This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here.
One of the narrative threads in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile is that of Father Urrutia, the book’s protagonist, being sent on a special mission around Europe to write a report about how Catholic churches are finding “solutions putting a stop to the deterioration of God’s houses on earth.” A deterioration caused by nothing other than pigeon shit.
A dying priest in his confessional bed, a complicit figure in Chile’s dictatorial power even though he considers himself a “literary critic, poet, and teacher,” Urrutia tells us about his luck and the job that seemed to have been designed especially for him. He recounts how some churches used methods that “did not interest” him and how others did not do anything at all to maintain themselves. The method used in several places that fascinated him most, he tells us, was “a weapon that was still undergoing tests,” “a radical solution”: using falcons to have pigeons killed, and thus to bring a stop to the damage caused by their excrement.
What is intriguing here is that it is not the humans and their united intellectual or organized activities that threaten these sacred sites of not only worship but also state power. It is instead the refuse from the body of a bird, not even a human, and for that matter not even a majestic bird that we find beauty in, but one that many of us either dismiss or see as a nuisance while it has well adapted itself to survive and thrive in our urban landscapes.
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It is a fascination with this particular storyline in Bolaño’s novella that sets me off, my dear reader, on a mission of my own. Like Bolaño and his not-so-likable character, I allow myself to get lost in a labyrinthine search, finding my way to the depths of the humans and the birds following the roundabout tracks left behind by their shit.
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Freud analyzes our relationship with the human excrement through a few different lenses. In his theory of the “anal phase” of child development, he discusses how we go from babies allowed to defecate no matter where, with others, often parents, taking care of the cleaning, to children who are trained to go potty, away from the eyes of others. In this transition, we realize that the refuse produced by our body through digesting the desirable food that entered and must now leave us is no longer something to be exposed to or taken care of by others. It is through learning this lesson and adjusting to this new relationship with our body that we move toward becoming adults and civilized.
The paradox here is that we carry the feces in our intestines while living through our days, and as long as they are hidden inside our bodies, for no longer than expected, there is nothing disgusting about them. But the moment this waste leaves our body, we experience disgust. Staying inside of us for too long, as a result of constipation, or leaving us and becoming an undesirable object separate from us, they become unhealthy and intolerable.
This disgust is similar to what Gordon Allport describes in one’s relationship to one’s saliva vs. spit. We carry our own saliva in our mouth all along, but the moment we spit it out, let’s say in a glass of water, we are disgusted by drinking that glass of water. The moment that something we carry inside us leaves us, is separated from us, becomes an other that reflects our corporeal animalness and metaphorically our inner world, we experience disgust. A feeling that sits at the intersection of shame, guilt, hate, and desire.
Social psychologist Erving Goffman notes, “Bodily excreta that become matters for befoulment or self-contamination typically start out as a part of the body that is not self-defiling, not, as is said, ego-alien,” a term coined by Allport. “It is shortly after leaving the body that these materials become somehow transformed in character, acquiring the power to befoul.”
Such relationships of shame and disgust become even more intriguing when considered alongside a familiar scene in many of our cities: dog owners walking their dogs and, hopefully, cleaning up their poop. Denver, where I currently live, is a dog city, with a higher ratio of dogs to adults than kids to adults, a characteristic commented on by many newcomers to the city. A recent billboard for Altoids mints advertisement on Colfax Avenue, which boasts to being ‘the longest continuous commercial street in America,’ reads, “MORE INTENSE THAN THIS CITY’S DOG POPULATION.” In Mexico City too, where I am now, writing this piece at a neighborhood bookstore-café, I notice all the dogs that are being walked around, often more than one by each person, and it’s a surprise to me that in this city, the dogs are welcomed into restaurants, cafés, and stores, their coexistence with humans a different one compared to that even in Denver.
When it comes to these lovely companions, there seems to be no disgust at work, neither on the side of the dog owner nor on the side of the accidental onlookers. Perhaps the relationship with dogs mirrors our relationship with human babies, a non-hierarchical one centered around their inability to do, on their own, this work of cleaning up that we demand of them in order for them to be present in our urban spaces as part of the human society, a relationship of love and care and forgiveness that’s absent in adult-to-adult relationships, except for certain cases. As Rozin and Fallon explain, “Normally disgusted substances or objects that are associated with admired or beloved persons cease to be disgusting and may become pleasant,” which clarifies the lack of disgust for the feces not only in the context of one’s children or pets but also in cases of care for elderly adults as well as in sexual settings.
