Pariah Dogs

with dogs at the edge of life

colin dayan

pariah dogs

part three

113

Perhaps they remembered the days of revolution in the valley, the blackened buildings, the communications cut off, those crucified and gored in the bull ring, the pariah dogs barbecued in the market place.M A L C O L M L O W R Y, U N D E R T H E V O L C A N O

A S O U N D O F G U L L S , a sunlit port, human voices, barking dogs. In a city market, dogs are walking past, lying down, sitting. Dogs gather in the center of the screen. Night falls. A dog gives birth; she nurses her babies. A constable in sharp silhouette comes and looks on as, growling, she huddles over her young. So begins Serge Avedikian’s fifteen-minute animated film Barking Island (origi-nally Chienne d’histoire), which, in 2010, won the Palme d’Or as the best short film at Cannes. The images are paintings by Thomas Azuélos, made deep and weighty, contoured yet dissolving at the edges, almost palpable.

Once the music changes, the scene shifts to humans at a long table discussing how to eliminate the dogs. Newspapers announce that there are more than sixty thousand dogs on the streets of Constantinople. The Turkish authorities appeal for an end to them. After exploring various options—gassing, incineration, turning corpses into meat for human consumption—offered by the Pasteur Institute in Paris and other European experts, the Turks decide to round up the dogs and abandon them on Sivriada (Sharp Island), a deserted place in the Sea of Marmara.

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But we do not know this, not yet. We see the dogs, and we hear growls. They sense the danger. Men arrive. The bitch tries to protect her young as other dogs are grabbed, netted, and snared, dropped into wooden crates. A sputter of orange, splash of red, and the dogs overlap, catch the light or obscure its glare. Dogs crouch, or bend into the upswing of their heads, mouths open, turned toward the men who have come to get them. Touches of white, yellow, light brown, black. It is difficult to watch this gouache of light and blood, presented against the sheer shape of dogs: their firm, jagged forms, the contours of bodies. Then we see the crated dogs carried to a boat, and we hear the sound of gulls and the whimpering of dogs at sea. The whimpers become squeals as the boat nears the rock island. In a blaze of sun, in the yellow sky of the afternoon, the crates are thrown and crash against the rocks, as the dogs are left to die on crags that have no green, where nothing lives or grows.

Now, in the darkness, desperate cries are heard, while the forces of law and order, the Turkish officials, are shown in the

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city, sitting comfortably at their meal, these stern and approx-imate humans. Winds blow into the room, carrying howls and wailing. The men shut the window. In the final scene, spellbind-ing in its visual intensity, a cruise ship passes the island of dogs. A painter sketches the desperate and the dying, the skeletons, the dogs. Some are still alive and barking. They jump into the water and swim toward the ship. A passenger hides her eyes. Another takes photos. As the ship pulls away, the dog bodies become black specks in the water, and the sea soon covers them. But suddenly we hear the barks and, again, the howls. Is this real or a haunt-ing memory of what had been life? A shot of the rock island, the bones, the vultures. There is not even the shadow of a dog left.

It is over. In 1910 more than thirty thousand dogs were trans-ported to the island. An article called “Suffering Dogs: The Canine Exiles from Constantinople,” written not long after their expul-sion, reported:

The death rate was about 200 a day. An industry has been started on the island by a Frenchman who skins the dead car-casses and boils them for the purpose of extracting the bones, both skin and bones being exported to Europe. Fresh arrivals at the island now take place once a week only, as the supply is fast diminishing which is not surprising, seeing that the city has been practically cleared of dogs.1

Avedikian links the Armenian genocide in April 1915 to these thousands of dogs cleansed from the streets of Constantinople and left to starve. Dogs were cast as perfect equivalents to those marked for displacement and death. During the film we never hear a human voice, only the dogs.

In every slaughter—and they continue today with increasing regularity—dogs alone seem prominent, present to our ears, or to our eyes. In Whistler, British Columbia, weeks after the Winter Olympics in 2010, a hundred sled dogs that had hauled tourists for a company called Outdoor Adventures were executed by the


person who raised and named them.2 In March 2011 dogs shot by animal control officers were found dead on a landfill across the street from the Chesterfield County, South Carolina, shel-ter.3 Roving dogs are familiar sights in cities either in decline—like Detroit—or in full-blown gentrification—like Istanbul. On the streets of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, sixty thousand dogs face extermination, descendants of those left behind in the Communist era when residents were forced to move to urban high-rise apartments. These dogs are now being culled by court order. Euthanasia is only one option. Marcela Pisla, president of the animal rights organization Cutu-Cutu, warns, “We have seen photographs as well as videos showing dogs being killed with metal bars, electrocuted and having their throats slashed.”4 In Kiev, hunters kill street dogs with poison, or they shoot them. And as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi approached, offi-cials hired teams of exterminators to dispose of what they called “biological trash.”5

“S O M E B O D Y T H R E W A D E A D D O G after him down the ravine.”6 The pariah dog adds the finishing touch to the death of former consul Geoffrey Firmin in the fascist Mexico of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. In J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, all the dogs euthanized by Bev Shaw give sense and heft to David Lurie’s gift, his service to dead dogs in post-apartheid South Africa, making him something more than human—“a dog-man: a dog under-taker; a dog psychopomp; a harijan.” What does it mean to live, to think, in Coetzee’s words, “like a dog”?7 Why is this question so urgent? What does it mean to live in a world so depraved that to be like a dog is a compliment?

