What are your first thoughts about elephants? Besides their being huge, powerful creatures with long trunks and floppy ears do you associate them with particular traits? The Memory of an Elephant by Alex Lasker is an epic story following the life of Ishi, a male bull elephant born in Kenya and his journey back home to the plains of his birth as he nears the end of his life. The locations span east Africa, Great Britain, and New York from 1962 to 2015, and Ishi’s story is told from an alternating Reader’s Corner first person/African elephant point of view and third person narration. That’s right—an elephant is the major character in this poignant novel. It may very well be one of my favorite books lately.
At the onset this reader was put off by a horrifying poaching scene near the beginning, but this atrocity is the pivotal point that sets Ishi’s life on its fifty-plus-year journey and establishes how the reader will view the relationship between animals and humans. Consequentially, we learn early on that young Ishi comes to lose his clan and is rescued. Until he is old enough and strong enough to set out on his own to find a new clan, Ishi is raised in an animal orphanage by Jean and her husband Russell Hathaway, a white big game hunter, and Kamau, a young Kikuyu boy. No matter how Ishi interacts with any other two-leggers in his universe, these three sympathetic humans will forever be imprinted in his memory as friends and life-long guardians.
Ishi’s search for a new herd sets him on adventures that bring him both happiness and danger. We read of Africa’s natural landscape and beauty but also of the wild cruelty of nature.
Of primary danger to Ishi are evil two-legged hunters with their boom sticks (rifles) and false birds (overhead drones), motivated by killing wildlife for a black market industry of obtaining and selling ivory. When later humanintervention moves the African elephant to a “safe place” it results in not being the happiest place for Ishi.
From the “elephant’s point of view” we are privy to fascinating aspects of the dynamics of communication and the hierarchy of elephant society. In many ways they are similar to humans. Social animals, they like to be in groups and to hang out around a watering hole. As families they support and care for their young, respect their aged members and mourn the loss of dead members. Young males play and have their favorite friends. Power shifts occur by settings, and the succession for leadership involves a fight for power. They are led by the strongest male, but behind every strong male is a strong female, too. Some elephants are kind, others are not. Elephants have an amazing memory and rely on highly developed senses of smell and sound to affect recognition. Humans may be considered the rulers of the earth but, interestingly, as the story of Ishi shows, the long memory of these intelligent animals may give them the capability to take revenge on humans who hurt them. And, Ishi never forgets his loving, rescuing human family of Kamau and the Hathaways.
The Memory of an Elephant by Alex Lasker gives the reader an understanding of the intellect and sentience of elephants. It also gives us a glimpse of the realities of ethical issues such as poachers who kill for sport and profit, the practice of caging as in circuses or zoos, and the need to protect these powerful animals.
Grandezza readers, Ishi’s story is heart-warming and often heart-breaking, and I recommend your including it on your To-Read-List. By the way, there are several titles of The Memory of an Elephant, so be sure to read the one by Alex Lasker.
