Pounds of Flesh: On Munir Hachemi’s “Living Things”
Munir Hachemi, transl. Julia Sanches | Living Things | Coach House Books | June 2024 | 144 Pages
Vegetarianism used to be quite the scandal. As the singer k.d. lang smilingly reminisced, “It was easier to come out as a lesbian than it was to come out as a vegetarian.” When she collaborated with PETA for an ad campaign, beef-lovers from Kansas to Calgary reacted with fury, resulting in bomb threats, arson, and mean-spirited jabs; many stations stopped playing her music, with one continuing to air her songs interspliced with the sounds of mooing. What lang stated plainly in her video, blue-jeaned and wholesome with an adorable cow chewing at her side, was a simple fact: “If you knew how meat was made, you’d lose your lunch. I know—I’m from cattle country.” But as the backlash from ranchers, industry workers, and ministers of agriculture attested, any public denigration of carnivorism was an unforgivable attack on an economic foundation. In wide swathes of rural land, the flesh trade is absolutely essential to local livelihood, and in our contemporary reality of industry rule, product is life. Caught within the insatiable maw of the money machine, the human body becomes inextricable from its laboring potential, and thus it too becomes wrangled up with the chickens, pigs, and cows, crunched into that ever-growing appetite.
Munir Hachemi is trying to tell this story of living things caught up in the gears of profit, of human hungers, of all the mechanisms of atrocity running in the background of our daily lives. These days, there’s no human activity that isn’t connected to some wider, more sinister process, and Hachemi’s novel—equally a work of ecological horror as it is an investigation of literary didacticism—forms an attempt to portray that immense, purposefully invisibilised system by which we are fed and sustained. There is a series of factory farms, a litany of sickening practices, deaths both human and not, all of which presents like an ethical prompt. But Living Things is a more surprising, lithe, and complex work than a manifesto for cleaner living. Instead, what grows in its narrative stride is the despair that takes root after the awareness of evil, an utterly contemporary helplessness.
Stories, even when they’re good, even when you’re in their captivity, cannot replicate the act of storytelling. What we’ve chosen to denote as “voice” in the written word is more accurately described as a sensitivity to how the voice works at its most persuasive and commanding—the way it pauses, the way it lilts; if anything, it is a testament to how good a writer or a translator is at listening. In reading, we don’t really get the experience of what it actually feels like to be enraptured by voice, because the page can be abandoned and returned to, while in oral delivery the tale is inextricable from the moment. What gives the told story vividity is how well it can round out that moment, to use the moment to make itself sharper, more enthralling, to never exclude the materials of the moment but envelop them within its own narrative procession. Hachemi seems to know this, because Living Things begins with a treatise on storytelling—and if this seems off-putting or overly pedantic, I can only say that it is his way of giving us that sense of a moment, of preparing us for the fact that the page is poised for us to enter its own dominion, and we must in fact resist. We must stay in this world in order to receive his story:
In the pages after this preface, you may come across a sentence like ‘everything is covered in blood.’ If that happens, don’t try to tease out any hidden meaning. I’m not saying that horror coats everything like a fine, invisible film. . . All you should understand is that everything is covered in blood. The snow, the gravel, the houses, the lamp posts. Everything.
What is detailed in the following chapters, Hachemi insists, must be seen as the world itself—what he calls “embellishment degree zero”. Essentially, he wants the reader to be a listener. Though this may seem like a dictum for reportage, the facts of his narrative matter much less than the active role of the person telling it; it is not the impossible resurrection of the past, but its reincarnation in the present.
One perceives here the influence of Javier Cercas, whose journalistic novels incorporate intensive research but refute the conjecture of fictionality, with many of his works focusing on the enforced amnesia in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. The role of fiction, according to Cercas (who follows in the way of Pavese and Eliot), is to make reality bearable—which is to say, intelligible. No matter where a book lands on the gradient between fantasy and realism, the text is a universal agreement of sense-making—to have the global mess of time-streams walk at one’s own pace for a while, to let chaos be tempered by linguistic order. Plots must hold strong to give contour and legibility to experiences, but it is voice that ultimately gives us a sense of being capably guided. And though no one is naïve enough to believe in “embellishment degree zero”, the fictionist applies this mandate only to insist that the background need not disappear as a story takes center stage, that we can be acutely aware of our own listening presence, holding to the greater soundscape.
