The New Zealand-China co-production of the animated film "The Legend of the Upright Elephant" was recently released nationwide. The most interesting part of this adventure story is that a new species is fictionalized, the peach chestnut elephant (thoriphant). Although their faces and bodies are more like donkeys, they are extremely special kinds of elephants (thoriphant uses the root of the word elephant, "peach chestnut" is a transliteration) that can understand and use human language.
Stills from the animated film Legend of the Erect Elephant.
However, the high level of intelligence did not achieve an equal status for them as humans. In the film, our kind do not regard them as rare treasures, but only as ordinary property to be bought and sold and livestock to bear physical work. Since the animal's excellent intelligence is useless in the eyes of short-sighted farmers and cattle dealers except to facilitate the understanding of orders, its rich emotions and desire for equal rights and a free life will of course be completely ignored by its owners. Enslavement by human beings is their unfortunate fate.
As the story progresses, the audience learns the history of the elephants. Their ancestors walked upright like humans, but in order to stay away from the evil deeds of mankind, the upright elephants divided into two branches: one migrated to the northern no-man's land, and more dexterous hands evolved, which could pick the fruits of trees, play musical instruments, smoke pipes, and even produce weapons, build cities, and construct complex social and political systems; and the one left, driven by humans to work (the main task was to bend over and plow the ground), successive generations, the hands became useless, and the uprightness gradually degenerated, forming a flexed and thick back.
The direction of the plot is not difficult to guess. As a member of this unfortunate ethnic group, the fate of the protagonist Muzi Li (who transliterates Mosley in mandarin as this slightly embarrassing name) is of course to continue the tradition of distant ancestors, to regain the glory of walking upright, and to bid farewell to the enslaved fate of that generation. Awakening, exodus, suffering, evolution, rebellion, the protagonist's experience is not difficult to find in many historical facts and stories that we know.
One of the most desirable associations is that the peach chestnut elephant is the embodiment of the black slave on the plantations of the American South. Indeed, he obviously had the intelligence and emotions of ordinary people, but he was in the position of a slave, and being bought, sold, enslaved, and subjected to violence was a common encounter between Muzi Plum and black slaves.
In reality, the image of the elephant also had a certain connection with the black people. In prehistoric times, elephants were widely distributed everywhere. Later, the mammoths, mastodons and other creatures on the American continent gradually became extinct - Jared Diamond in "The Third Chimpanzee" depicts how hunters who crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas exterminated mammoths in a short period of time. There are only two genera left in the family Elephantidae, which inhabit Asia and Africa.
The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond, translated by Wang Daohua, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, February 2016.
In Asia, the ancestors of the Indus and Yellow Rivers tamed wild elephants and used battle elephants. Years later, the Persian Empire greatly deterred Alexander the Great with the 15 war elephants obtained from India, which is likely the first time that Europeans felt the shock of the elephant's huge size. Although there were intermittent records of the use of war elephants in Europe until the Middle Ages, after the 15th century, firearms became widespread, and the advantages of elephants disappeared, and they were no longer used by Europeans for war.
In addition to military use, it seems that it was once an extremely precious gift in the diplomacy of European countries, and ordinary people cannot see it. Until the Renaissance, the image of the elephant still often appeared in European paintings, sculptures, and handicrafts, symbolizing strength and wisdom, but some images were really not very subtle, and presumably the author had not seen this distant treasure with his own eyes. Since then, in the eyes of Europeans who have experienced the baptism from the Enlightenment to biological evolution, the aura of mystery has gradually faded.
On the other hand, with the opening of new shipping routes, the colonial cause was in full swing. The slave trade, which had existed in Africa for centuries, intensified, and large numbers of slaves were trafficked to the Americas. Over time, the survival of slavery gradually became the focus of attention. Interestingly, people's impressions of elephants have also changed.
White elephants have sparked anxiety in the United States
Racial anxiety triggered by skin color
In 1884, circus operator Barnum spent great efforts and high costs to buy the white elephant "Tongdalong" from the King of Burma and transport it to Britain and the United States for touring exhibitions. It was the first time the public in both countries had seen a white elephant, and the New York Times article described Tongdarong's appearance: "There was a large pink patch of color on its forehead that spread across its eyes and half of its nose. The ears are strangely triangular, with flesh-colored pink edges, and large patches of mottled spots, as well as spots on the chest and shoulders. The underside of the torso is also flesh-colored. Ross Burren, a professor of English at OCAD University in Toronto, points out that flesh color is an ambiguous term because it vaguely points to the flesh of white people.
A few years later, Tundaron died in a fire, and Barnum admitted in his reminiscences that he was a little disappointed when he first saw it, because the white was not pure white, but the spots and patches of color caused by albinism. "There is no really pure white elephant in the world, the divine, technical, God-created white."
