A TALK TO A CLASS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES

Humana Festa, a Novel: A talk by Regina Rheda via Skype to a class at UCLA on May 24, 2018.
My main reason to write works of fiction is to enjoy creating literary art while elaborating on a theme, a subject matter that I care about, that is intriguing or somewhat unusual, different from what my potential readers may be used to and that they would both enjoy and think about. It may seem obvious to cite being driven to write about a topic that one finds compelling. But there is a critical criterion according to which the theme or the subject matter should not be a writer’s primary concern, because what is really important is the writer’s voice. I think that the position that the theme is a secondary element in a work of art can be reactionary, as it may discourage artists from dealing with such crucial problems as social injustice, economic inequality, wars, etc., and it may encourage complacent self-involvement in artists who, talented as they may be, are mostly concerned with their own “voice”.In my humble opinion, voice and theme are not mutually exclusive, and a writer worth his or her salt should work hard on both. That’s what I tried to do in Humana festa. My main preoccupation was the imperative to end animal exploitation. The narrative voice you “hear” speaking about this issue is, in some parts of the novel, serious in tone, concerned or poetic, and, in other parts, witty, fun, or humorous. There is even a touch of apparent political incorrectness here and there, because humor is always by nature disrespectful of something, and there are some hints of things gross or irreverence that some people may consider bad taste. But, as the famous German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht once noted, “There are times when you have to decide between being human and having good taste.” I couldn’t agree more. When I was writing, achieving an aesthetical balance between comic irreverence and sober concern was not an easy task to pull off.  Animal exploitation is a very serious issue, because it involves an enormous amount of injustice, unnecessary pain and suffering, so I had to be careful not to appear to be taking the matter lightly in the scenes with comic elements. I also had to be careful not to sound preachy or merely sentimental in a corny way in the serious passages. Was I 100% successful? Maybe or maybe not, and readers’ opinions may vary, but one thing is for sure: I worked really hard and did my job as a writer.
In 2005, when I decided to write what became the novel Humana festa in the original Portuguese, animal rights and veganism were not things that average people in Brazil took seriously or even knew much about. Granted, there were many animal rights advocates in Brazil, with whom I connected through a discussion group on the Internet. The group members were activists from the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as from other South American countries, such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. As everywhere else, there were basically two types of animal rights activists in the group: the abolitionists and the welfarists. I subscribed to, and still do, and so does Humana festa, to the abolitionist position, which holds that we humans should go vegan because animals should not be used or killed as our resources or property. The welfarist position, on the other hand, says that it is not necessary for us to go vegan because it’s OK for humans to use and kill animals, as long as those animals are QUOTE – and I stress the QUOTE here – “humanely treated” in the process. The abolitionists, like me, were into the theories of Gary Francione and Tom Regan, both of whom I translatedby the way. There are differences between those theories, but they both affirm that animals should not be used as resources of humans. There is some elucidation of those ideas in Humana festa. During a meal at his parents’ home on the farm, Diogo gives his relatives a quick, very basic explanation about both theories. His account is followed by a sequence involving jokes, which is a common defensive reaction to exposure to animal rights concepts. This funny sequence is also a resource I used to make more palatable the possibly uncomfortable didactic element. 
During my time with the animal rights discussion group I also saw a very compelling, unforgettable video called Earthlings, which shows what happens to nonhumans used in the animal exploitation industry. Were I not already a vegan, I would have become one, after watching those atrocities. 
As I was writing the book, some of my non-vegan friends thought that it would be very difficult to find a publisher in Brazil for a novel advocating the end of animal exploitation. But people everywhere normally love animals, right? Or at least they think they love animals, to the extent that they can love someone that they are treating as their property, as their slave. Anyway, the fact that my book was about animals was a strong reason why it was accepted by one of the top publishing houses in Brazil, the Editora Record. Editora Record even had a list of subject matters that it was seeking in manuscript submissions, and animals was actually one of those items. It also helped that the editor-in-chief was vegetarian-friendly, having once said to me that while she was not a vegetarian she would like to be one eventually. She was also very familiar with my former books, as editora Record had published most of them.  So I didn’t have to submit my original to a bunch of publishers; I was successful on my very first try. I also asked prominent, well-regarded Brazilian academic Márcio Seligman-Silva to write the blurb, or the book flap text, and he accepted. In my opinion, the best part of his blurb is this: “Humana festa is a true original. Its theme is totally of the present day and urgent”. The whole editorial process took one year and a half, and Humana festa was published in December 2008. The marketing team got to display copies at the main bookstores around the country, among volumes intended to be purchased as Christmas gifts. It didn’t sell particularly well. It didn’t gain the attention of reviewers in the mainstream media. A Brazilian Animal Law academic journal published an essay… in English, though. Other than that, the published reviews were in magazines concerning vegetarianism and environmentalism, and even those took their time. The animal rights crowd was naturally curious about the book, but some activists complained that it was too expensive... Welcome to a big problem for Brazilian literature in general!  