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Recently, a friend in Tehran was texting me, on WhatsApp, about how Dubai is a desired wonderous city pulling many people to itself like a magnet. I texted back with a question, “How so?” and she responded, “It’s the closest thing to a utopia in formation.”
It has been many years since I last traveled to Dubai, so I cannot speak based on personal experience, but I have heard all about the shiny urban developments, the cultural institutions, the cosmopolitanism, and the futuristic vision of the city. I have also heard about issues with labor rights, gender inequity, and freedom of expression. So, I wonder about the use of the word “utopic” here. What makes a place utopic? Or rather what is it that makes a place received in people’s imaginations as utopic? Is utopia possible in one specific place when the world at large is not in a utopic state? Is utopia possible in reality at all?
In a psychoanalysis session, sometime after these texts, I’m in a whirlwind associative monologue about not-belonging and otherness in a city of which many sing its praises when I arrive at my friend’s comment about Dubai and utopia. My analyst, who is also based in Tehran and with whom I’ve been having virtual sessions through Facetime Audio for many years now, long before Covid made the practice more acceptable worldwide, says something about Dubai being dubbed the Manhattan of the Middle East. He quickly, though, adds that WhatsApp and Facetime are blocked there and can only be accessed through VPNs, which is the case for many applications in Iran as well, including WhatsApp though not Facetime. (This conversation of ours was before the US passed laws about banning TikTok unless its ownership changed hands from its current Chinese ownership.) My analyst then tells me about the failures of the sewage system of Burj Khalifa, a building that prides itself on being the tallest in the world.
This is surprising information and kind of unbelievable to me. So, I later get on the internet to look into the fancy structure’s sewage system. I find articles that talk about the manual removal of the sewage, transported away with dozens of trucks every day. But I also find several counternarratives that call those reports false, that explain that the trucks were a once-upon-a-time occurrence and condemn the stories as part of a campaign trying to smear the glories of Dubai.
I imagine the luxurious lives of those who frequent the building vis-à-vis the manual labor that removes their feces, the role that money plays in each group’s lives, and the caravan of trucks filled with human shit driving through a manicured landscape of glamor. I wonder how Bolaño would take this information and turn it into a story.
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In a conversation with The New Republic, psychoanalyst Steven Poser points out that “Freud had an idea that in the unconscious mind, that [sic] money and perhaps gold in particular, [sic] was equivalent to some kind of shit. Excremental substance.”
In his exploration of neurosis, defecation, and money, Freud writes, “The connections between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation [sic], which seem so dissimilar, appear to be the most extensive of all. . . . In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist . . . money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt. We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure, and the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life. . . . It is possible that the contrast between the most precious substance known to men and the most worthless, which they reject as waste matter (‘refuse’), has led to this specific identification of gold with faeces.”
Which brings me to one artistic representation of such identification: the sculpture “America” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, a completely functional toilet made of gold installed in one of the Guggenheim’s bathrooms in New York City in 2017. The day I visited the museum, a long line was formed outside the bathroom, and according to the artwork’s Wikipedia page, more than 100,000 visitors used the gold toilet in the museum during the show. Since the installation was concurrent with Trump’s presidency, alongside the artist’s inspirations and intended meanings for the piece, I and many others, evidenced by an article on Guggenheim’s website, made connections between the American president’s desire for gold and shine and this particular artwork. And interestingly, when the White House asked for a Van Gogh piece to be loaned by the Guggenheim for Trump’s private rooms, curator Nancy Spector instead offered them “America.”
Now, I want to invite you to take these bits and pieces about “America” and imagine that you’re floating around in the Guggenheim’s rotunda at night. You are trying to use your “head” (a word that, according to an interviewer in conversation with Cattelan, is an American English “euphemism for toilet”) and be analytical of what you see in front of you, but instead get lost in your fantasies for/with “America.” Suddenly, you feel an urgent need to defecate but have no choice but to wait in line, alongside many others competing for this “extraordinary opportunity,” to be able to “make use of the fixture individually and privately . . . in an experience of unprecedented intimacy.”
