166OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDimpending slaughter.^21 Like several of the “Translations,” the speaker of
these poems is plural: “us” pigs and “all me” cows. The language in both
poems is simultaneously harsh and beautiful, ungrammatical and pow-
erful. As in Barbara Gowdy’s novel The White Bone, Murray tries to
imagine and articulate the shared terror of animals as they face impend-
ing death, allowing his own language to become strange rather than
cloying. The poems are hybrid too in that they express mostly somatic
experience linguistically. The cows speak in the present tense: “Teats all
tingling still / from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths.” The
pigs in the slaughterhouse line recall experience before the “sore cement”
and the “pole that lightning’s tied to.” They were happy and powerful:
“We ate crisp. / We nosed up good rank in the tunneled bush. / Us all
fuckers then.” They can see down the line, hear what is coming.
Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
Not the terrible body-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling
here in no place with our heads on upside down.It does not seem surprising that pigs in a slaughterhouse would have
some understanding of what is happening, that those ahead of them are
having their throats slit as they are hung by their feet, that their screams
are of terror, and that knowledge of impending death leads, as it does
for humans, to an instantaneous memory of aspects of life that make it
valuable. For the cows too the plurality of the speaking voice suggests
that the herd knows what is happening to the others, that the speaker is
thus simultaneously dead and alive.
A stick goes out from the human
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.As Coetzee argues in The Lives of Animals, what goes on in slaughter-
houses is so horrific that we have mostly sealed it off from our awareness