The narratives of the Ethiopian giraffe and the Kenyan giraffes appear in two texts respectively: the puppet play Tall Horse (2006) and the novel Giraffe (2007) by J. M. Ledgard. Tall Horse tells initially of the trajectory of two young giraffes destined to be royal tributes, who were captured in the Ethiopian Highlands and then shipped to Marseilles. The more fragile giraffe was sent to the English king while the other was placed under the guardianship of one Hassan and the slave Atir. The illustrious scientist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire came to ensure the safe passage of the giraffe who walked 7000 kilometres to Paris. This extraordinary journey inspired the South-African based Handspring Puppet Company in collaboration with the Sogolon Marionette Troup of Mali to bring to the stage the giraffe’s story – an African animal who had enchanted all of France. Now, roughly a hundred and seventy years later (2004–2005), two African puppet companies could beguile international audiences with this play, which featured a life-sized giraffe puppet and only two human actors alongside many other puppets and puppeteers.

In the frame of the play Jean-Michel, a young Frenchman, enters the museum at Bamako, Mali in search of Atir his ancestor, and is magically drawn into the past as he transforms into Atir himself via a journey through the Special Collections. The play is not plot-driven but foregrounds a kind of pageantry as it depicts the responsiveness of the French and Atir to the young giraffe. The script is based on Michael Allin’s account Zarafa (an Arabic word for gentleness and the etymological basis for the word giraffe), subtitled The true story of a giraffe’s journey from the plains of Africa to the heart of post-Napoleonic France (1998). The historical giraffe Sogo Jan (her name in the play) lived in Paris for eighteen years. Atir, who accompanied her on much of her journey, remained her keeper for the rest of her life. Even if this could suggest a ‘happy’ story of a kind, or at least one of some stability and longevity for an African animal in Europe, the near-solitary captivity of a herd animal accustomed to unlimited space is a tragic diminishing of her life.

Like Tall Horse, the novel Giraffe is a dramatically effective and extraordinary story. The more recent giraffe narrative is one of tragedy, violence and state secrecy. When J. M. Ledgard, The Economist correspondent, was stationed in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, he was apprised of the silenced history of a herd of giraffes captured in Kenya in 1973 and transported to the Dvur Kralove zoo in the CSSR. The motivation behind acquiring these African animals (ironically they did not constitute a natural herd as they consisted of different strains) was to breed a new species for the glory of Communism. The breeding programme was highly successful until the night of April 30 and the early morning of 1 May 1975 when the herd was massacred by orders from the Politburo. As Ledgard puts it in a postscript to his novel, Giraffe:

Set initially in 1973, just five years after the Soviet Union had quashed Dubček’s attempts at liberalisation in the CSSR and invaded the country, the novel is imbued with the stifling rigidities of communism and the characters’ fears of Soviet surveillance during the Cold War. The narrative itself is polyphonic and begins with the point of view of Snehurka (or Snow White because of her unusually pale chest and underbelly) as she is being born, then her experience of her subsequent seizure and the start of the journey. Emil (rather heavy-handedly named) Freymann, the haemodynamicist, who travels with the giraffes from Hamburg to the zoo in the CSSR, studies ‘the flow of blood in vertical creatures’ (Ledgard 27). He interacts mainly with Snehurka, the most confident giraffe on the barge. He provides a sense of history of other diasporic animals, as he reiterates his ideological rejection of ‘the communist moment’ (19 and passim). Once the giraffes reach the zoo, the principal narrative voice is that of Amina, a young orphaned worker in a dangerously pollutive factory. The giraffes wake her from her somnambulism, both literal and metaphoric, of the sleepwalking life she leads and it is she who embodies some calm and love for them as they are massacred. This final, traumatic event is repetitively represented, told through the points of view of the witnesses and participants.

While the novel is a tragedy interlaced with stringent political critique of a heartless communist state and its effects on both human and nonhuman, the play is a social comedy replete with mostly gentle satire as it critiques the colonial narrative of Atir and Sogo Jan and celebrates the advent and reception of the giraffe in France. My concern in this chapter is the recurring element in both play and novel, the vulnerability of the giraffe body, and the concomitant embodied, vertiginous relationships between human and nonhuman. The life-size giraffe puppet body in Tall Horse serves as a reminder of the live animal presence behind its construction, thus suggesting a way of reading both the play and the novel which incorporates animal ethics. This body is not a symbolic body, in the way that animal bodies have been made to stand for human character traits. Instead the puppet body approximates that of the ‘real’ giraffe being. As Basil Jones stresses, ‘the primary work of the puppet is the performance of life’ (254) as it ‘striv[es] to depict and embody life’ (255). This dramatic figuration of the animal body does not imagine the giraffe as a mere play of surfaces; on the contrary, the animal’s interiority or subjectivity is undeniable.

Such a reading is underpinned by a number of theorists in Animal Studies who consider a focus on the body of the animal and the human an ethical, posthumanist strategy. Rosi Braidotti suggests a ‘neoliteral approach’ which eschews the metaphorisation of animals for an approach in which ‘the other … needs to be taken on its own terms’ (528). Following Deleuze and Guattari, she argues for ‘an ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, other) can do’ proposing that:

For Cora Diamond in ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ humans share an embodiedness with nonhuman animals which we ‘respond to and imagine’ and which counteracts the strangeness of animals. An intense appreciation of human embodiment encourages an acknowledgment of the common embodied vulnerability which we ‘share’ with animals, as well as a heightened awareness of physical mortality, so much so that this can elicit extreme feelings like panic (74).

In Cary Wolfe’s analysis, like that of Braidotti and Diamond, posthumanism very specifically undermines anthropocentrism and speciesism, but rather than rejecting the human he recommends engaging with human particularity ‘once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on’ (Posthumanism xxv). Thus we re-consider what we have always accepted as ‘human experience’ by ‘recontextualizing [the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself] in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of “bringing forth a world”’ (xxv).

