Liza Flum

[Domestication / Feralization]

In her essay on the value of friendship, Briallen Hopper describes “getting together with friends a couple times a week as a ‘feral prevention plan.’” In a year where such feral prevention plans have been largely dismantled, the words “domesticated” and “feral” hold new resonance. As our domestic spaces close around us, both protecting and entrapping us, what does it mean to be domesticated? Are those of us who sheltered at home overly domesticated, and if so, what is the result? Can an excess of domesticity create a sense of being feral? And what do these words, “domesticated” and “feral,” signify about humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals? These questions were the impetus for this special issue, which explores the domestic space as a site for encounter and alchemy between human and nonhuman.

In The Animal that Therefore I Am, Derrida reframes the gap between humans and nonhumans as a “folded frontier” rather than an abyss with clearly delimited edges. His piercing encounter with a domestic cat prompts him to reevaluate both nonhuman and human experience—and he concludes that much of what separates humans and nonhumans may be illusory. Writers in this issue discover, through encounters with nonhuman animals, an otherness that provokes new self-awareness. As Rusty Morrison notes, “I’ve missed seeing how deftly the cat vanishes / into a night within a night that I will not let myself go near.” Past the familiarity of a domesticated animal, uncharted experience beckons.

These writers attend to the tension between the anthropocentrism inherent in any act of domestication and feralization’s promise of transcending and decentering the human. Their work sits at the crosscurrent between these ideas; as Emma Catherine Perry observes, “Wherever we go we accompany;” yet, at the same time, “we were never at the center of any story besides the ones we tell/ ourselves.” Meanwhile, the boundaries between who is considered human and nonhuman are perilously porous, as in Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez’s poems about the Salem Witch Trials. Ostracized from the domestic sphere, women accused of witchcraft were reframed as other-than-human. If animals can be anthropomorphized, people can likewise be dehumanized, to dangerous result.

As we emerge from pandemic-enforced isolation bemoaning our new-found “feralness,” I hope these pieces will invite us to explore the insight and interconnectedness that domestication and feralization afford.  In their meditations on human and nonhuman, these writers locate the vulnerability we share through our common embodiment. We may be bound to nonhuman animals by what Ralph Acampora calls “symphysis,” or shared embodiment, rather than the anthropocentric fellow feeling of “sympathy.” Whether the poet is newly awakened to the sensation of a cut elbow’s “rust-dome,” or “[eating] the roll of scalloped crackers / from another’s snack drawer,” their bodily awareness creates possible kinship with nonhuman animals. The writing in this issue ultimately calls us back to our own skins. As Yael Villafranca notes, “how do you survive the walls of yr own mind? // start with the body.”

—Liza Flum

[Domestication / Feralization]