The Rabbit Slaughter by Vincent Crapanzano - Guernica _ a Magazine of Art & Politics

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The Rabbit SlaughterBy Vincent Crapanzano

February 16, 2015

An anthropologist examines the meanings of sacrifice and slaughterwith his own life as the casestudy.



Lydia Janssen (http://www.susaneleyfineart.com/index.php/Detail/artists/Janssen) , Rabbit Run, 2009. Oil on canvas,

70 68 inches.

I must have been five years old, because we had not yet moved from cottage seven to cottage five.Cottage five was much bigger than cottage seven. My parents had to wait several years until oneof the larger housesfor some reason the houses were all called cottageshad been vacatedthrough either the death or the retirement of one of the senior resident physicians. Very rarelydid they leave for another position. My mother used to say they were more institutionalized thanthe patients in the hospital. Institutionalized was one of her favorite words, and it must havebeen one of the first words I learned, though I had no idea what it meant other than my mothersdisapproval.



My father was always trying to raise animalsrabbits, chinchillas, chickens and ducks, tropicalfish, and a canary. They all died, the chinchillas because the room they were kept in was too hotand the tropical fish because the water heater went on the blink and boiled them. The canary justdropped dead one morning. The chickens and ducks stopped laying eggs, and so we ate them. Iwas ten or eleven at the time and held them tightly as Mr. Axelson, our handyman, cut theirthroats. Or maybe it was my father who cut their throats. I cant remember. It seems unlikely,though, because my father always wore a suit and tie and never liked the sight of blood. Once thechickens throats were cut, I dropped them and watched them flutter around, spurting blood allover the cellar floor, before they finally died. I was horrified and fascinated but mainly trying notto throw up. I dont think I was still holding any of them by the time they died and probablydidnt feel the sudden weight of lifelessness. That came later, about ten years ago, when Pico, ourBouvier, died in my arms.

But did Phil feel the death of the rabbits he had slaughtered, if it was in fact he who killed them?Phil was one of the patients who worked for us as a handyman when we lived in cottage seven.He stoked the coal furnace, tended the rabbits in the hutch at the bottom of the garden, and didthe heavy cleaning, but he spent most of the time in his office in a corner of the cellar, readingcomic books and drinking coffee out of a bowl he shared with Gargya gun-shy Spinone that ahunter had given my father just before I was born. Phil was, as I now remember him, a small,timid man, perhaps in his thirties, who had a lock of greasy blond hair that was always fallingover his left eye, causing him to lose his place as he read the comics. He had created his officesometimes he called it his hideawayby blocking the cellar corner with old, rusted gym lockersthat were arranged so that they not only walled him in but also created a secret passagewaythat was closed off by two open locker doors that were hooked together with a chain. I had toknow the secret number of knocks for Phil to open the door. The problem was that he keptchanging the secret number without telling me, so I usually had to call out, Its me. Whosme? he would ask, adding, Im me, and laughed as he unhooked the door. The lockers werefilled with the smelly old clothes and raggedy dolls and stuffed animals that he collected. Theywere headless or missing limbs or split at the seams. Ill have to call the doctor, he would say ashe showed them to me and told me their names, but youll have to remind me. Im alwaysforgetting, and they never cry. I was never sure whether he was pulling my leg or serious.

I loved Phil but was only allowed to go down to the cellar for a half hour before dinner. Philthought of himself as a scientist and used to explain how things worked, but when I repeatedthose explanations to my parents, they could barely contain their laughter. Phils science was hisand no one elses. I didnt care. I liked his science andI rememberkept a chunk of coal thatPhil had cracked open to show me a fossil. Phil saw a very rare ancient worm in the coal, but Icouldnt see anything. Still, I kept the fossil under my bed until Clara discovered it and threw it



away. I wasnt upset. In fact, I preferred reading comics with Phil over listening to his science. Hewas only supposed to read Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Elmer Fudd to me, but, in fact, he readBatman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. It was our secret, my first real secret from my parents.Phil was sure that if my mother knew (and I suspect she did) he would be fired. So I never toldmy parents. Clara knew because she was always spying on us, but I dont think she told anyone.There was a conspiracy among the three of us, though Clara did not like Phil and Phil did not likeClara. As it was Sunday, she wasnt at home when I discovered the dead rabbits. They had allbeen strangled and thrown about the hutch and on the lawn in front of it in what must have beena terrible frenzy.