What would happen next in this scene of intimacy involving a circular museum and the golden toilet named “America,” if this were a Bolañoesque story?
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Traditional toilets in Iran and some other countries in Southwest Asia are different from the gold toilet created by Cattelan, which is the prevalent model used in the West. These Iranian toilets, or sometimes dubbed Turkish toilets, are described by some as a mere hole in the ground, but they are most often porcelain pans installed in the ground with two slightly raised side platforms for the feet. They demand that you squat down to use them instead of sitting on them. While many Iranian elders and believers in ancient Persian medicine consider them healthier for the digestive system due to putting the body in the squatting position, these toilets have been increasingly replaced by the western-style ones: the latter is considered more modern, the former backward.
Some tourism materials about Iran note that using bathrooms, especially on road trips, is not recommended, because if any bathrooms are to be found at all, they will rarely have the western toilets. I remember a travel guide piece even recommending taking medication to decrease urination frequency while traveling. I should confess here that, especially as a woman, I found this a problem when I lived in Iran, but I have heard that these days there are more road stops with clean facilities.
As Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, a book about human waste, writes in an article in Slate: “How a society disposes of its human excrement is an indication of how it treats its humans too.” I want to add that how one tells the story of how a society disposes of its human excrement is as important too. For example, for many years the Western world considered squat toilets retrogressive and unsanitary, until it started appropriating and marketing yoga and all the health discourses around it. Soon enough, articles started popping up about the benefits of squatting for your digestive tract, and of adding a platform under your feet while sitting on the toilet to help your intestines in the act of defecation. Then “toilet potties” and “foot stools for toilets,” with prices currently ranging between six and ninety dollars depending on material and design, began to appear on sales websites. Now, squatting is not backward anymore, but rather a health-conscious ergonomic choice to take better care of your body.
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When I tell a friend in New York, with whom I have biweekly writing meetings on Zoom, about this essay-in-progress on shit and Burj Khalifa’s manual sewage removal system, he tells me yet another interesting story: about controversies around the “poop trains” that go from New York to landfills in Alabama. Once again, I find the information strange and so I am back on the internet to do my own investigation.
According to an article in The Washington Post from 2018, a train headed towards Adamsville to dispose of human waste, through a contract with a company called “Big Sky,” stopped at a small town called Parrish. As a result, “10 million pounds of treated human waste from New York,” with a smell described as “foul,” “acrid, hurtful, [and] all-consuming,” was left there for two months before the waste was “mercifully . . . removed one truckload at a time.”
The locals’ concerns raise fair questions about the role of money and power in this process, the city officials’ responsibility to their citizens, and a population’s right to breathe and to have healthy bodies. The language, however, signals to an “us” vs “them” narrative at work: “Little Parrish is left with the sting of feeling as if no one cared that all of this excrement was left on its doorstep. The town had become purgatory in a little-known disposal pipeline that imports materials no one wants, for profit—big-city waste from the North that heads to landfills in the rural South.” Or: “Lingering, still, is the concern that something from the outside could alter this place for so long.” We see, on the one hand, the problematic dumping of waste from a center of capital at the lands of a marginalized community, as if that is the most natural solution; and, on the other, the troublesome illusion that the community could exist in isolation from “the outside” and that whatever arrives from the outside is contaminating, as if “alter” is a code word for danger.
Now I want to invite you, dear reader, to use this an already-too-absurd-to-be-true reality as a prompt to try and write yet another Bolañoesque piece of fiction, with characters living in a small town along the rail tracks on which the poop train finds its way through an American landscape. Maybe start the story with this phrase from the report: “The poop train added insult to injury . . .” or end it with this one: “All we ask is that states take care of their own mess.”
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Similar problems with one group othering another through the handling of human waste are brought up in the 2023 film Origins by Ava DuVernay. Based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, it looks into the similarities between racism and casteism across the globe, how the project of casteism relies on the dehumanization of the other.
One group at the center of the book, and the film, is the Dalit community, dubbed the Indian “untouchables”: not because they are too powerful to be touched, but because they are considered the lowest caste in society. One degrading act forced upon the Dalits is that of “disposing of faeces from dry toilets and open drains by hand to be carried on the head in baskets to disposal sites,” reports a Huffington Post article from 2016, adding that around 90 percent of these “manual scavengers” are women.