But in 1884, the unknown public was still curious and fascinated by Tongdalong, which triggered a color storm. Travel writer Frank Vincent Jr. had earlier written his famous travelogue" "The Land of the White Elephant: Scenic Spots in Southeast Asia", and this time he pointed out in an article entitled "The White Elephant": "White elephants are white only in contrast to the obvious black." Mixed-races are not entirely white, but they are white compared to pure-blood blacks. "Less than twenty years ago, the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was enacted, formally abolishing slavery across the Country, but the legacy of race was far from being resolved. Vincent's article was much sharper than the New York Times's, explicitly linking white elephants to race and discussing whiteness.
Stills from the documentary "Elephant".
Also in 1884, two white elephants were exhibited in the United States, Barnum's own "Tip" and Fury's "Light of Asia." They were all ordinary elephants (Vincent called them "black elephants"), but they were repeatedly painted white by the owner of the merchant, so they looked whiter than Tongdalong. But Barnum and Foribou's camps clashed, accusing each other's elephants (including Tongdalong) of being whitewashed impostors.
The "White Elephant Controversy" was once rife, sparking a great debate that the historian Sarah Amatto called "whites, races, racial purity, racial eugenics, and white privilege." For example, some people are anxious about the technology that Barnum and Foribau used to color elephants, fearing that it will reshape the social status of whites and blacks in the United States. A New York Times article titled "An Interesting Experiment" satirically assumed the following scenario: "If it is successfully promoted, people of color will be as rare among us as holy white elephants... The bleached Ethiopians are dazzlingly white, comparable to snow. The purest blonde on Madison Avenue looked dark around the beauties of Thompson Street, and the once white man suddenly became a man of color. It was a strange feeling that white people's skin tones were despised by bleached people of color. All the laws and regulations that still exist for people of color will apply to caucasian races. We will have to pass a new civil rights bill to ensure we can get into hotels and sleeper cars. If bleached people of color condescend to adopt white expressions, we may even hear ourselves being called 'niggers' with contempt. ”
The White Elephant Controversy of 1884.
Later that year, two soap ads fueled the white elephant controversy. Advertisement I depicts an elephant and its dark-skinned tamer, who scrubs the elephant's skin with a cloth in one hand and whitens its black color with soap in one hand. Advertisement two is of a white boy bathing a black boy: in the first picture, the black boy sits in the bathtub and the white boy stands next to him with soap; in the second, the black boy sits outside the bathtub, his face still black, but the rest of his body has turned white.
The implicit logic of the above articles and advertisements is that the whiteness of elephants and human skin tones is variable and can be adjusted by commodities. If skin color is not absolute, the racial problems caused by skin color are clearly a social construct. Buren is profound in pointing out that this conclusion may surprise racists, but they can also infer in reverse that whites must maintain their privilege by tightly controlling their whiteness, lest people of color one day usurp their benefits.
Mary the killer was killed
Like how black people are confused
The ancestors of mankind went out of Africa, footprints all over the continents, and evolved many civilizations. Ironically, many of the descendants of the tribe that remained in Africa later became slaves. Muzi Lee and his contemporaries almost reproduced this history, but the Legend of the Erect Elephant explains this tragedy in terms of a vicious circle caused by physiological degradation, which is only a modest imagination of literary works, and there seems to be no corresponding example in reality.
The objective difference between progress and backwardness among civilizations is not caused by the superiority or inferiority of the race. In another of his books, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond has repeatedly argued that "European colonization of Africa is not as much about the differences between European nations and African nations themselves, as some white racists believe." On the contrary, this is due to accidental factors in geography and biogeography — especially due to the different areas, different axes and different varieties of flora and fauna between the two continents. Still, he reminds readers in the book that "Japan's rejection of guns and China's abandonment of ocean-going ships (as well as the abandonment of mechanical clocks and hydro-driven spinning machines) are well-known examples of the technological regression of isolated or semi-isolated societies in history." "If the peach chestnut elephants are understood from their upright back to creeping as a metaphor for such a retrogression of civilization, their tragedy is a loud wake-up call.
If we broaden the bar a bit, we'll see real-life elephants going through more similar things to black people. In 1916, Mary, a twenty-something female elephant of the Sparks Brothers Circus, was hanged in public for killing the elephant caretaker in full view of the public — though the cause and details of the killing are disputed. The gentle Mary quickly regained her composure, while the crowd was furious and shouted to kill her. Five shots were fired at it on the spot, but to no avail. In response to this outrage, the circus owner decided to publicly execute Mary. In the presence of more than 2,500 people, Mary was hanged—the first time, the chain broke, and Mary, who weighed more than ten thousand pounds, fell heavily to the ground and fractured her hip; the second time, it lost her breath.