I had gone down to play with the rabbits, and when I sawthem, I just stood there immobile, entrapped in so intensea perception that I could feel nothing, neither the horror

nor the grief nor even the violence of the act.

It was, as I said, a Sunday. My grandparents were coming to dinner, as they always did onSundays. Just before they arrived, I had gone down to play with the rabbits, and when I saw them,I just stood there immobile, entrapped in so intense a perception that I could feel nothing,neither the horror nor the grief nor even the violence of the act. I had had no experience of deathits finality. Five-year-olds cannot grasp finality, psychologists say, but this doesnt mean theycant experience it. I did for an instant, and it left its mark. I could not cry. I dont know howlong I stood there. I didnt hear my grandparents drive up to the house. I didnt hear anyone callme, though someone must have. I didnt even hear my grandfathers footsteps as he approachedme, but I wasnt surprised when he put his arm around me, instinctively covering my eyes, thoughit was far too late. He didnt say a word. Nor did I. There was nothing to say. He stooped downand touched several of the rabbits. Theyre still warm, he said aloud but to himself. It musthave happened this morning. I wanted to touch the rabbits, to feel their warmth, to make themcome alive again. I knelt down, but before I could actually touch onealthough my fingers wereclose enough to feel their warmthmy grandfather pulled me away, ordering me not to touchthem with a severity I had never before heard. They may have been poisoned, he said. Holdingmy hand, he walked me back to the house to tell my parents.



I dont remember much of what happened then. I wasnt allowed into the living room, where myparents and grandparents were talking. I listened at the door until my father suddenly opened it,catching me and sending me up to my room. I dont know exactly what I heard, but I knew thenthat my mother was sure it was Phil who had killed the rabbits. My grandparents agreed with myfather, who said it could have been any of the patients in the hospital, anyone, in fact. I lay onmy bed. It couldnt have been Phil. How could my mother accuse him? He was my friend. He loved therabbits, and the rabbits loved him. I knew because I had helped him feed them. He had given themnames and talked to each of them as he held out lettuce leaves for them to nibble. They evenwaited their turn. Phil had a way with animals, my mother used to say. I could hear them nibblingand began to cry.

Im sorry I never really felt the rabbits warmth, because then, perhaps, my memory of theircontorted bodies, their heads twisted grotesquely, might have dissipated. Dead, they seemed muchlonger and skinnier than when they were alive. Their fur had lost all luster, and I could practicallysee their bones through it. But without that warmth, or maybe because of it, my memory of themhas remained cold. Sometimes I do see myself looking at them, but that image is not the same asmy image of myself in my earliest memories. It is a distancing imagea defensive self-scrutinythat shields me from the warmth I never felt.

My sympathy was with Phil. So was my grief, for I knew that I could never again accept theaffection I had had for him. The next morning, I heard my mother and Clara asking each otherwho could have killed the rabbits. Like my mother, Clara was sure it was Phil. I thought of her asa traitor (though I probably didnt know the word traitor). She had betrayed our conspiratorialbond. She said that Phil was sure we would give away the rabbits before we moved, that theywould be slaughtered and eaten. He preferred to kill them himself. My mother agreed and usedClaras argumentI was to learn laterwhen she fought with my father about keeping Phil on.She wanted to dismiss him immediately. My father won, and Phil moved his office to cottage five.Well, not quite, since my mother refused to let him bring his lockers and his smelly old clothes.He did manage to bring a robins egg blue clothes bag, which he hung from one of the pipes inthe cellar in front of the little table on which he had stacked his comic books.

It was never the same for Phil. He stopped sharing his coffee with Gargy and didnt much liketalking to me. As he had only one chair, he no longer read the comics to me. He kept telling mehow cottage five was dangerous. Five was his unlucky number; seven had been his lucky one. Hehad seen snakes in the garden, and they were going to get us. They didnt want us there. I toldmy parents, but they said not to pay any attention to Phil. He was having one of his episodes. Hewould have to spend a few weeks in the ward, and then everything would be okay. I knew thateverything would never be okay, but I didnt say so.



