Why Animals? A "Poem about an Urban Slaughterhouse" as a Zocritic Narrative

Abstract

The article's author proposes a zoocritical reading of Tadeusz Śliwiak's Poem about the Urban Slaughterhouse and poems from other volumes in which animals appear. The basic assumption is an attempt to notice in the volume from 1965 threads testifying ecological sensitivity, which anticipated the subsequent development of ecological literature. The author, taking into account the poems created since the 60s of the twentieth century, postulates the recognition of Śliwiak as a poet who shows a tendency to include not only people but also animals in the "community of the wounded". The emotion that allows us to build a new order based on care and responsibility is the humiliation experienced by the poet during his stay in the city slaughterhouse during the Second World War. What testifies to the persistent return of memories from that period is the metaphor of the "scar of memory", appearing in many poems. The author of the article argues that long-term observation of the mass death of animals could have been a traumatic experience for the poet.