. Most recently, Mike White’s "The Year of the Dog" (2007) features the batty Peggy (Molly Shannon), a lonely single woman in her 40s whose only friend is her dog. On the other hand, Rheda’s novel is by no means the first in literary history to treat nonhuman animal suffering as a topic for serious moral consideration. Percy Bysse Shelly’s "Revolt of Islam" (1818)-"Never again may blood of bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast"- provides the title for Humana Festa. The post-human protagonist of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) connects his suffering with the plight of nonhuman animals, declaring himself vegetarian. Frankenstein’s overdetermined dehumanization-he is the Cartesian machine par excellence, the product of his human-cum-God-like creator-is a powerful statement about the plight of commodified other-than-humans

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whom he empathetically refuses to consume. John Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) explores human and nonhuman animal suffering in post-apartheid South Africa, while in The Lives of Animals (2001), Coetzee delivers an indictment of nonhuman animal exploitation through Elizabeth Costello’s fictional Tanner lecture series at Princeton University. Whereas Mike White’s Peggy is an endearing lunatic who looses touch with reality in her overstated identification with nonhuman animals, Costello is tormented by her attunement to realities suppressed by the vast majority. She is deranged but Coetzee suggests that her derangement is due to awareness of the moral schizophrenia of the world in which she lives, her solitary perception of the crimes of astounding magnitude taking place in slaughter houses, animal experimentation laboratories and fur farms the world over.

In Brazilian literature, Rheda’s work is predated by bold indictments of animal exploitation and defiance of human/ animal dialectics. As in the work of Coetzee, these southern hemisphere critiques are contextualized within a broader spectrum of Western metaphysical structures of domination. In Machado de Assis’s "Conto Alexandrino" (An Alexandrine Tale, 1883), two scientists conduct experiments on a myriad of nonhuman animal species. The motives behind their tests are frivolous, their quest for truth a sham: in one case, they vivisect hundreds of rats simply to ascertain changes in eye color at the moment the live animals’ hearts are removed (is it lilac or a shade of blue?). When the scientists have run out of nonhuman animals, they turn to criminals, hundreds of whom are released from their cells to be subjected to the scientists’ knives. Foucault’s panopticon is brought to bear through Machado’s dual sites of abjection: the prison and the experimentation laboratory. Machado shows that animalization-the withholding of humanity and, therein, protection from injury-is a process which can befall any living creature, whether on the basis of species difference (and confinement within the experimentation laboratory) or criminalization (and relegation to the prison). In Machado’s "A Causa Secreta" (The Secret Cause, 1885),5another

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scientist dissects live animals to satisfy his whimsical curiosity. This story brings home the complicity of his seemingly innocent associates; despite her distaste for his experimentation, the doctor’s wife simply insists that his acts be accomplished out of sight and earshot so as to protect her fragile sensibilities. A young medical student who questions the ethical implications of the doctor’s actions remains silent. To his condemnation of cruelty to nonhuman animals, Machado conjoins a gender dynamic: when the doctor’s wife passes away, his sadistic enjoyment in observing her demise connects the logic of voyeuristic domination over nonhuman animals with the objectification and commodification of Maria Luísa’s body.

Guimarães Rosa’s "Meu Tio, o Iauaretê" (My Uncle, the Jaguar, 1961) also addresses intersecting oppressions. The narrator, a wildcat hunter who regrets murdering so many of his "kinfolk," ultimately turns into a jaguar. In addition to Rosa’s send up of the human/ animal divide, the narrator’s withdrawal from Portuguese in favor of an idiom incorporating Tupi-Guaraní and the onomatopoeia of the wildcat (an array of cat-like sounds) links speciesism with racism as intertwining discourses that sustain the postcolonial order. In Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, 1938), Graciliano Ramos recounts the plight of an impoverished family of northeastern migrants seeking refuge from the drought. Subjected to this zero limit situation, they are bombarded by the madness of a society that denies them the most basis forms of protection. Relegated to the margins, they are likewise confounded by language, by a wall of words they cannot pronounce and a painful inability to communicate with one another. Ramos connects their anguish with the predicament of their nonhuman animal companions, a parrot who "can’t even talk" and a dog, Baléia; these nonhuman animals’ desacralization is guaranteed precisely on the basis of purported lack of access to language and the incapacity for rational comprehension. Animalizing humans and humanizing animals, Ramos reflects on our universal susceptibility to "thingness." He enables the expression of nonhuman animal perspective and, therein, personhood; along with chapters narrated from the outlooks of Fabiano, Vitória and their two sons, one chapter is told from Baléia’s point of view. The life experience-

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and, ultimately, the legally and ethically sanctified killing-of this mal-nourished mongrel is at once a reflection on anxiety about racial mixing, the stigmatization of the rural, backland poor, and the arbitrary horror of animalization.

Published in 2008, Rheda’s Humana Festa is distinct from these earlier texts for its engagement with the interdependent contemporary discourses of veganism and animal abolitionism. Whereas Ramos and Rosa indict the exploitation of animalized beings, their messages are contradictory. In Vidas Secas, Baléia’s murder is the source of mourning and remorse, but the moral ramifications of slaughtering piglets and breaking wild horses are suppressed. In "My Uncle the Jaguar," wildcats are "kinfolk" but killing dogs and cows does not elicit ethical inquiry. Machado’s indictment of animalization is more coherent, though he confesses a lack of personal commitment. In a crônica published in "A Semana" in 1893, he describes himself as "carnivorous by upbringing and vegetarian by principle" and admits that "when I attained the use of reason and organized my code of principles, I included vegetarianism; but it was too late to be executed. I was already a meat eater" (5 Mar 1893). Humana Festa is specifically informed by the theories of law professor and animal abolitionist, Gary Francione, whose Animals as Persons (2008) lays the framework for the most radical of animal rights discourses to date. Unlike Peter Singer or David Favre, Francione rejects welfarist advocacy for the elimination of "unnecessary suffering," arguing instead for the abolition of animal exploitation across the board. For Francione, the question boils down to personhood versus property. As long as animals are considered property, attempts to reduce their suffering will be inconclusive. Francione compares the millennia-long animal advocacy movement with the struggle to end African slavery; laws and regulations curtailing the infliction of violence against enslaved blacks were full of loopholes that privileged slaveholders’ rights above those of the enslaved. Efforts to reduce unnecessary suffering had as their premise the belief that a certain degree of suffering was justifiable if it benefitted the owner. While Francione concurs that it would be better to beat a slave three rather than five times a week, it would also be preferable not to torture nonhuman animals prior to killing them

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and for rapists not to beat their victims in addition to raping them. But just as there is no such thing as "humane rape," there is also no such thing as "humane slaughter." Francione insists that meaningful change cannot occur until we accept that animals are persons. Like human animals, they...

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