'the map of belonging'

'Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos, they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance' (John Berger, 'Why look at animals?', About Looking, London: Vintage, 1991, p. 26).


The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another, knowing instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don't hear is the hum of undergrowth or the crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-roar booming against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears are sharp points but the noises they seek are too far away.

I wish I could hear your voice again.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992, p. 135. Photos from Paignton Zoo © David Williams 2009

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Ten days or so after posting the material above, in Sicily, as a rivulet of red-hot lava crept through the snow on Etna in the distance, I read Isabel Fonseca's horrifying and brilliant book Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey (London: Vintage, 1995) At one point, she describes a trip to Tirana zoo in Albania in the early 1990s, with a young Roma companion Nuzi. For Fonseca, this zoo constituted the 'molten heart' of some hell, and her description reads like a scene from The Island of Doctor Moreau:

"The disgraceful pavilion was death row for wildlife. Standing before it, collar firmly over nose, one could only wonder why all the other animals hadn't been killed, as all Albanian laboratory animals had been by now, one researcher told me, for lack of food.He hadn't meant food to feed the rats and rabbits: the pink-eyed specimens had all been stolen and sold as food. The newspapers printed warnings about the rare cancers and viruses that these black-market Rodentia carried ...

Still, stunned curiosity impelled us forward. There was a bear-dog, and a lion-dog, with enough remaining fur-patches between them to quilt a chihuahua. The smallest hairless animals - and it was unclear what they were, or had once been - looked like large baby hamsters: pink tubes. A pair of eczema-stricken piglets were probably pumas when they first arrived ... An X-ray tiger lay head-down and ill in one cage; next along was an ex-chimp, morosely bathing in a manky puddle below his little section of tree. There was a dead tortoise and something that looked like a hunk of pressed peat: was it an iguana? No, it was another dead tortoise, a naked one. Perhaps the keeper had made off with its valuable shell.

The birds didn't look as though they could fly, or walk, or even step out of the congealing egg-drop soup they all stood in and tried to pull loose from - the liquid was like chewing gum on your shoe sole. In contrast to their neighbours, the birds at least resembled some light-weight version of themselves. In the last cage there was an eagle, its Turkish trousers now several sizes too big, and the beak bunched and rippled into accordion ridges from some kind of beaky osteoporosis, so that it looked as though it had been punched, hard.

"The eagle", Nuzi told me, with unnecessary irony, "is our national bird" (pp. 71-2).

memory's lining

In the middle of Sans Soleil, Chris Marker’s 1983 film-essay gathering ‘things that quicken the heart’ from ‘two extreme poles of survival’ (Japan and Guinea Bissau in Africa), there occurs one of the most horrifying and enduring moments of lastness I’ve ever seen. At first we watch Japanese children participating in an annual ceremony to commemorate the death of animals at Tokyo Zoo. The narrator interprets their staring curiosity as an attempt to peer across the partition separating life and death. What they ‘see’ by virtue of a sudden edit is, magically, a giraffe galloping through the African savannah (or rather we might say, after Bataille, that the gallop is giraffing – it is so distinct an action). Soon it becomes clear that the creature is startled, afraid; it is being pursued by hunters. A shot rings out and it is wounded, it slows to a halt. A second bullet pierces its neck and ribbons of crimson blood spurt from both sides in pulsing waves. The giraffe staggers, teeters forward, then lurches backward a few steps before its long legs buckle and it falls heavily to the ground fatally wounded. We see its death throes, its face, its eyes, before a white hunter with a rifle steps into the frame and delivers one final point-blank gunshot to its head. A grey mist of vaporised skull and tissue mushrooms from the back of its head, and it lies still. Later the vultures arrive and feast on its eyes … This is a context devoid of ritual remembering, the narrator tells us, in which ‘death is not a partition to cross through, but a road to follow’.

In addition to the elegance and vulnerability of the giraffe, in addition to the grotesque violence of its annihilation by trophy hunters, somehow my shock at these images is further amplified by the rhythms of its running and dying, and the collapsing architecture of its fall from on high. The callous brutality of its final moments of life are traced in space and time; it moves so fast and yet it seems to last an eternity. My eyes are both witnesses to the obscenity of this ‘frenzy of the visible’ and temporarily blinded by it. Although part of me wishes to consign its memory to oblivion somehow, it ghosts me - and I still see the giraffe’s running and its dying, its flying and falling, for they have become part of my image-memory.

Earlier on in the film, the narrator had suggested that: ‘memory is not the opposite of forgetting, but its lining’.

(Extract from 'how do you say goodbye? last songs': an invited presentation given at the symposium 'Goat Island: Lastness, raiding the archive, and pedagogical practices in performance', Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, 2008:
© David Williams)