I am not sure if it was the next morning or a few days later that Phil didnt show up. I thought atfirst that he wasnt allowed to leave the ward, but there was too much whispering going on for meto believe that for long. Something more serious had happened, something children shouldnthear. Maybe the police had proven that Phil had killed the rabbits. The hospital police had beencalled in that day to investigate, but, as far as I could tell, all they did was stuff the rabbits intoburlap bags and haul them away.

Whats happened to Phil? I asked my mother.

Hes not coming back, she said.

Why? Hes done nothing wrong. I miss him. Hes my friend.

Yes, I know, she said with forced sympathy. Wait until your father comes home for lunch.Well talk about it then.

No, you wont, I cried, and ran to my room.

I was wrong. My parents told me that Phil had died during the night. He had a weak heart, myfather said.

I didnt believe them. I knew he wouldnt come back, but I didnt believe that he had died.

The next day, a new handyman appeared: Mr. Axelson, also a patient. I already knew him becausehe had built the bookcases in our old house. He was told to clean out Phils things. I was orderednot to go near the cellar, but I sneaked through the garden entrance and saw a bottle ofstrawberry jam fall through the rotted bottom of Phils clothes bag when Mr. Axelson took itdown. The jam splashed all over. It was moldy and filled with maggots. I vomited. When I wasolder Clara told me that Phil had hanged himself. I had no reason not to believe her, but Ipreferred to think he died from a weak heart. What other reason would my father have had to tellme, a five-year-old, that Phil was very young to have died of a weak heart?

It left me with a longing, yes, if I am honest with myself,to have touched death, the corpse, and the fear, and the

desire to overcome that fear which came with the longing.



Im not at all sure how I understood the slaughter of the rabbits at the time. Ive never forgottenit, but I cant say that it has haunted me. I cant say that it traumatized me. It left me with aresonant but unreachable spacethe space between my fingers that might have felt the rabbitswarmth and the rabbits themselves. It left me with a longing, yes, if I am honest with myself, tohave touched death, the corpse, and the fear, and the desire to overcome that fear which camewith the longing. It also left me with the thought that had I been able to touch the rabbits, theywould have come to life.

I keep returning to a painting of a French king, touching a man who is covered with scrofula. Mymother explained that for centuries it was believed that a royal touch could cure skin disease. Iadmired the king. How could he bear to touch such a disgusting lesion? Wasnt he afraid ofcontagion? But he did do it. I am quite sure that I did not think of the dead rabbits at the time,but I wonder if they didnt fuel my fascination. For years I wanted to become a doctor, but after along and painful struggle I decided against it.

When I told my wife, Jane, about the rabbit slaughter years later, she reminded me of JulianNibble. Marta had given Julian, a fluffy white rabbit, to our daughter, Wicky (now Aleksandra).Marta was an old peasant who lived with her brother in a single room on the ground floor of atower in Bonnieux, in the Vaucluse, where we were spending the summer. Marta owned abeautiful masa farmsteadabove the village, which even in those days was worth a fortune, butshe refused to sell it despite the many extravagant offers she received. She was childless. Rumorhad it that she had an incestuous relationship with her brother. It is true that they shared thesame bed. Some of the villagers called her a witch. She would wash the sheets and pillowcasesonly when the moon was full, because they would be whiter if they dried in the moonlight. Eachday we would take Wicky to see Julian, and on her first birthday, Marta gave her a present. It wasJulian Nibble, skinned and stuffed with rosemary.

There is a fine line between slaughter and sacrifice. Did Phil sacrifice the rabbits? Was it a privateritual? Can a sacrifice, at least the sacrifice of an animal, be a private affair? I doubt it. Sacrificesrequire the presence of a group. Poor, gentle Phil, all alone, unable, I imagine, to give to therabbit slaughter that sacral quality that would turn the rabbits into sacrificial victims. Or perhapshe did, imagining, hallucinating, a public. After all, he was a diagnosed schizophrenic. He was nota Marta, who could never have imagined our upset when she arrived with Julian in a basket. Shesaid that way Wicky would have her friend with her forever. Fortunately, Wicky was too young toknow what had happened to her friend. Jane and I did eat Julian. We felt obliged to, for such isthe power of the gift, of the gift giver, but it had lost what taste it had. I couldnt even smell the



rosemary.

