More than Human

Erika Howsare reviews Kapka Kassabova’s “Anima: A Wild Pastoral.”

By Erika HowsareSeptember 22, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

ONE OF THE FIRST propositions of Kapka Kassabova’s new book Anima: A Wild Pastoral is an expression of futility: “Nothing we can do.” It refers to the fate of a ram, headbutted to death by another ram during mating season, and is spoken by the shepherd who looks after the flock in the Bulgarian highlands. Kassabova makes it a maxim.

But who is “we”? One of the many questions raised in this masterful book has to do with the nature of the collective but different human pathways and with the very boundaries of the human—the places where we shade into other species.

Kassabova grew up in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and now lives in Scotland. She has published three previous nonfiction works about the Balkans. In Anima, the final entry in the quartet, she enters a world of animal enthusiasts who have, in the postcommunist era, undertaken a punishing task: to save some of the oldest domesticated animal breeds in the world—dogs, sheep, and horses—along with a pastoral way of life. “Moving pastoralism emerged in Central Asia, the Balkans and the Mediterranean several thousand years ago,” explains Kassabova, and it persisted in the European heartland until the mid-20th century. In one of many illuminating etymologies, she adds that “the Greek nomas means ‘wandering shepherd’ or ‘wandering in search of pasture,’” linking human movement to that of other mammals.

In conversational passages, Kassabova offers sweeping histories of the Karakachan people, “one of the oldest nomadic peoples to have entered modernity with their animals,” and of the 20th-century upheavals, including hardened national borders, communism, and privatization, that disrupted and marginalized nomadic cultures. These are bookended with the 21st-century group with whom she embeds in the “dying village” of Orelek, Bulgaria.

They are two artist brothers, Kámen and Achilles; Kámen’s wife, Marina, a wolf biologist; the couple’s sons; and several family elders and hired shepherds. They allow Kassabova to visit, go along on daily outings, and even spend weeks living in a high-altitude hut during the summer, following sheep and living on weekly supply drops. She gradually becomes more entangled with the humans in the story, yet the main players are not especially welcoming. “If you must,” replies Kámen when Kassabova initially requests to visit. On her arrival, he “glanced at [her] sideways without a word” while washing blood off a knife. Months later, he is still largely indifferent, embittered by decades of numbing work among the layered ruins of earlier eras, bucking the tide of a globalized economy.

The larger structure of the book centers Kassabova’s personal arc in this “separate and injured” world. It’s a compelling story, built around vivid, novelistic characters. But she also offers a larger context. Antiquity is indelible in this highland world where dozens of cultures have swirled over the land, each leaving its mark. Two of Kámen’s dogs are named Titan and Nestor. One of his former shepherds leaves to establish his own flock on a different mountain, which happens to be the homeland of Orpheus.

In a realm this storied, Kassabova’s tendency to get caught up in forces beyond her control makes sense. All the people here seem to hold their individuality up like umbrellas under the rain of history and modernity. Near the beginning of Anima, Kassabova mentions a previous sojourn with Emin, a wild-horse herder in eastern Pirin, a time of physical challenge and emotional turmoil that became her previous book Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time (2023). “Gripped by fascination and affection, I stayed too long in his inhospitable terrain,” she writes in Anima. Now she looks for “a middle path” more vital than the sanitized world of privilege and safety, but less extreme than the life of Emin, a “human misfit, wired for the wild.”

It’s clear from the opening pages that hardship will dog her in Orelek. “The stones slip under your feet,” she writes of the highland. “[T]he mare slipped into the gorge with the drunk cowherd Vasko […] this is what you do here: you wait and endure.”

No one endures more than the shepherds, who Kassabova quickly realizes are “the invisible people.” The essential workers of the pastoral system, they are “at the centre of the circle. Yet shepherds were not seen or heard. […] They were not meant to be protagonists in the story.” There are also bears and wolves here, but they are not reflexively hated. In fact, one of the ecological theses of Anima, also a central part of Kámen and Marina’s mission, is that predators, livestock, and people should coexist. “What made this coexistence possible was the guardian dog,” Kassabova writes. While saving breeds of dog and sheep, the Orelek group also rescues wolves and bears. Each has a role to play in pastoral life.

Now, there are other, more modern problems circling the flocks: the complexity of government subsidies, fickle markets for lamb and other products, all the long-tail results of the 20th century’s revolutions. Kassabova makes these clear but is ultimately more interested in creating a portrait of people in a locale. Anima leaves an impression of human-animal bonds within a landscape. Marina, on a data-collecting mission, calls to wolves by howling, a sound that “rippled through [Kassabova’s] body for the rest of the day.” At high altitude, Kassabova bonds with one of Kámen’s dogs: “Topi kept close to me today and looked at me searchingly with his adult eyes. […] The higher you went, the harder physical survival became, the more equal you felt to everything.” When Kámen has a big decision to make, he sleeps with his sheep.

The counterpart to all this communion is the shepherd’s loneliness in a world that is well on its way to forgetting about shepherds, fresh milk, transhumance, and the special animal breeds that the Orelek team preserves. As for the sheep, Kassabova writes, “they are pastored by us but they don’t need us. […] An animal-human sect living in the shadow of mass death, that’s what we were. Not because of what we were doing but because we were so alone.”

Anima is sorrowful even as it hums with the pleasures of walking outside, knowing a landscape, and translating these experiences into language. Kassabova’s prose constantly moves and surprises, unfolding from one image into the next, like the flock: “The sheep draw geometric shapes as they zigzag uphill, black against the white scree. Rhombus-like, a moving harlequin pattern, like something you see in a child’s kaleidoscope when you shake it. Now it’s diamonds, now it’s a star.”

In this shape-shifting language, she recounts the heartbreaking fact that addiction is a constant presence for the shepherds, a trouble that’s always about to bloom into outright crisis. In place of human community, they have alcohol, which makes them transform from devoted to wayward. The pastoral life may be seen as a form of prayer—“The days were beads in a rosary,” Kassabova writes—and there is no shortage of mythology embodied in this landscape, including a tradition in which people don the skins of long-haired goats to perform yearly dances. But those old stories, those that once supported a “middle way,” have given way to modern, less coherent mythologies.

The concept of “anima” enters the book in later sections. For Kassabova, it is the world’s soul, represented by the wind, images that move and shift—a kind of wildness in the collective psyche. “[T]his wrecking force is the world’s soul,” she writes. “Anima is pantheistic.” She knows she cannot stay forever in Orelek, though she relishes the way this place has smudged the boundaries of self, the “we” becoming more than human: “You end up like your animals, that’s all.”