With Hooves in the Slaughterhouse

Depictions of Animal Death in the Poetry of Eucanaã Ferraz and Edimilson de Almeida Pereira

Abstract

Several theoretical and critical formulations within the scope of literary studies have focused on the relationship between poetic creation and the living world. In this article, specifically, we focus on some contemporary Brazilian poetry, represented here by poems by Eucanaã Ferraz and Edimilson de Almeida Pereira. Respectively, the corpus of analysis comprises two texts: the poems “Fado do boi” (2008) and “Matança do porco” (2022). Our approach considers the procedures through which scenes of animal death are dramatized, whether in the wake of increasingly mechanized slaughterhouses or through the artifice of blades still handled by human hands. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the intertextual dialogue that the poems establish with other texts and other authors of Brazilian literature, with the animal figure as a point of convergence. To this end, contributions are mobilized in order to consider the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of the relationships between the different species cohabiting this same planet.