Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead

by Hayley Singer

Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote?

Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age?

Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on earth.

Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Politics

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 2023

Reviews

[Nat K · Rating 2 out of 5]

***Longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize***

***04.April.2024 Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize***

”Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness? Of hell? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity.”

The title is very telling and is a clear barometer of how the Author feels.

Chapter titles such Cannibal Cafe, A Smack of Sorrows, Snuff, Blood as it Pours Down the Drain, Holiday in Hell, and Inferno give you an idea of what to expect. It’s about consumerism and capitalism and pain. It truly is a manifesto about animal rights which I completely understand. The pain and suffering of farmed animals being treated as objects to be bred purely for a sure death to end up as meat. My apologies if that is too blunt, but it’s much harder to read what is written in this book. Even the people working in various capacities across various abattoirs and related industries slowly go mad with the work, the smell of blood on their hands lingering long after they’ve been washed with soap.

”Take note of how you are becoming sick from this world.”

Cows being destroyed after mad cow disease, thousands of pigs being destroyed during COVID as the market for them was no longer viable, shipload after shipload of live cattle and sheep dying slow, cruel deaths on the sea before they reach their destination.

I struggle with all of this too. Truly I do. There are so many things which shouldn’t happen but do. But I don’t know that writing with such a low vibration will change anything either.

Perhaps humans are the worst kind of animals of all? All seems to point that way. I sometimes think that. That man is continually proving his dominion over less able creatures and other beings. And seemingly having no problem with that. But a book (albeit a small one) filled with such heavy, grotesque images doesn’t necessarily help any cause either. Not from my perspective anyway.

Filled with an absolute overload of discomfort I skipped chunks which I found too confronting. I realise this was the aim. To make the reader squirm, and perhaps view the world through a different lens.

”What a sad year each day has become.”

For the brief sections where the plight of animals wasn’t being discussed, COVID made an appearance, along with the confusion and isolation of the world at the time. There's mention of Writers such as Dante and Sylvia Plaith, as well as other references which I couldn’t always understand. A lot of it went straight over my head.

And yet, for my dislike of this as a whole, there is some really exquisite writing. Moments of beauty and acute observation.

”Old souls trapped in new wine bottles.”
”The aquarium glow of laptops.”

I wish there had been more of them, as Hayley Singer can clearly write.

Trigger warnings. Slaughterhouse and abattoir scenes. Descriptive scenes of animal death. Overall misery. Suffering. Sadness, such sadness. No hope.

This put me in mind of Anwen Crawford’s No Document, which had been longlisted for the Stella Prize in 2022. I also found that book difficult to read with so many distressing moments.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Stella Prize fell off my radar for a bit, so I'm trying to immerse myself with this year's selection and expand my horizons by trying to read as many of the nominees as I can. Even those books I wouldn't automatically choose. This is one of them. I found it far too confronting. It wasn’t for me. It is dismal and grim.

Hayley Singer speaks eloquently about her book and Stella Prize nomination here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipJQ_...

Shout out to Randwick City Library for having this available on Overdrive.

”This book has been written for farmed animals and in solidarity with those who care for other species as kin.”

Book 1 of my Stella Prize 2024 reading longlist.

[Thubten Palmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I'm going to try and talk everyone I know into reading. Singer says there's a collective human barricade against hearing animal suffering; I think she's made a huge step towards dismantling it here. I spent most of my time reading this sighing and wiping tears away. I don't think one can continue to invisibilise the suffering of the slaughterhouse after reading this

[Joshua Line]

'Take note of how you are becoming sick from this world.'

'I've been looking for a guidebook called Method of Survival Theorems, or something like it... A dream book that lays out different kinds of survival as concept and reality with chapters on the relations between survival and self reliance, survival and production and reproduction, survival and care, survival and poetry.'

'Animals and people crawl about and weep and this is called Life.'

[Declan Fry]

Hayley Singer's debut is darker than the ink it is printed with: factory farming, meatscapes, abattoir noir, the fleischgeist.