Translated with incredible poetry by Julia Sanches, Living Things is the account, told in first person by one “Munir Hachemi,” of four young men from Spain seeking seasonal labour in the south of France. This detail alone creates a fecund sociological ground for the story that follows, casting the characters within the systemic abuse against foreign workers, the culture of interchangeability and anonymity that underpin temporary jobs, and the particular economic conditions in Spain at the time—vaguely referenced—which have fostered the normalcy of seeking jobs abroad during the summers. After arriving in the southwestern commune of Aire-sur-l’Adour, Munir and company first set up residence at a local campsite, then make their way to the local office of temporary workers: Association Solidarité Travail, or AST. After being told that the relatively cushy and high-paying job of grape-picking is no longer available, they are offered some other vaguely-termed positions (les poulets, les canards, les champignons) instead. What follows is a rapid physical and psychic dissolution as the men find themselves shuffled around to different entry-level jobs within the local sector of industrial agriculture—caging chickens, force feeding ducks, aiding in some secretive scientific venture to engineer crops. Each of these tasks are brutal in their own way, described with an increasing sense of despair and desperation.
The four men are all variations on a theme—literature-tending intellectuals seeking validation and artistic material through manual labor—though placed on a sliding socioeconomic scale, with some needing the money more than others. Essentially, they are a sample group of liberal arts graduates, left-leaning and world-hungry, on their way to pad their memoirs. In the lead-up to the work catalyzing their breakdowns, Hachemi uses the distinctly learned tenor of their conversations to sprinkle in the theory that readers could later look back on as the narrative’s philosophical backbone: the aesthetics of estrangement, for example, allowing new conjectures to be made from familiar subjects; or memory and its resistance to factual rigor:
G explained that just as seeing a urinal in a museum compels us to consider that object under a new regime of light and darkness, seeing a police officer in uniform in the middle of a desert—for example—could strip him of his aura of power and allow us—he claimed—’to see the emperor naked.’
The unwritten footnote is that these men are used to abstractions and theories; as such, they’re utterly ill-prepared for the concrete violence and abjection of industrial food production, the sickening potency of death which wholly resists signification. There may be a “discourse” to be distinguished in the act of capturing genetically modified hens, impossibly crowded by the hundreds in a hellishly overheated warehouse, and stuffing them into wire frames. Some “deduction” to be made from hearing their bones crunch, from the overpowering smell of excrement, from the acute awareness of both their torment and your own, seething amidst the rage of being within this raw, pulverizing prison. The ability to identify any reason in this environment, however, must be made at a great distance, for any integration with that actuality is to temporarily eradicate the discriminations that make us capable of reading situations. “The counterpart of culture,” as proposed by the philosopher Paul Santilli, “is not nature but horror,” which invokes real elements that are nevertheless generally unthinkable as a part of our reality. If culture is what allows us to reference, to apply language, and to maintain categories and taxonomies with some rigor, then horror is the obsolescence of those capacities. Life is not alive there; pain is not painful, and torture is not a despicable crime but the baseline of a job well done. Once Hachemi has moved on to the actual account of their time in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the novel becomes epistolary in form, a series of journal entries geared towards a more immediate, urgent notation of the world. There appears a loss that extends beyond the exhaustion, sadness, and sense of futility:
I have a new understanding of Piglia’s famous question: how to narrate the horror of real events?
Ricardo Piglia, an Argentine writer, was speaking of his nation’s military dictatorship, a seven-year period wherein the junta murdered or disappeared approximately 30,000 people under the facade of “national reorganisation.” As iterated most directly in his 1980 novel, Artificial Respiration, Piglia premised then that a more adequate method of narration cannot simply posit the novel as a mirror of the world, but instead as a force that creates new spaces and time zones. A dozen years later, with The Absent City, he would invent a machine that could reintegrate the repressed memories of Argentina’s dictatorship back into the present, thereby piecing together a public consciousness that had been shattered by indiscriminate acts of terror. The memories come in fragments, anachronistic and hallucinatory, but they arrive, and thus are instantiated with a new permanence, adding a bit of rupture to any totalizing, mandated, and necessarily suppressive narrative. Resisting conformity in any sense, this flawed, disorienting narration is what chips away at the smooth surface of a perfect system, eroding apathy and repression with a persistent and scattered haunting. An endless proliferation of alternative testimonies, then—this is how defiance is exercised.
