THE ELEPHANT’S EYE AND THE MAJI-MAJI WAR IN HEMINGWAY’S THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Abstract

Published in 1986, Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden has always been a controversial work due to its multi-layered narratives. While the honeymoon narrative, constructed around Catherine Bourne and David Bourne, focuses on the theme of gender/sexual role reversal and polyamory, the African narrative is based on David’s childhood experience while elephant hunting in Africa with his father. Regarding the latter aspect, in “Tracking the Elephant: David’s African Childhood in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden,” Suzanne del Gizzo stresses the importance of childhood and empathy in David’s African story, suggesting that David’s childhood innocence is linked to the symbolism of Africa, while his empathetic connection with the elephant and his perception of elephants as equal to humans based on elephants’ reasoning power serve as a profound contrast to his father’s anthropocentric masculinity, in which animals are regarded as objects and thus they can be killed unethically.

On top of that, I suggest that the adult masculinity demonstrated in David’s African story is associated with a biased prejudice based on speciesism, whereby we differentiate ourselves from other animals purely on the grounds that we are human. While this perception is viewed as problematic by the narrator David, the author Hemingway provides us a way to deconstruct this prejudice, which is through looking into the eyes of the elephant. In “The Eyes of Elephants: Changing Perceptions,” Nigel Rothfels demonstrates how elephants’ eyes have become central to the discourse of suffering and further concludes that elephants can be seen as a reflection of our worries, fears, and hopes. Crucial to the discourse of elephant’s suffering is the determination whether someone or something is worthy of protection and respect based on whether that individual can suffer and the idea that all sentient individuals are the center of moral concern. Lacking this moral concern, David’s father and Juma shoot the elephant and let him bleed to death, which explains why David would lose respect for his father and Juma. Moreover, by applying Rothfels’ conclusion into David’s African story, one understands that the graphic description of the elephant’s death metaphorically serves as a reflection of David’s own death, which can be regarded as a traumatizing experience.

It is this traumatic experience that urges David to rewrite the African story even though it has been interrupted and eventually destroyed by Catherine. As for David, the process of writing out the African story serves as an act of “remembering.” Moreover, from a non-anthropocentric viewpoint, David’s recollection of the elephant hunting story is worth emphasizing due to its foregrounding of his father’s dismembering of the elephant, a sentient being. While David’s rewriting of the story might be claimed as an act of “re-killing” the elephant, I see his courage in remembering this cruel moment of his childhood and his moral concern toward the elephant as a form of non-anthropocentric masculinity. This form of masculinity, as I suggest, can also be seen as a form of post-colonial masculinity, as imperial guilt remains the primary source of David’s African story. This leads to the point that my analysis regarding David’s African story in The Garden of Eden will cover both non-anthropocentric and post-colonial aspects.