These questions come up unexpectedly. They intrude on my teaching William Carlos Williams. Take Paterson and imagine approaching Williams’s language experiment, his cult of particu-lars, with dogs on the mind. It’s not too far-fetched, since he begins


with a preface that marks the shifting and speed of the poem in a way that cannot easily be put aside:

To make a start,out of particularsand make them general, rollingup the sum, by defective means—Sniffing the trees,just another dogamong a lot of dogs. Whatelse is there? And to do?The rest have run out—after the rabbits.Only the lame stands—onthree legs. Scratch front and back.Deceive and eat. Diga musty bone

This dog is assuredly not Eliot’s Jacobean dog, digging into Web-ster’s White Devil to introduce the dirge of The Waste Land. Instead, Williams’s dogs come in and out of the first three books of his long poem, scratching, peeing, and clambering at large in the park that prohibits their entry: “no dogs allowed at large in this park.” In a poem that questions both poetic mastery and human cruelty, Williams embraces what he calls “the foul-ness.” Fighting any cult of beauty purified of muck and mire, he affirms the presence of dogs and their particular way of knowing the world.8

In the park, strollers and lovers are “paced by their dogs”; a “man in tweeds” appears “combing out a new-washed Collie bitch” that “stands patiently before his caresses”; and another “walks his dog absorbedly / along the wall top—thoughtful of the dog— / at the cliff ’s edge above a fifty foot drop.” To “unravel” a “common language” is something akin to combing a dog’s hair. The burden


for Williams is not just to accumulate the remnants found in the wake of insignificant lives but something riskier. Every detail, even the random marks of punctuation, abetted by an inventive profusion of things, adds to a verbal terrain that makes us think and feel and sense more abundantly than we normally do. And if there’s any ques-tion that the desired entanglement of particulars, words thrown this way and that, momentary and shifting, takes its example from the life and language of dogs, we have only to hear Williams’s admonition:

Listen! — The pouring water! The dogs and trees conspire to invent a world—gone!

Bow, wow! . . . . . . . . . Bow, wow! Bow, wow!

Variously the dogs barked, the trees stuck their fingers to their noses.9

It all depends on the strength of the affections. Dogs bark, and trees stand along with them, though the trees hold their noses from the smell. The troubling of civility and privilege that is Williams’s aim in Paterson depends on a subtle but raucous way of looking. Leaving no doubt about the wanton injury and casual cruelty of humankind, he digs up and puts back into the poem whatever has been ignored or cast out. With the aid of dogs yelping and their turds stinking, “Blah! / Excrementi! / —she spits,” he surrenders his poetry to the excrescence.10 He reminds his readers that a past of genocide and greed can be written only by depending on, even while buckling under, the force of the superfluous—or whatever the reasonable and cultivated among us identify as trash or dirt, or simply unnecessary. Such an adamant noncomposition, registering


fully the perceptions of the external world, changes us physically. As real as a punch to the stomach, the writing forces us to assent to de facto subversions of good taste and propriety, so fulsomely disqualified throughout the poem.

One dog, a dead dog, becomes as crucial to the meaning of this epic as Argos is to the Odyssey. The lines on a dead dog form the most Homeric part of the poem, though they are introduced by an all-too-commonplace conversation about a dog bite, a dog killed, and the one who remembers his loss:

That was your little dog bit me last year. Yeah, and you had him killed on me. (the eyes) I didn’t know he’d been killed. You reported him and they come and took him. He never hurt anybody. He bit me three times. They come and took him and killed him. I’m sorry but I had to report him . .

A dog, head dropped back, under water, legssticking up : a skintense with the wine of death11

Perhaps this is how life insists on being remembered, felt, and known. Williams invokes, though tentatively, a reservoir of attach-ment and appetite on which all creatures draw but from which most of us have learned to cut ourselves off completely. The world comes into focus this way, with humans and dogs embroiled in a landscape of intercommunicability that might more accurately be thought of as a way of learning compassion—that is, to bear or


suffer with. We might go further and consider how the embod-ied sentience of this poetry can be fully revealed only in what lies beyond the human. This exacerbation of life—pure sensation, the stuff of the senses—prompts us to risk losing ourselves in what is beyond our ken.

Something about death and dogs makes us think and teaches us about how we come to know and when we ought to care. The involvement of humans in the death of dogs, stray or owned, is so persistent as to leave us no way out. Reasonable slaughter, nec-essary removal, and enlightened euthanasia tell our history, and these dogs, judged errant and ordered dead, form the ugly reality beneath the veneer of civilization. But what matters most is that they lead us to take in what precedes or transgresses what we usu-ally mean by understanding.

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Pariah Dogs