It may seem uncouth or simply incommensurate to compare the horrors of industrial farming to dictatorship, but both are fanatic, necessarily secretive, and seamlessly integrated into the everyday; it would be more accurate, however, to say that food distribution and access is one of the mightiest branches by which an oppressive society flexes its control. The authoritarian’s role is to ensure the lack of any viable alternative to what they provide, and when it comes to sustenance, corporations are able to seize upon one of the few things for which there is truly no adequate replacement. We have no choice but to eat, and any option related to food is mediated by the terms of access, calculated from various factors of availability, distance, and price. Industrial farming exists for the supposed reason that it is capable of satisfying all of the above to give the most food to the most people, and this is the dominant narrative: to push hunger as a supply issue instead of the political problem that it actually is. That line remains tremendously convincing and thus remarkably successful, continuing to reify itself by screaming the central question—how else are you going to feed all these people?!—so loudly that an answer can hardly be heard.
If you haven’t yet suspected, the dictator of Living Things is not one individual demagogue, but class. The lines separating those who have and those who don’t are starkly drawn in this enclave of seasonal employment, and despite their relatively comfortable backgrounds, Munir and his companions are firmly the latter. After all, they’re here with empty pockets, ready to earn their way—and this distinction, too, finds its fitting metaphor in food. Soon after arriving, they head to the supermarket:
Our shopping list might actually be a perfect outline for a chronicle of our time in Aire-sur-l’Adour, one composed of nutritional values, saturated fats, carbohydrates, and animal products; a tale, in short, that Schopenhauer and other physiognomists would have found much more interesting than the one I’m telling.
What follows is a litany of foodstuffs that largely have no purpose beyond filling the stomach and providing sufficient energy to work—with plenty of alcohol to numb the tiredness and defeatism at the day’s end. Later, as the four increasingly decline into exhaustion and apathy, their living situation also collapses into a disgusting maelstrom of waste and detritus, compounded by their malodorous garments which hang on to the vicious nature of their jobs. One week after their first day, they also begin to run out of food.
After being inundated by the brutality that is their new day-to-day—which at this point involves vaccinating chickens in a ceaseless, mangling procession— Munir goes vegetarian: “Going off meat—for good—isn’t so much a decision as a necessary consequence of this morning’s work. There is no other way.” Here, the ghostly axiom of the story has been made pungent and corporeal: there is very little separating the workers themselves from the creatures they brutalize. Operating in this assembly line means being severed from natural light, the movement of time, innate compassion for sentient beings, pleasure, cleanliness, and anything else that composes one’s sense of dignity. As the animals with their broken wings and exploding internal organs are shoved onward through the well-oiled channels, the ones doing the shoving are caught up in the motions, forced to ignore their own agony and compelled by the need to eat, to rest—neither of which can be accomplished without completing the shift. They are as helpless as their charges. Even quitting and going back to Spain (which seems at this point to be the only reasonable choice) is brought up only half-heartedly in the journals; the blinding immediacy of primary needs obliviates one’s capacity to consider any other option.
