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Dr. Yazdovsky
The narrator of “I, the Elephant, Wrote This,” the elephant is a Mozambican African savanna elephant born in the early 1970s. She and her twin sister are extremely close. Her story follows her life from babyhood to her death as an adult. As a baby, the elephant and her sister love hearing stories of other elephants’ “glorious deaths,” and how these dead elephant’s soul ends up in the stars. She and her sister spend a lot of time considering their own deaths—and wondering why there aren’t any stories about Mozambican African savanna elephants. But when she and her sister are initiated into the herd as adults, they learn that the savanna elephants have certainly died heroic deaths—but their deaths are too sad for children to handle. Though the elephant is excited at first to learn these new stories, her excitement wanes when she gives birth to her daughter two years later. Being a mother causes the elephant to shift her focus; suddenly, she finds that she’s more interested in life than death. But this shift proves difficult to maintain when the elephants realize that they are, unwittingly, caught up in the middle of the Mozambican Civil War and a drought at the same time. Under these circumstances, the elephant is distraught and terrified when her daughter and nephew playact as the elephants Castor and Pollux—their games don’t seem so innocent when they could conceivably die any time. But as connected as the elephant is to her daughter, she’s connected most strongly to her sister. Thus, when hungry villagers shoot her sister, the elephant chooses to die with her rather than abandon her. The elephants die forehead to forehead, in the same position as the elephants Castor and Pollux in their constellation.
Elephant Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Elephant or refer to Elephant. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
I, the Elephant, Wrote This: Soul of Elephant
Quotes
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
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“A zoo,” she said to them, “is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.”
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As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
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Elephant Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Elephant or refer to Elephant. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
I, the Elephant, Wrote This: Soul of Elephant
Quotes
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
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“A zoo,” she said to them, “is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.”
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As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
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