Verticality, Vertigo and Vulnerabilities: Giraffes in J. M. Ledgard’s Novel Giraffe and in the Handspring Puppet Company’s Play, Tall Horse

Abstract

Giraffes, with their beauty and charisma, have always been vulnerable to capture. Caught young, giraffes, or at least the females, can become tractable, even domesticated. No wonder then that Mehmet Ali, the Ottoman envoy in Egypt, wishing in 1826 to gain the support of Charles X of France in the Greek War of Independence decided to send an Ethiopian giraffe as a tribute and a highly desirable addition to the king’s planned menagerie (Allin 64, 67). No wonder also that Czechoslovakian scientists and politicians in the 1970s committed to transforming and manipulating nature in order to glorify Communism set in motion a scheme to capture giraffes in Kenya and transport them to the Dvur Kralove zoo where they would breed a new species. In these histories of capture, the giraffes were made to perform their vertical identities. They were always already spectacle — to the French full of admiration for the single female giraffe made to walk from Marseilles to Paris, to the Czechs who marvelled at the giraffe herd in their local zoo, but as African animals exiled from their native environments, they were vulnerable to foreign climates and diseases and to the whims and schemes of their captors. The single giraffe was displayed in the first municipal zoo in early nineteenth-century France — a royal, exclusive menagerie no longer politically feasible in post-Napoleonic France — the herd in communist Eastern Europe was deployed for research as well as display.KeywordsNonhuman AnimalWilful IgnoranceCaptive ExistenceHuman EmbodimentAfrican AnimalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.