As someone who has never before
purposefully killed an animal, I always thought taking something’s life would
be a profound moment. Hearing bones pop and crack, the gurgle of blood, my
first slaughter would be Homeric. Grown men would collapse weeping in the
streets of Troy and my inner, primal spirit would be sated by the ferric stench
of life-blood and the warm humidity of a quickly fleeing life. With Ares’
demands met, I would walk away with some new insight, perhaps on the tragedy of
life and death; something, at least, to make me appear profound at a cocktail
party or over drinks. Instead, my experience was fairly underwhelming and gave
me a sense of how naturally killing comes to humans. No adrenaline rush, no
glorious high: just a dead rat and a poorly chosen stick.
Walking by my Mkuu’s (head of school’s) house one sunny afternoon, I noticed him
standing out front holding, what in Tanzania can only properly be called, a
child-beating stick or fimbo. Around
him, his two sons, also armed with sticks, were unpacking and moving boxes.
After exchanging greetings, my Mkuu
declared “we are at war,” pointing his stick at a pile of five or six dead
rats. In the midst of processing my first pile of bludgeoned rats, I was snapped
back to reality by the command, “quick, grab a stick, there’s one more in this
box.” Knowing what I know now, in my rushed call-to-arms, I grabbed a fairly impotent
stick; lacking the bend that allows a good fimbo
to flatten most of its length against the ground and thereby cover more area,
my rigid, heavy Excalibur’s point of impact was limited to just the tip (ha!). As
the rat was released into the yard and the chase began, we were joined by Mama Gulam, who rushed out of the house wielding
what, in any culture, can only be described as a club.
Rats, I learned, are sprinters.
They start fast, engaging in acrobatic acts of evasion and escape in tight quarters, but tire
quickly in the open, making easy targets. Diving exhausted from a tree, the rat
met its final moments in a bed of leaves, the killing blow offered to an
incompetent and frightened man-child: me. My long fantasized moment of triumph
sounded exactly the same as the many times, in my ineptitude, I struck only
leaves. It was not poetic.
Allow me a brief discussion of
animal-human relations in Tanzania. Killing pests is part of the daily routine
and people do it with a smile or a shrug. Grandmas are exceptionally skilled at
clubbing rats to death and the proudest I’ve ever seen my Mkuu’s son, Gulam, was when he killed a rat with a brick; he then
asked if we should give it the de-worming medicine his family gave their
chickens. Additionally, pets are not part of the cultural practice in Tanzania;
hence, all animals are seen as objects. They are manhandled, killed, and
exclusively seen as a means to an end. The transition from animals to food is also
much more visible than in America. As in, you see it. Chickens, goats, ducks,
and cows patrol the neighborhoods during the day, scrounging for edible garbage
thrown outside of homes, only to return at night to be slaughtered and eaten.
Children are assigned to kill and dress chickens. Your local butcher shop
consists of the still furred hindquarters of cattle suspended from meat hooks,
a tree stump, a scale, and a knife; cuts of meat are not a thing here, so your
kilo comes is rendered through indiscriminate hacking through bone and flesh. No
matter how hard I try, the sound of the butcher’s makes me flinch. Tanzanians
don’t.
As an omnivore and American, it’s
refreshing to be made aware of the source of meats’ and the requirements of
raising livestock; here it’s hard to forget how much work people put into an
animal before they put it into themselves. For example, the resources that go
into meat production are much more tangible when you observe the amount of
water a cow can put away during a drought. In America, we never see our meat
being tortured and grown at a freakish pace before we eat it, and we remove any
vestige of life- a head, tail, or even bones- from our flesh abstractions. This
isn't making any value judgment and, like most things that are kind of fucked
up about America, I've come to miss it; say what you want about the proper
treatment of animals and conscious eating, because I know you will, but a
person only needs to see a disembodied goat head being hand-washed in a plastic
bucket or a rooster being decapitated with a too-dull knife only a finite
number of times before asking, “can a robot do that inhumanely?”
Sorry for my discursion, now back to
m’stories. This final episode involves myself and a mouse. For reasons to
numerous and too petty to get into, this mouse had become my white whale. It
had evaded my broom one too many times and, instead of taking my leg, it was
pooping all over my kitchen and chewing the lids off of my oil jugs. After
drinking its fill, based on the position of the bottles and level of oil in the
morning, I’m certain it hopped in and did victory laps. Finally, as my visiting
friend Deirdre and I were enjoying chocolate cake and ginger tea in my
courtyard, she saw the mouse run into my shower (which, in my house is a
concrete floored room with a hole). Grabbing my stick and flinging open the
door, I fell upon the mouse. For a brief period, I became Ahab, Samson, Death,
and old-testament God and that pitiful mouse was an amalgamation of the mask,
the philistines, life, and Sodom. Full of rage, I struck that mouse down,
shouting obscenities in what, knowing myself, could only have been a very high-pitched
and unmanly voice. Presented with the killing blow, I brought the stick down
and, in contrast with the din of my broomstick hitting concrete floor, produced
an organic thud, not unlike the sound of someone getting struck with a
baseball.
So there Deirdre and I were, stuck
with the task of awkwardly rolling the limp mouse’s corpse out of my courtyard.
Watching its ragdoll body tumble and flop over the uneven pavement, I couldn't
help but see the moue in two lights. In one, tinted by my rage and prideful
victory, it was Hektor, shamefully being dragged behind my chariot, an empty
vessel paying the price for combat and life’s passion for killing. But, in the
other, shaded by sadness, it was the innocent and natural Petrokolis, reminding
us of the regret in every death and the cost of every life taken.