It wasn’t until some years later that articles concerning Humana festa appeared in a Brazilian literary journal and in a book of essays. As time went by, it seems to me, Humana festa’s readership and recognition increased a little in Brazil.  There are college professors using the book in class, and there is at least one abolitionist animal rights group selling copies, as well as books by Gary Francione, during their vegan education efforts. At this point, Humana festa is my best selling work still in print in Brazil.
While it was quick and easy to find a major publisher in Brazil for the original manuscript, to find a publisher for the translated work in the US was a whole different story. There were about 40 rejections. The University of Texas Press, which had published my first 2 books plus 3 of my stories in the series Pan American Literature in Translation, in 2005, had ceased their translation projects altogether. Other university presses were no longer publishing translations either. Some smaller presses said that they were short on resources. Others said that they were about to close shop. The main justification for rejecting the proposal was the formal “this is not what we are looking for at this moment”. Not wanting to wait any further,  Humana Festa, A Novel went the route of self-publishing.
As I became a vegan for the abolition of the exploitation of all animals, I became more concerned with how exploited the majority of human animals are under capitalism. So, in order to end all human exploitation, it became clear to me, the capitalist system should end.  In fact, under capitalism, everything ends up being destroyed for the profit of a few human animals on the planet. Just look at what capitalism is doing to the environment, and to exploited humans and nonhumans all over the place. Look at all the imperialist wars. We’re probably on the brink of the 3rd world war, which can be waged with catastrophic nuclear weapons and incinerate all animals on the planet: humans and nonhumans alike. So now it’s very clear to me that it’s not enough to be a vegan. There needs to be socialism internationally. There needs to be a system where society’s production is used for the benefit of everybody, that is, socialism, instead of a system devoted to the profit accumulation of a few. Gary Francione himself said that he is for socialism, by the way. But suppose the world goes socialist. It won’t do much good to the nonhuman animals if people in a socialist world don’t go vegan, right? Therefore socialists should go vegan. Am I asking too much, a socialist vegan world? No. I’m just being rational, reasonable, and fair. I’ve been learning a lot about socialism from a website called World Socialist Web Site. I strongly recommend it, although they’re not into veganism and animal rights – yet!
But when I wrote Humana festa, I did not know what I know now about socialism. So I don’t get there in Humana festa. My novel is very concerned with human exploitation, as you can see in the chapters that show Mizz Orchid and all other employees of Diogo’s dad. That’s a big part of the novel: the plight of the poor farm workers and their struggles – especially when Mizz Orchid, herself a very poor worker, tries to fit her struggle for the pigs into her fellow workers’ fight to improve their own social and economic situation. But their struggle is not towards real socialism.
The farm where much of the story takes place resembles a farm that I visited when I was a kid in Brazil. It was in the interior of the state of São Paulo. It belonged to one of my relatives, and it bore the unmistakable and unforgettable stench of cow dung. The river was thick, dark, and smelly, and the workers were dirt poor, living in shacks without electricity, potable water or bathrooms. I was 9 years old and I didn’t care much about the poverty of the workers or the miserable situation of the cows that were raised there just to be sent to the slaughterhouse. Instead, I enjoyed feeding hungry baby lambs with a baby bottle. It didn’t occur to me to ask why they were so hungry. I liked riding tame, thirsty horses, but it didn’t occur to me to ask how they were broken and why they were so thirsty all the time. I drank foaming warm milk that went into my glass straight from a cow’s udder early in the morning. It didn’t occur to me to ask what had been done to the calf. Now I look back at all that with nothing but disgust. Many of the farm passages in the novel are also based on research that I did.
I was living in Gainesville, Florida, when I wrote the book. I drew inspiration from my experience living there to write the parts that take place in Weekeewawkeeville, Florida. Gainesville is a somewhat progressive university town in the middle of the sleepy backwardness that is the state of Florida. In Gainesville, as in my fictional Weekeewawkeeville, there is a school of Forestry, and there are vegan students, but there is also a surgeon whose waiting room is crammed with mounted dead animals and photos of the surgeon proudly holding a gun with one hand and an injured hunted animal with the other. I lived in Gainesville for almost 20 years, and I’m glad to have recently moved here to the central coast of California, which is more progressive on some levels, and from which I hope to draw inspiration to write parts of my next work. That’s it.
Now I’m going to try to answer some questions that professor Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond emailed me. 
1) Are parts of the novel based on or influenced by personal experiences and/or real events?

