Anna Lindh Foundation

The Markaz Review: Review 48, Animal Truths
"Talking lions, ducks, gazelles, traveling cats, magical dogs, and giraffes — welcome to the wonderful world of TMR’s animal issue." 

Sometimes the stories of animals can express human truths more viscerally than a straightforward account of people suffering. For instance, the lions of Baghdad and the tragedy of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq were the subjects of the graphic novel, The Pride of Baghdad. Despite the fact that the lions had spent their whole lives in an Iraqi zoo, they didn’t speak Arabic — unlike the lions in “Mureen/Lion School,” the 2016 Mesopotamian-inspired artwork-relief by this issue’s featured artist, Lin May Saeed (1973–2023). Iraq was the country of Saeed’s father. The sculptor who grew up in Germany also didn’t speak Arabic. However, as TMR’s art critic Arie Amaya-Akkermans writes, Saeed was “not interested in human metaphors or in the archaeological imagination of the past per se, but in a more transtemporal, transformational, intersectional gesture. [Her work] is about turning upside down the utilitarian hierarchies of social relations that fashioned the world into the binary of human and animal.”

In the Anthropocene epoch of rapid climate change, increasing numbers of animals, birds, and fish are on the precipice of extinction. This has made human research into animal cognition all the more prescient. New studies show that the ordinary crow can recognize the faces of people. These incredibly intelligent birds don’t forget, hold grudges, and repeatedly dive-bomb people who have harmed them. Recently, philosopher of animal minds Susana Monsó has spoken about orcas, which like elephants, have an understanding of death and mourn their dead offspring.

The November issue of The Markaz Review, themed on animals, deliberately eschews the binary relationship between the proverbial “man and beast.” The artwork, art criticism, prison and family memoirs, travel writing, fiction, essays, and poetry featured here go beyond the politics of the eating, exploitation, and abuse of animals to reach a new level of understanding. And in many instances, it is inspirational.