HITCHHIKING ALBANIA 2012: the blærg, total adventure edition
A wanted to hitchhike around Albania and I was game. I’m not organised for hitchhiking: lugging around this ancient, heavy computer, things spread between two backpacks, it was punishing at times.
A did some research before we started. He learned that it’s common for people to ask for money from hitchhikers. “Yo para yo problem?” he would ask when someone stopped. He was outraged/offended that people wanted money “Don’t they know?”, I was like, dude.
Thus ends the section of full sentences. Disparate verb tenses to come.
Preliminary hand gesture lexicon, accuracy indeterminate since you never get to ask:
- looping finger pointing downward: we are going somewhere close and coming back here
- finger-wag: “no” with no judgmental implication
- small forward index finger flick: we are only going a short distance
- thumbs-up: a classic I recognise from Canada and the US, fuck you
First ride (BABE) took us to Tepelenë, what we thought was an okay intermediate point on the way to Berati. But, enwebsed there, it seemed incorrect. (It wasn’t.) Backtracked, as pictured, to a turn-off from the highway.
Making decisions without the Internet: phantom cyborg limb syndrome.
Hiding from the rain under an awning at the turnoff, startled by the yelp of a goat in a wheelbarrow. “Maybe it’s dying?”
Interventions at varying levels of mutual intelligibility that our chosen route to Berat was a no go situation. A mountain? Dangerous slopes? Terrible road conditions? Hand gestures can only say so much.
Making mistakes without the Internet: soaking feet.
The idea of principles or purity regarding not paying.
Another pained emanation from the goat.
Realising that “1 lek” can mean “100 lek”.
A furgon (shared taxi, or “minibus” or “sherut” or or or) to Berat stopping, interveners yelling at us to go, but no. No go.
Memories of my own fierce adherence to stands taken, $y and otherwise.
A worker carrying the goat off by its hooves.
Learning a ride to Tirane (I’m there now) would cost 400 lek, ≈ $4, there being a turn-off to Berat along the way.
The worker returning to collect and break wood. “Because I don’t think you want to be here when that goat starts roasting.” A: sensitive vegan.
The weirdness of “we have no money” meaning “we don’t want to spend money”; hitchhiking with GPS.
The goat, skinned and skewered, baleful eyes intact, starts roasting. Prodding A into grudging respect for one person carrying out the entire process, as compared to the incredible levels of abstraction that comprise factory farming.
My hunch was that close attention to how the work of industrialized killing is performed might illuminate not only how the realities of industrialized animal slaughter are made tolerable, but also the way distance and concealment operate in analogous social processes: war executed by volunteer armies; the subcontracting of organized terror to mercenaries; and the violence underlying the manufacturing of thousands of items and components we make contact with in our everyday lives. Like its more self-evidently political analogues—the prison, the hospital, the nursing home, the psychiatric ward, the refugee camp, the detention center, the interrogation room, and the execution chamber—the modern industrialized slaughterhouse is ‘zone of confinement,’ a ‘segregated and isolated territory,’ in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Invisible,’ and ‘on the whole inaccessible to ordinary members of society.’
The sweet smell of sizzling flesh as principles are compromised.
We took a ride toward Tirane. Immense potholes, road narrowing to one lane, police checkpoints. Getting out near Fier, paying the now-higher price, taxi drivers miming drinking to mock us for holding out for another minibus.
Italian-as-an-additional language meets French-as-an-additional language.
Getting there. Haggling in Berat without even knowing it.
I was not able to directly interview the knocker, but I spoke with many other workers about their perceptions of the knocker. There is a kind of collective mythology built up around this particular worker, a mythology that allows for an implicit moral exchange in which the knocker alone performs the work of killing, while the work of the other 800 slaughterhouse workers is morally unrelated to that killing. It is a fiction, but a convincing one: of all the workers in the slaughterhouse, only the knocker delivers the blow that begins the irreversible process of transforming the live creatures into dead ones. If you listen carefully enough to the hundreds of workers performing the 120 other jobs on the kill floor, this might be the refrain you hear: ‘Only the knocker.’ It is simple moral math: the kill floor operates with 120+1 jobs. And as long as the 1 exists, as long as there is some plausible narrative that concentrates the heaviest weight of the dirtiest work on this 1, then the other 120 kill floor workers can say, and believe it, ‘I’m not going to take part in this.’
Hitchhiking Albania 2012: it’s possible, but expect confusion and hostility!