I have seen animals slaughtered, and even more sacrificed. I remember the excitement thatsurrounded the slaughter of a sheep when I lived on the Navajo reservation. That excitement wascoupled with hunger, but, while purely secular, it was somehow celebratory, too. There had beennothing celebratory about my fathers slaughtering the chickens. Nor, I imagine, in Martasslaughtering Julian Nibble. She was far too practical. She may have lived in a world ofsuperstitions, but her act did not rehearse the kind of sacred drama that students of religion andsome anthropologists once claimed. Some still do.

Sacrifices are a different matter altogether. I witnessed, and in fact participated in, many of themin Morocco, where I was doing fieldwork with teams of exorcists in the late sixties. I went withYoussef Hazmaoui, my field assistant, to buy a sheep for Id al-Kabir, the Great Feast, in whichMuslims commemorate Ibrahims sacrifice of Ismael (Abrahams of Isaac). The market was filledwith excitement. Shepherds had brought thousands of sheep there. There was much haggling.Everyone was interested in how much everyone else was paying for a lamb, a sheep, or a goat. Itwas said that the king would sacrifice a camel. When we brought the sheep back to Youssefshouse, his neighbors came out to appraise its sizeits cost. I had the feeling that they werecalculating the salary I was paying him.

On the Id, as we were going to Youssefs for his family feast, Jane and I were taken aback by theblood that was literally flowing in the streets. (Muslims, like Jews, do not eat blood.) We hadassumed that when travelers described the streets flowing with blood, they had been speakingmetaphorically. Knowing how poor most of Youssefs neighbors were, we felt we were witnessinga gigantic potlatch that extended across the Muslim world and were immediately embarrassed bythe thought, since, succumbing to market calculus, we had ignored the sacred quality of the feast.

The Id is a joyous event, unlike the sacrifices that were performed at the Hamadsha exorcisms Iattended. (The Hamadsha was the name of the religious confraternity to which the exorcistsbelonged.) There was no joy there, even when the possessing spirits, the jnun, had released thosewhom they had possessed. The sacrifices were weighted by obligation. There was always thatsense of imminent danger that accompanies contact with the spirits. Strictly speaking, theceremonies were not exorcisms but, technically, adorcisms; for rather than ridding the possessedof the malign spirits that had entered them, their goal was to convert the jnun into benign,protective spirits. The French classicist Henri Jeanmaire has suggested that exorcisms which aimat the permanent expulsion of the demon occur only when the spirits are considered evil (as inChristianity); when they are considered amoral, then exorcistic rituals seek their transformation,much as the Furies were transformed into the Eumenides in Aeschyluss tragedy. However



transformed, the jnun were quick to anger and would punish those they protected if the personoffended them. They acted as a sort of extrapolated conscience.

Women did not mutilate themselves, but they, too,danced wildly in trance, bent over, their hands, their

loosened hair nearly touching the floor as they swayedside by side

The ceremonies were long, lasting well into the night. They were bloody affairs, since some of themen possessed were forced by their possessing spirits, mostly female spirits, to slash their headswith knives (in the past with halberds), to release the heat, the intolerable pressure they felt astheir bloodthe spiritmounted to their heads. Women did not mutilate themselves, but they,too, danced wildly in trance, bent over, their hands, their loosened hair nearly touching the flooras they swayed side by siderepeating the same movement, though far more rapidly, with whichthey washed their floors each morninguntil finally they lost control and fell to the floor. I couldnot help but think that this ecstatic, at times epileptoid collapse was their only respite from theburdens of the cloistered world in which they were imprisoned, if not by their husbands than bythe conventions that, unacknowledged by most men, entrapped them as well. The ceremonieswere exhausting to watch. Not even the feast that ended thema meal at which the meat of thegoat or sheep that had been sacrificed earlier that day was servedrevived me. Though I awokedrained, the Hamadsha who had fallen into trance felt rejuvenated the next day.