I think that this question was already answered.

2) What authors influenced your writing style? 

I learned a lot in terms of humor and wit from the rhapsodic novel Macunaíma (1928) by the Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade. I also learned irony and sarcasm from Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós (he was born in 1845). I learned a lot about narrative structure reading novels by Peruvian author and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

3) Why is the elephant named Regina?

It’s a homage to myself and a way of having fun while choosing names for my elephant characters.

4) What led you to become an abolitionist? Was there an event in particular that influenced you?

I was already a vegan and I was reading about animal rights on the Internet. I saw an article mentioning Gary Francione and saying that he was controversial. As I like controversies, I searched for more information about his ideas. He criticized the big animal rights organizations for not doing relentless and unequivocal vegan education; instead, he said, those supposed “animal rights” organizations were asking for donations for their campaigns for a “better” treatment of animals in the industry. He said that those organizations were after money, and that their campaigns for a better treatment (their welfarist campaigns) made people confused about the animal rights issue. He said that those welfarist campaigns reinforced and perpetuated animal exploitation, because they made people think that it was OK to use animals that were supposedly well treated. And he said that animal rights activists should be abolitionists, that is, vegans who educate others to go vegan because this is the way to abolish animal exploitation in practice and subsequently in law as well.

5) What are the differences between food politics in the U.S. and Brazil?

I’m not well informed about food politics and it’s been almost 20 years since I left Brazil. What I know is that there are more and more vegan options in restaurants in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, the city I used to live in. There are many people there getting into veganism for the sake of the environment, their own health, and the animals. In this one aspect, at least, Brazil has improved a lot since I left the country. I think this improvement must have to do with the vegan/abolitionist animal rights activism there, which increased in the last decade or so.

6) What is the biggest obstacle to animal liberation?

I agree with Francione that the biggest obstacle is that the so-called animal rights organizations keep telling people that it’s OK to consume animals humanely, instead of unequivocally telling people to go vegan for the end of animal exploitation.

7) What steps have you taken to raise awareness about your cause, besides writing this book?

I translated much of Francione’s work, one of Tom Regan’s books, and, whenever I have an opportunity, I talk to people about veganism and why I think it’s necessary for everybody to go vegan.

8) What is your personal opinion of Diogo? Should someone become vegan just to appease their partner?

Diogo starts to go vegan because of Megan’s influence. It’s OK! In the beginning he struggles, he has setbacks. But as the story develops, he ends up being a true, committed vegan. So, I think it’s OK if someone starts going vegan for some other reason and then evolves towards a true commitment to the animals, the environment and their own health.

9) Do you have a favorite part of the story?

My favorite parts are the ones with Mizz Orchid. I enjoyed a lot writing about the parts in the farm. The political parts with the workers, and so forth. I also like when I make fun of Diogo’s mom, her meanness towards her maids, her attempts to look “chic,” her gluttony, etc.