Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead by Hayley Singer

‘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