As the sacrifices I observed were always performed in the center of a circle of onlookers, I wasnever very close to them; that is, until I attended a Hamadsha performance at the annual musicfestival in Essaouira in 2002. Essaouiraa fortress town known as Mogador to the Portuguese,who had built it in the sixteenth centuryis one of the most beautiful cities in Morocco. Eachyear it hosts a music festival at which there is both traditional music played mainly by the Gnawa,a secularized group of exorcists who perform all over the world, and jazz from the United States,Europe, Africa, and Cuba. Since the Hamadsha participate in the opening procession but dontperform (for fear, I suspect, that they might fall into trance, mutilate themselves, and therebytarnish Moroccos image as a modern nation), I was asked to speak about them to a group ofinvited scholarsthe ct intellectuel of the festivalwho were to attend a Hamadsha ceremony



staged especially for them. Reluctantly I went to the ceremony. I had spent the afternoon talkingto a young Hamdushi (a member of the brotherhood) who was disgusted by the secularization andcommercialization of the rites. They will anger the jnun, he told me with rage, fear, and worry inhis eyes.

I found myself sitting next to the sheep that was to be sacrificed. Trembling with fear, its eyesbulging, it pressed itself against me. I had never felt such fear. It took possession of me. I couldnot distinguish its fear from the fear I was now experiencing. What was even more extraordinarywas that when the sacrificer approached the sheep, he, too, began to tremble. It was as thoughthe three of us were caught within the fear. I felt no relief when the sheeps throat was cut, itsblood pouring into a pail as it twitched into death. Judging from his expression, I do not think thesacrificer, who had no doubt performed many such sacrifices, felt any relief either. I wonderedwhether his reaction and, by contagion, mine arose from the primordial danger of havingperformed a sacrifice for profane rather than sacred reasons. It was a demonstration rather thanan offering. Those gathered were an audience rather than participants in an offering andrecipients of the blessingthe barakathat the ceremony would normally have conveyed. TheHamadsha who were present were either apprehensive, as was the sacrificer, or disengaged. Thefew women who danced and fell into trance did so in a desultory manner. As far as I could tell,none were possessed. None of the men danced. Under such circumstances, the death of the sheepwas meaningless: a slaughter rather than a sacrifice.

The line between the sacred and the profane is never as clear as we assume it to be. Theperformance of a ritual in a space that is not demarcated as sacred does not necessarily render thespace in which it occurs sacred. Rituals can fail not only in terms of their efficacya rain dancethat does not bring rainbut also in consecrating themselves, as I believe the Hamadshaceremony I described did. They lose what self-transformative power they have. But what occurs inhallowed precincts is not necessarily sacred. Cathedrals have often been meeting places for purelysecular activitieschildren playing, dogs running about, women gossiping, and men playing cardsas can be seen in some of the Dutch genre paintings of the 1600sor meeting places for spiesand lovers in countless movies. Still, a sacred precinct can affect the secular. I find it slightlydisturbing when the audience applauds after a concert in a church, especially one in whichreligious music is performed. As I have had no religious training, I might be attributing greatersanctity to a church than does the believer, who by definition responds at least as much to thesacrament as to its location, but the two are hard to distinguish ceremonially. Elation knows noboundaries. Or does it?



Excerpted from Recapitulations (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9781590515938?p_ti) byVincent Crapanzano, to be published by Other Press on March 17, 2015. Copyright 2015 byVincent Crapanzano. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.

Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology atthe CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of six booksThe Fifth World of Forster Bennett:Portrait of a Navajo (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9780803264311?p_ti) , Hamadsha: AStudy in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan(http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9780226118710?p_ti) , Waiting: The Whites of South Africa,Hermes Dilemma and Hamlets Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation(http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9780674389816?p_ti) , and Serving the Word: Literalism inAmerica from the Pulpit to the Bench (http://www.powells.com/partner/41288/biblio/9781565846739?p_ti)and has published articles in major periodicals and academic journals such as AmericanAnthropologist, Les Temps Modernes, The New Yorker, New York Times, and Times LiterarySupplement. He lives in New York City.

To contact Guernica or Vincent Crapanzano, please write here. (mailto:[email protected])

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The Rabbit Slaughter by Vincent Crapanzano - Guernica _ a Magazine of Art & Politics