Anat Pick’s consideration of posthumanism echoes, to some extent, that of Wolfe. Through embodiment, she proposes, we both render ourselves ‘“less human” … whilst seeking to grant animals a share in our world of subjectivity’ (Creaturely Poetics 6), but she is sceptical of the notion of animal subjectivity in itself, disavowing ‘interrogating and expanding the possibilities of (non-human) subjectivity’ (6). Pick prefers to ‘proceed … externally, by considering the corporeal reality of living bodies’ (2–3). Like Diamond she stresses vulnerability, analysing it through the philosophy of Simone Weil in which ‘the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence’ (3). Pick regards this notion of beauty as always already ethical in its implication, ‘a sort of sacred recognition of life’s value as material and temporal’ (3).

While my reading of the two texts under discussion is influenced by the theorists quoted above on embodiment, representations of the interiorities of the giraffes will also be included. To do so is not to regard them as humanist subjects but to align my reading with Wolfe’s insistence on reconsidering ‘our assumptions about who the knowing subject can be’ (‘Human, All Too Human’ 571). His essay simultaneously pays attention to representations of human and nonhuman commonalities of lived embodiment, its vulnerabilities and finitude and its ethical dimensions. I will also read the giraffe body metonymically in relation to human bodies. In Animals in Film Jonathan Burt’s critique of the ubiquity of ‘rhetorical animals on screen’ which includes ‘animals as metaphors, metonyms, textual creatures to be read like words’ (31) resonates with Braidotti’s call for animals not to be metaphorised. When the human body and the animal body are made to metonymise each other reciprocally in trans-species knots, however, Braidotti’s sense of the ‘radical immanence’ of the nonhuman animal body is incorporated. Further, the human body may then be located in relation to Wolfe’s ‘entire sensorium of other living beings’. In the play and novel under discussion both humans and giraffes figure intertwining trans-species vulnerabilities while remaining, always, embodied, separate beings with their own histories and lives.

Una Chaudhuri observes that drama is the ‘most anthropocentric of all the arts’ (522). A life-size giraffe puppet contradicts conventional theatre, of course, yet the animation of the puppet is dependent on the skill of the puppeteer who has to make the audience believe in its ‘life and credibility’ (Jones 254). The puppet may appear to be all body but its very movement denotes an inner life (Jones 266). For Jones, puppeteer and producer of Tall Horse and other Handspring Puppet Company plays, this ‘embodied form of thinking, of thinking incarnate’ signifies a refusal ‘to make a separation between mind and body’ (266). Thus, according to Adrian Kohler, Handspring master puppet designer and maker, the giraffe puppet has to simultaneously embody ‘some kind of strength and determination within her complete victimhood’ (Adrian Kohler qtd in Millar 232).

The aesthetic expressivity of the puppet body animated by human actors inside the puppet reminds us that the body of the giraffe is key to trans-species relationships between human and nonhuman in both novel and play. With this puppet body looming over the human actors and other puppets, a narcissistic identification with the animal (on the part of the players or the audience) is scarcely feasible. Instead, trans-species connections are embodied, materialist, and incorporate Weil’s sense of vulnerability which Pick discusses. Acampora’s ‘symphysis’ between humans and animals as opposed to ‘erotogenic romantic models of fusion’ (114) is useful in its suggestion that such a ‘bodily consciousness’ is both human and animal. (Even so, the term ‘consciousness’ seems an odd one to use, given its connotation of ‘thinking’ and ‘cogitation’ as J. M. Coetzee has Elizabeth Costello complain [33] in another context.)

The giraffe puppet interacts with Atir, who is played by a human actor. The strongest connection between them is their common vulnerability to slavery, with the image of a slave body recurring in the intersecting embodiment of human and nonhuman. The identities of both Sogo Jan and Atir are historically framed by the horror of slavery: Mehmet Ali who masterminded sending the giraffe as a royal tribute had ‘monopolised the slave trade for fifty years’ (Allin 36). Atir served as a slave of Bernadino Drovetti, the adept plunderer and marketeer of Egyptian antiquities. Soon after Sogo Jan is captured in the hunt and her mother killed, Atir, perhaps in an attempt to expiate his culpability, confides to her his own traumatic history ‘I was once a slave like you – stolen from my village in Mali by the jonserelao’ (Burns 250). When the young giraffe demands more sustenance he acknowledges ‘Already you have made a servant of the one who captured you’ (Burns 249). Subsequently, as it becomes clear in Paris that Atir will not return to Africa, partly because he fears that his Malian home has been obliterated by the slave trade, partly because Sogo Jan has become exclusively dependent on him, he taunts the giraffe repeatedly ‘I am not your slave’ denying his attachment to her (Burns 262, 263, 276). Like Atir, the giraffe is, potentially, both slave holder and enslaved. Reciprocally, they have changed each other’s life trajectories; both are irrevocably diasporic beings, Africans in Paris with a sense of what has been lost. Sogo Jan’s narrative had been written on her very body according to Atir: her markings, her taamaki, reveal her destiny of a long journey from which she will never return.

On a lighter note, the negrophilia in Paris at the time (Millar 45) renders Atir a sexualised and highly desirable body. In the play he is seduced by Lady Clothilde Grandeville de Largemont, wife of the prefect of Marseilles, who finds him in the stable where he sleeps with Sogo Jan. In the stage directions she is ‘thrilled to be making love under the eyes of the giraffe’ (Burns 267), as though the very gaze of the giraffe contributes to Atir’s desirability. In the narrative of the play, Sogo Jan is also exoticised and eroticised. In her Africanity, her grace and beauty, her...