To recognise violence in all of its variety, forms and iterations, is to be more clear-eyed than those who would disguise it. Examining the human domination of animals and the violence of our anthropocentrism, Abandon Every Hope is nothing if not clear-eyed. It is a brave, provocative debut, one that heralds Singer as an uncompromising author. In a series of linked essays that are at once philosophical, critical, and prose-poetic, Singer explores the exclusion of animality from our life worlds and the brutalisation of both ourselves and other animals that results. As she writes:

"This is philosophy, religion, science and narrative as ritual exclusion. Human is separated from animal. Animal is separated from soul. These are conceptual moves Val Plumwood calls hyperseparation. Or, the concretion of a licence to kill, a permit of abuse."

One chapter, Snuff, considers death sentences – literally, subjects that are inexpressible, that write white (refusing verbal expression, they turn to white ink on a white page, rendered invisible). Obliteration, Singer reminds us, is a kind of trauma or mourning intrinsic to the worlds we live within, the continual return of unfathomable events and experiences. No one who has ever worked at a meat factory can deny the ugly, brutal labour it demands, the early morning stench. Some deaths we can only ever write around; the thing itself remains unsaid because it's unsayable.

Singer's book engages in a series of circlings and acts of cultural detective work, the "interpretation of narrative artefacts not usually seen as crime narratives". Crimes without perpetrators. (Not because the perpetrators do not exist, but because there are just too damn many.) Recalling authors like Anne Boyer and Kate Zambreno, the results are visceral and haunting. Reading it, I was often reminded of the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz: "a great fear chokes him / of finding a word / written all in capitals / and not being able to pronounce it."

Contrary to its title, Abandon Every Hope asks that we hold onto at least one: the hope of refusal. Refusal of commodification, of mass slaughter. The refusal of statistics that work to bury our dead so that we don't have to.

You can check out the rest of the 2024 Stella Prize shortlist here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-0...

[Natasha (jouljet) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A confronting, graphic reminder of the consumptive treatment we humans inflicted on the animals of our world. Mostly in the food production industry, but also the horrors of transport and slaughter, and the impact of climate change and the recent pandemic panic.

The pause that the examples of animal suicide gives. The stomach-turning detail of the treatment of animals specifically bred for our meals, medicines and science explorations.

This rumination on animals seemed to speak to several other previous Stella Prize longlisted books, with a number coming to mind in this reading. In fact, as one vividly came into my head after a discussion on the pages, Singer mentioned the very story.

An unsettling book of prose to challenge our ethics, knowledge and ignorance of the meat world and animal care. Unhelpful to the pork and beef and poultry industry, a brutal reminder, and eye-opening telling, of the hidden journey from farm to plate.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ideas explored in the novel are grief, loss, murder, pain, flesh and meat. Some of the emotions exploded were anxiety, despondency and horror.
I found these essays or pieces to be mesmerising; so contemplatively written yet also serving as a well worded wrecking ball to dismantle many complacencies that people often rely on, for our own (hedonistic?) purposes. The writing is poetic, expansive and captivating and not for nothing is the closest I've come in a long time to really reflecting on the whys behind choices I make, and considering change as a result. I would say this is a book you could read time and time again, and would gain new appreciation and insight each time; and I would hazard that I will be doing as such. The historical frame of reference, and cultural critique lens Singer employs within this text is powerful

[Kim Stallwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow.....

[Sabrina]

"Looking is a tool. It is also, of course, a weapon."

Necropolitics, focusing on the modern death of non-human animals and what humanism means (or doesn’t) in contrast. Honestly, everyone should read this. grim, but how can it not be? Grim, but isn't that the world we're in? Singer is doing her absolute best to wade through grief, and to tug the reader through it too. Singer holds a mirror up to reflect the anthropocene, frames the pandemic around it, then gives you a hammer and asks you to shatter it. Powerful stuff.

"I go searching for disappearance just as it were a river, blank and undulant. A river of last light. A river of exits. A river that is bigger now than it has ever been. That swells up, like a puffed face, and smells rotten. I tell myself, not only will I find this river, I will follow it all the way to its source."

[D'face · Rating 2 out of 5]

Animals die on farms, in abattoirs, on the side of the road. This book documents the many sad ways. It is a tough read but the argument or purpose of elaborating and dwelling on this misery is unclear.

[Peta Garside · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really great collection that I didn’t know what to expect from it. Think some of went over my head but honestly it was truly emotional reading.