Though Living Things does not function like a traditional novel in many ways, there does exist something like a “critical event” that swerves the characters from their path of disintegration, and it’s important to note that this turn takes place after the four men switch from working with animals to working with plants. The final assignment they take on is with a sleek corporation called Synngate, “the third largest company in seed sales . . . and the first in phytosanitary products.” In a role much less violent but somehow more sinister, the men are tasked with facilitating the self-fertilization of corn plants, and later, with the testing of different pests on specific breeds, working towards a vague purpose that seems to be along the lines of eradicating local farmers as competition and creating some king species of proprietary corn. Though nowhere near as materially abhorrent as working with livestock, it is this fundamental elucidation of corporate lordship that catalyses the protagonists’ urge to revolt. They put together theories of how Synngate, temporary work, migrancy, capitalism, racism, and the whole foundation of Aire-sur-l’Adour fit together in one vast schematic of exploitation; they fantasize about laying waste to the whole enterprise. As Munir has just chosen to remove meat from his diet for moral reasons, it is particularly heartbreaking when he is then confronted with irrefutable evidence that corporate farming is devastating on every level—with its pursuit of monopoly; its disregard for ecological balance; its maniacal, nihilistic manipulation of life. But instead of letting all that accumulated rage and sorrow build up to an explosive event, Hachemi suddenly switches to a tone that is notably less urgent, settling on a stoic, almost defeated attitude of reflection to carry the concluding chapters. The writing once again shifts to ruminate on the role of description and remembrance, the responsibility of testimony and the “necessary vehicle for language to be able to tell what really happened”, and the cacophonic intrigue of what had seemed like life-or-death mysteries a few pages ago come to quick and simple endings.
Always, always: how to narrate the horror of real events? As Cercas, Piglia, Hachemi, and countless other writers have sought to show us, the horror of reality is not only found at its observable surface, but in the way that a single experience of pain, revulsion, or monstrosity can be followed and linked to a labyrinthine matrix of terrors, which itself becomes more obscure and vague as one continues to seek it to its end. It’s one thing to swear off meat because you’ve been made sensitive to the suffering of animals, but it’s another altogether to realize that eating itself has become an act that indicates towards widespread suffering. As the philosopher Noël Carroll remarked, we are afraid of monsters because “they are beings . . . that specialize in formlessness, incompleteness, categorical interstitiality, and categorical contradictoriness”, and most of the systems that have thus far set our lives in order is monstrous by exactly this definition; they resist concretization and comprehension, hiding and camouflaging themselves to be indiscernible, and most of us can only grasp at the totality in the frayed threads they use to bind themselves to us. Essentially, they fuck with us by annihilating the way we think. They demand that we not think.
Living Things comes to a stuttering, almost ungraceful ending. I suppose this is why I felt that its story was less written than it was told; the mood of the last few pages was that of a fire burned down to a crumbling glow, the night solidly descending, and the speaking voice descending to a rasp, weary from talking so long and made somewhat despondent by reminiscence. Munir and his friends leave France—the whole thing is left to the past. The experience was accomplished, the material was collected, a lesson was learned and iterated: “storytelling . . . is something we do by instinct while the world falls to pieces around us.”
When Frederic Jameson posited that we are within a “late capitalism” of global prevalence and superstructures, he asserted that any political art for this era requires “some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing . . . in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.” The diagnosis is clear, but literature must look closer at that word, unimaginable.
Narrative is the methodology in our reconstructions and our imaginations, our casting of ourselves and the appearances of others; it is the formula by which we structure our days, how we make our choices. As such, it has been cultivated slowly, through generations instead of lifetimes, in the same way as any evolutionary trait. Living Things may come off as occasionally disjointed or overly concerned with its own creation, but ultimately it exposes how one juggles the history of literary forms, trying to figure out how to interrogate and develop the immediate present. Sculpting the not-yet imaginable. The simple task of grasping our positioning is in fact a gargantuan feat of wrestling with recollection and inscription, the archive and the canon, weighing one’s helplessness and incapacitation with the fact of political and moral responsibility. Living Things, then, is not a work that ascertains its social service, attempting to struggle against the enormity and tragedy of what Hachemi lived through. Instead, it is documentation of one writer in the throes of resisting neutralization. There will always be texts that envision the future, drawing out their great revolutionary plans to strike, but there are also more confessional, trying works that take aim at the beginning—when the struggle has not yet begun to articulate itself, and consciousness is shaking off the plague of numbness. The aim of the former is victory, and the aim of the latter is simple, human clarity. It surmises that before we act, we must first hear ourselves speak.
Seen through the great eye of the global economy, we are all disposable. You are. I am. We could be as easily thrown away as the carcasses we filet and portion—and perhaps the only aspect of ourselves that remains safe from this carelessness is the wandering of our expressions, the fall and rise of our voices, the evidence of how we tried to chase a changing and elusive world, the tracks that will hopefully be followed and built upon. The desperate, sacred, alive work of living things.