Creating With Other Species

More-Than-Human Voices in the Writing of Marília Floôr Kosby

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the work Mugido [or diary of a doula] (2017), by Brazilian author, Marília Floôr Kosby, in dialogue with Anna Tsing’s notion of political listening (2015) and with Donna Haraway’s invitation to “stay with the trouble” (2016), learning to live and die with all beings in a dense and complex present. Seeking to analyze new relations of cooperation and community beyond the limits of species, the discussion draws on the analysis of the commons developed by Silvia Federici (2018), and identifies, in the various encounters between women and cows that mark Kosby’s poetry, a proposal for constructing forms of life shaped by what David Graeber (2011) called “baseline communism,” the “raw material of sociability.”