Despite being dubbed "Mary the Killer" at the time, many years later, more and more novels, songs, and dramas recounted Mary's plight, mostly with deep sympathy. Writer Joan Van Norsdale Schroeder, who was also interested in Mary's story, quoted Thomas Burton in her work, which was published in the Tennessee Folklore Society Gazette in 1971 — the years when the black civil rights movement took its stage.
Schroeder l'Oro sketches the potential socio-psychological connection between Mary and the Negro: Burton writes that some local residents recalled the 'two keepers' hanged next to Mary, while others recalled Mary's body being burned to the ground on a pile of crosses. 'This belief,' Burton wrote, may have been due to the fusion of hanging with another incident in the town of Owen in which a who allegedly kidnapped a white girl was burned to death on a pile of crosses. 'Killing Elephants: Spectacles. Kill 'Niggers': Another spectacle. It was 1916 — a good year for America's scapegoats. ”
Decades after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, many blacks were still lynched. Burton hooks the historical facts, which is intended to be outspoken; and Schroeder breaks this unspoken word. Elephants and blacks, two seemingly unrelated groups, experienced similar fates because of their similar origins and skin color, and even conflated in the memory, imagination and subconscious of white people.
Elephant Hunting Rifle and Archery
From the pests of the barbaric lands to the uncivilized people of color
In addition to blacks, the impression of the object is also projected on other minorities. Consider a video game, Red Dead Redemption 2 takes place in the United States from 1899 to the early 20th century, when the disabled heroes of the Civil War have become old beggars on the street. In the online version of the game, which is known for its rigorous research and meticulous depiction of hundreds of birds and beasts in the United States, elephants do not appear as living creatures, and the only element related to elephants can be found in the game except for the remains of mammoths, which is a weapon called an elephant hunting rifle. Through its introduction, we learn that man at the time regarded elephants as a "deadly nasty pest" who was useless except for ivory: "They grow in the barbaric lands of India and Africa, excrete ridiculously large amounts of excrement, flatten and consume crops in spite of hungry people, and panic for no reason, trampling an entire family to death in a matter of seconds, more dangerous than rhinos or lions." ”
Poster for the game Red Dead Redemption 2.
Such impressions can hardly be said to be fair, and the words reflect the deep prejudice and anxiety about others. As early as 1862, the French naturalist Henri Muo's posthumous book "Travels of the Lao Kingdoms of Siamese Cambodia" introduced his rediscovered Angkor monuments to the Western world, thus bringing Southeast Asian culture into the spotlight. But an elephant standing at the end of the 19th century will still not be truly accepted by the Western public, whether it is an African elephant or an Asian elephant, it is a dark, barbaric, incomprehensible creature that is hostile to civilized society. As those people have the impression that the difference between the Burmese in Burma, the Bantu in Africa, and the Maori in New Zealand is probably not as great as anthropologically, and that these people of color exist in essence as the antithesis of whites.
This stereotype remained unchanged for many years in the 20th century. The story of Mary aforementioned is reminiscent of George Orwell's The Shooting, an essay of a memoiristic nature. That is to say, the elephant shooting detailed in the article was completed by Orwell himself in the 1920s when he was in Burma. Why, then, did Orwell claim that this incident had made him see "the true nature of imperialism"?
The hairy one killed people like Mary. The dead were Indian coolies, and the elephant owner was also Indian. I don't know if Orwell was too lucky, or if his opponent was much weaker than Mary, and our future literary hero, the novice archery at this time, only fired three shots and killed the reckless elephant. "Older (European) people say I did the right thing, younger people say it's too bad to shoot an elephant in order to stomp a coolie to death, because elephants are worth more than Kolingi coolies. Afterwards, I secretly rejoiced that the coolie had died so well that I could shoot the elephant with plain and justifiable words, and that I was in the right position in law. Orwell said sarcastically at the end of the article.
Burma was then part of British India, part of the British Empire rooted in the colonialist order, and a distant, unfamiliar, and uncivilized continent. In this land, ethnic antagonisms and conflicts are acute. What happened here is both a miniature image of the global landscape between the two world wars and a rehearsal of many turbulent currents that continue to this day. Looking back at the experiences of elephants in recent centuries, people all over the world today should learn more lessons, always be vigilant, and put an end to discrimination, enslavement, crime and persecution against ethnic minorities, so that the tragedy of the "peach chestnut elephants" will not be repeated.
Resources
https://www.elephant.se/database2.php?elephant_id=3864
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/race-and-the-white-elephant-war-of-1884
https://daily.jstor.org/original-white-elephant/
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E8%B1%A1
https://blueridgecountry.com/archive/favorites/mary-the-elephant/
Written by | Zhang Zhe
Edit | Wang Qing
Proofreading | Wang Xin