How did you come about writing Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead?

This book was drafted out of my PhD, which I completed in 2016. I spent years re-writing the document into a work that could speak beyond academic environments.  

My PhD focused on an idea called the fleischgeist, which is a pun on Hegel’s concept of the zeitgeist. Fleischgeist is a German compound term I found in the early days of my research as I was reading a boutique magazine called this is meatpaper. ‘Fleisch’ means meat and ‘geist’ can be translated into English as ghost or spirit, or mind or intellect.

In the first issue of this is meatpaper, the editors announced that they would explore global meat cultures from meat glue to offal, meat hats to DIY slaughter. For them, meat production and consumption encapsulated the spirit of our times. They were exploring the fleischgeist.

Throughout my PhD I focussed on developing the potential meanings of this term. I spent years looking for examples that embodied the fleischgeist within my lived contexts. I started to understand meat as a storied substance via philosophers and cultural theorists like Val Plumwood and Jane Bennett. I also saw meat as a wild storyteller, with special thanks to Deborah Levy’s severely underrated, genre-breaking novella Diary of a Steak. Diary performs a mind-twisting unravelling of human exceptionalism, misogynistic medicine, and it disrupts dominant understandings of multispecies cultures by bringing a feral creaturely poetics to the page. I do not use the term ‘feral’ with any negative multispecies connotations. I use it to point to Levy’s undomesticated creative practice.

Within the fleischgeist there is a tension between diverse and divergent feelings and ethics in relation to meat produce and consumption. Meat love and disgust, meat eating and avoidance clash and pull and snag on each. There is a sense of haunting that hangs over all of this. I see it as an ethical haunting that occurs when the realities of meat production, artificial insemination, multispecies eugenics, family separation, brutal death, life-long confinement, de-beaking, tail docking, ear tagging, stun-gunning, live transport (I could go on) are brought onto the cultural scene.

Often narratives that speak the realities of animal slaughter and meat production are kept ‘out of bounds’. They are swept off the cultural scene and held in a liminal space of knowledge against which the culture I live in defines itself as kind or ethical or empathetic or even ‘civilised’. Narratives that speak the realities of the industrial meat complex are relentlessly policed.

There are socially acceptable stories of meat, and meat production. But they can only be told according to very narrow generic conventions, and the stories are often truncated. The gore is washed away. As I wrote Abandon Every Hope, I worked to find ways to transgress what is culturally acceptable to say within my lived context. I needed to haul the gore back onto the cultural scene, and I needed to do it in a way that would still invite readers into the text. Abandon Every Hope is trying to write a version of the fleischgeist. The ghostly, tabooed version.

In your Stella Prize longlist video, you mentioned that this book is a ‘essentially a lamentation’. Why lamentations and how much did poetry influence your writing process?

Lamentation allows a person to speculatively and performatively recreate pain, horror, distress and grief, publicly. Lamentation speaks grief while holding onto horror. This seemed like the only way I could approach the world-sickening world of the slaughterhouse.

I read poetry. Absolutely. I am astonished by poets. I am astonished by the ways they show me the world as it is, as it might be. The poets I read are political and uncompromising. Even though I do not write poetry, I try to write towards the potency I find in the poets I adore.

Describing pain and suffering is not easy or straightforward. Language must be precise to clearly manifest the experience on the page. How did you go about this in Abandon Every Hope?

I am not sure I have been effective at manifesting pain and suffering on the page. Sometimes I think about a head smacked against concrete. I think about my head smacked against concrete and I feel that precise description is impossible, at least for me. There is so much pain and suffering I had to leave out of this book because my mind collapsed when I tried to describe it. I wanted to bring in the fear, the smells, the confusion, the boredom but it was too much for me. I faltered under the weight of it all. So there are many things missing from this work. I wrote several versions of the book: a scholarly monograph, a book-length prose-poem, a series of more conventional essays. From each version I only carried over what felt vital.