In “The Dalit in India,” Sagarika Ghose states: “Metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a ‘shit bearer’ for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy.” She discusses some of the terms used to refer to the community: “pariah,” which means “those of the drum” or the “leather people”; and “‘harijan’ or ‘children of god’ [which] was Mahatma Gandhi’s name for dalits.” She explains that “the word ‘dalit’ or ‘crushed underfoot’ or ‘broken into pieces’ is the contemporary version of the word ‘Untouchable.’”
While words change and we, as language workers, believe that what we call a thing does matter, I want to pause and quote what the dalit leader Bhaurao Gaikwad stated in 1935: “It is no use only giving Untouchables a sweet name. Something practical should be done to ameliorate their conditions” (quoted by Ghose). While laws have changed, casteism and racism are, in practical and psychological terms, still very real in our world, even if their forms are different.
In Origins, DuVernay does not simply have Wilkerson’s character recount the injustices brought upon the dalits as part of her research findings, but actually gives us a scene with sensory details, making us visual witnesses. In the scene, or rather in my memory of it, two human beings cover each other’s body in oil in order to minimize the impact of the feces on their skin before they go down into a pool of human feces. The delivery on the screen of the tension between the two acts—the inhumane cleaning of feces forced upon the Dalits vs. the care the two members of the community show each other—is the story of our humanity, the hatred vs. the love for the other.
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In “Self-Portrait as the Poop Emoji,” Viplav Saini writes, “at a Starbucks in Ohio I was identified, / a child pointed to me, burst out, cried, / “His skin looks like poop, Mommy!” / Did she really . . . ?” It is a short, punching poem about self and otherness, about America refusing “what remains unassimilated, what [its] body refuses.” In it, Saini reminds America to “know that I am you, inside you, around you, I am, America.”
Sairi’s poem leads me to the gates of a memory from some years ago. At a literary festival, I was part of a panel about issues of representation, of the self vs. others, and problems of appropriation. In response to the complexities raised by the moderator and the rest of the panel, one of the participants, who was a quite famous writer, dismissed the importance of research and factuality when writing about others unlike him, using the old argument of artistic freedom. He justified his position by simply calling himself a lazy researcher, a writer who believed in the free reign of imagination, never for one second questioning his views.
The residues of that disturbing panel stayed with me for a long time, especially since similar questions continue to be asked in other pedagogical settings. The essay that ultimately provided me with the argumentative foundation and language on the matter was Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary,” where they discuss the issue from the perspective of “rights.” They argue that when artists claim that they have the rights to imagine and create whoever they want and however they want, they make it seem that their imaginations are free of racial limitations and other biases, that “the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made ‘me.’” The illuminating moment for me in their argument is when they state that to start from a place of “I have a right to . . .” is:
“to begin the conversation in the wrong place. It is the wrong place because, for one, it mistakes critical response for prohibition (we’ve all heard the inflationary rhetoric of scandalized whiteness). But it is also a mistake because our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds. To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.”
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One day many years ago, when I had just started my PhD program at the University of Denver, a person in my cohort asked me what my name meant.
Here is how the scene unfolded in the department lounge:
I begin by explaining that my name پوپه / poupeh comes from a classical Persian poem منطق الطیر / The Conference of the Birds by Attar Neyshaburi, and that the Persian root of my name, پوپ poup…
And then I’m stopped in the middle of the word by the person’s laughter. A quick one that does not sound malicious but is merely a matter of fact, a natural reaction, one that is immediately, perhaps upon understanding its impact, brought to an end. I am perplexed and I remain silent because I feel suspended, for a moment that seems to explode into a whole world, in a displacement that is not merely a linguistic one between پوپ and poop. I suddenly realize that I am not anymore a person present in the Persian language but instead in English, something that does not register organically within me in each and every moment. In my mind, the two languages coexist. In my mouth, they are part of the same continuum. But in the ears of the other sitting across from me on the other side of the table, they were not. They are not.
In this shift of language, I, who in Persian am a bird, a hoopoe, and, in the myth of the poem, converse with the other birds to lead them to their destination—to find the phoenix and reach enlightenment—become in English the excrement, the refuse, the unwanted other outside of the body.