[Martin Rowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely give five-star reviews, but this fascinating and shocking meditation on the lives and deaths of animals amid the COVID and extinction crises merited it. That doesn't mean to say it's perfect: ABANDON can be opaque, disjointed, and sometimes tough to read. But I am sure it is a book I will return to over and over again to plumb its depths and recharge my rage, despair, and commitment.

Although the blurb doesn't say it, the book's best description is Singer's own, a thanatography: "a form that works to invoke the unnamed dead. In this way it is related to lament. It is also a prose poem formed as a collage of news items and images laid side-by-side, a strategy that attempts to give life to moments of death and remember the dead in a world that would have us forget." Because it deals with the unspeakable, and the unspeakable machinery of violence we have constructed, ABANDON EVERY HOPE also demonstrates a perpetual struggle with language, meaning, and what can and cannot be said. It does it in often startling and memorable ways.

Overwhelmed by the mountains of shit—actual as well as metaphorical—upon which factory farming rests, Singer has a dream—an excremental vision, as it were: "A Subcommittee from the Council of Poets debates whether the primary guide for imagining and describing the contemporary Earth Era should be fecal matter. This is a faecological time interval, in which many conditions and processes on Earth are understood to have been profoundly altered by shit." There follow precise renderings (the word is a useful one) of the horrors of the "depopulation" of animals in the early stages of the COVID crisis, the segmentation of work in slaughterhouses where animals are segmented, and detailings of our thoughtless, endless cruelties. All of this is in service of trying to grasp "collective animal trauma against which there is a collective human barricade. We cannot *actually* see sadness and pain or hear a cry of heartache when we see sadness, pain or hear a cry of heartache."

For anyone (and I include myself) who has attempted to describe what it means to live an ordinary and a creative life within the interminable repetition of mass animal slaughter, ABANDON EVERY HOPE is at once an exercise in speaking against the silence, of making some sense of the obscenity, and an apt description of the task for those engaged in animal liberation and creative writing. As Singer writes: "If it is capable of doing anything at all, [writing] has to incite total animal liberation. Has to move society towards a new form of existence, or it will be a failure." That's an impossible goal for any writer, let alone any book, but ABANDON EVERY HOPE marks a heroic effort at doing precisely that.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Those who have been abandoned are not irretrievable, though mostly it feels that way. The language is the same as the language of being buried alive.’

What can I tell you about this collection of essays and thoughts? What can I say about the discomfort I experienced while reading it? Should you read it as well? I was expecting something different, and I almost did not finish reading. Almost, but respect for Ms Hayley’s views kept me turning the pages.

Here is the blurb:
‘Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote?
Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age?
Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on earth.

Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?’

Confronting, uncomfortable and unpleasant. Of course, most of us who eat meat have never seen animals slaughtered, have never been in an abattoir and are able to separate our fondness for particular animals (often named) from those collective (unnamed) beasts we eat. After all, our meat is a commodity prepared and packaged for sale without any remaining hint of the processes undergone. Should we be? What is Ms Singer’s objective? Is it (simply) to share her views, or to try to influence others? The messages are uncomfortable, but at times the writing is sublime.

I finished this book aware of my heightened level of cognitive dissonance (temporarily, at least). Will I stop eating meat? Unlikely.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[vicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

— Tonight my dreams come in the shape of a cemetery. Hundreds and hundreds of plots.

i think the flesh of this novel (its graphic dissection of physical, animal bodies, but also its meditation on hopelessness under capitalism) fails to be as shocking as it should be (literal visceral violence is so commonplace today that this book references brains being cut out in nbc hannibal and i know exactly what scene it's talking about) but its bones shines through in such a way i can't help but appreciate it

i may be a vegetarian but i would be lying if i even pretended to know the extent of animal cruelty in the world as it is presented here. honestly sometimes the plain cold facts are more confronting than the pictures of violence. this is not so much a series of essays i picked up to learn, but one that i sit with and let sit with me for some time

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bird flu has appeared in Australia. Chickens at farms in Victoria have tested positive for one of the strains of the virus. Other, more virulent strains have been tearing through wild birds around the world, causing mass deaths of penguins and pelicans. They've crossed into other species: dairy cattle in the US, sea lions in Australia, people. Just like COVID-19, bird flu is spilling over from its usual hosts, yet another illustration of the nexus of environmental destruction and human health that scientists have been warning us about for decades. Read more on my blog