In this shift of language, the Persian nickname that lovers have whispered in my ear, to return it to its original form and allude to the poem in moments of intimacy and nakedness, suddenly becomes in English the bodily material not to be touched.
When seconds later, I finally realize what has just happened, I laugh too, maybe as a mere bodily reaction due to discomfort, maybe to make light of what feels anything but light, I am not sure. Then I try to explain my own realization and continue with the rest of the story of my name.
The person who asked me about my name later became a friend and we, with a few others from the program, are still in literary conversation and collaboration. But since that uncomfortable experience translating the origins of my name, I have been careful about how I tell the story. I no longer go to the roots but speak only about the journey. About the birds who survive their migration and arrive at their destination only to discover that the phoenix is non-existent, that what awaits them instead is their collective image reflected in a lake. The birds come all the way only to learn that there is no one body that should be desired and exalted: it is all of them in their togetherness that create the phoenix.
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In Bolaño’s By Night In Chile, as Father Urrutia travels from one place to another, he makes sure to give us the names of the falcons he meets at different churches along the way. In Pistoria, the falcon is called Turk. In Turin, Othello. In Strasbourg, Xenophon. In Avignon, Ta Gueule. In Burgos, Rodrigo. In Madrid, Ronnie. In Saint Quentin, Fever.
Each falcon has its own characteristics and is described in a particular way by the fascinated Father. Each carries its own layers of symbolic meaning under its wings. While Ta Gueule, whose name in French means “Shut Up!”—“an unequivocal reference to the Vatican censorship of rebellious priests,” according to Jacobo Myerston—is known for “his voracity and ferocity,” Rodrigo is “without the slightest trace of the elegance” of his fellow pigeon killers.
Despite his attempts to present himself, in his final confessional rant, as a contemplative, somehow regretful, literary critic, poet, and teacher, the words Father Urrutia uses in his recollection and representation of these birds of prey betray him and his unconscious. When describing Ta Gueule’s confrontation with the pigeons, he speaks of the falcon “splashing color like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident . . .” When he first meets Rodrigo, the falcon is “wretched” because he is fed purchased meat by his priest; but then the priest dies and Father Urrutia proudly lets it fly and Rodrigo, in turn, immediately gifts him with “bundles of feathers on the ground, the small bloody bodies of several pigeons.”
In another scene centered around Fever, the falcon kills a pigeon that was a “mascot for an athletic competition,” disturbing the mayor, the attendees, and the sponsors of the event, who saw the pigeon as “the peaceful sublimation of rivalry in sport”; as well as the communists, for whom the bird “was Picasso’s dove.”
The shift of the falcon’s symbolic meaning from one group to another reminds me of the roles that pigeons play at Muslim religious sites across Iran and in the region. Present in abundance, they are seen not as threats, but sacred birds symbolizing the place’s connection to the ethereal realm of God. Their sound is considered a good omen. People bring them grains as a form of alms, entering an exchange with God, feeding his birds and praying that he resolve a problem or grant a wish.
The instances of violence that Father Urrutia describes between the falcons and the pigeons are not organic to the natural world. They are rather a result of human intervention for the sake of preserving man-made institutions of power and control from a natural bodily discharge. And well, we have seen where many of our interventions, disrupting the balance of the nonhuman world, have taken us. Yet in this violence, the dying priest of Bolaño’s novella finds only beauty and pride, resorts to artistic expression, unaware of the brutality and complicity that emerges in his intellectualism.
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And so here we are, my dear reader, arriving at the end of this essay, which started with pigeon shit and then somehow shaped itself around other issues of scatology. It was by allowing ourselves to float in the mess through a Bolañoesque manner of storytelling, similar to a psychoanalytic stream of consciousness, that we were able to sit at the intersection of what enters us and what leaves us, what we live and what we speak of that lived experience, bringing together the human and the non-human, the self and the other.
Thus we find our way here to the end, but perhaps this is just an end for this version of the essay, for this moment of reading, because unlike Father Urrutia’s confessions, these notecards on shit are not a rant from the deathbed.
poupeh missaghi is a writer, editor, translator, and editor. Her debut book trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020, and her second, Sound Museum, is forthcoming in 2024 (Coffee House Press). Recent translations include Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi, In the Streets of Tehran by Nila, and I’ll be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi. She is an assistant professor at the University of Denver and a faculty mentor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.
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