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For The Catholic Herald

To the researches of the antiquary and scholar Jorge Luis ‘Vintage’ Borges, a few points offer further context on that most peripatetic of birds in this, our present century.
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Learned reports come from South Asia, where the spotted-bill Filipino pelican (phillipensis) is found, with no small irony, only in Cambodia, the Indian peninsular, and in Sri Lanka (or the contemporary Ceylon). Here they are known to congregate by the Beira Lake, ‘an urban oasis’ in the capital city of Colombo, whereat they feed upon raw sewage, single-use plastics, and the flesh of those who commit crimes against the state. Herefrom they derive their green hue, as in former legendary illustrations.

In the Americas, along the Gulf Coast of the northern continent, at La Nouvelle-Orléans, the pelicans play a game named ‘basketball’ by ornithologists, in which they catch a round ball within their bucket-like beaks (the Hebrew word kavas meaning both ‘cup’ and ‘pelican’), attempting to deposit it one to the other, but are not allowed then to transport it thus, which is termed ‘travelling’, as one might think befits the wanderous nature of the species.¹

And within Europe the fabulist Dahl has transmitted at least one account in which a pelican was found to be running a window-cleaning business in collaboration with a giraffe, a monkey, and a small child (the child’s right to employment and/or fitness as regards working with wildlife having thus far not been ascertained). This incident fell out, it is averred, in England, where the pelican is held in certain high regard, not least in aristocratic and heraldic circles – vide ‘Hampshire House’. The Royal Park of St James is particularly noted for their population, and in the age of the automobile it has become necessary for a pelican crossing to be erected, enabling the animal to venture to and from St James’s Palace safely, across the modern thoroughfares.

Though not know to the British (or at any rate witnessed by them) for many centuries, in recent times the sceptre’d isle has hastened to catch up, the venerable Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to take just one example, having of course the pelican as its emblem, also inaugurating as a new ‘tradition’ a college anthem – as accompaniment to their ancient and sacred reverse-pelican-walk – on a theme of Thomas Aquinas: ‘Bye, bye, Mrs Pelicane Pie’. They then partake of a huge banquet.

On Anglican feast days more widely, church choirs sing in honour of the ‘soft, self-wounding pelican’ (Finzi, 1946) ‘whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man’ – this strange image arising, as Borges notes, from St Jerome’s commentary on Psalm 102 (‘I am like unto the pelican in the wilderness’), in turn commented upon by the inquisitorial S Roberto Bellarmino SJ, wherein ‘as the pelican wages constant war on noxious animals, [and] especially on serpents, so the Anchorets constantly do combat with the demons’. That doctor of the church cites Mary Magdalen, Mary of Egypt, Paul the first hermit, Anthony, Hilarion and others in his analogy.

This is susceptible to two conjoined interpretations.

The first is that the pelican connotes the solipsistic tendencies of our age: self-loathing, body-dysmorphia disorder, psychological perturbances, and so on. It may be for this reason that the pelican is still found engraved upon cilices. (Compare also, the ‘pelican daughters’ of King Lear with the earlier, and the more overtly Christological implications in King Leir.)

More charitable interpretations might well be put forward for a bird that – according to one Spanish fable – would rather set itself on fire than lose its fledglings (a gloomy and inverted version of the phoenix myth) – whence the popular legend of the stork (considered the same bird by the ancients) delivering a baby. The unreliable Horapollo (Hieroglyphica), however, speaks of a creature noted for its blindness or imprudence, because they nest needlessly upon the ground and are thus vulnerable to traps:

Though like other birds, it can lay its eggs in the highest places, it does not. But rather it hollows out a place in the ground, and there places its young. When men observe this, they surround  the spot with dry cow-dung to which they set fire. When the pelican sees the smoke, it wishes to put out the fire with its wings, but on the contrary only fans the flames with its motion. When its wings are burned, it is very easily caught by the hunters. For this reason, priests are not supposed to eat of it, since it died solely to save its children. But the other Egyptians eat it, saying that the pelican does not do this because of intelligence, as the vulpanser, but from heedlessness. (transl. Jean Martin)

In the Hieroglyphica, it is the vulture which allows its young to drink its blood. Either legend might well stem from a translation error; but Joseph Hall, in his Meditations, takes Horapollo’s conception of the pelican as a caution against meddling – ‘the flame of discension’ – in church doctrinal matters, to one’s own destruction.

Modern Egyptians, meanwhile, do also sometime eat the pelican, which they call gemmal al bahr, or ‘the camel of the river’. But the meat thereof is coarse and strong and greasy, for which reasons it had been proscribed among the Israelites (Levit. xi. 18). And at this season, our thoughts turn likewise to the tribulations of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and crew (the Terra Nova expedition, 1911) who subsisted, for as long as they did – according to his own handwritten journals, in the British Library – on a diet of ground pelican and biscuits, this meal named for the ancient belief that the pelican can store a weeks’ supply of food in its beak. More evidence of the nutritional value of this sustenance would have been afforded by their safe return, and welcomed, no doubt, by later generations of polar explorers. Alas, though, they did not survive their great endeavour.

There remain, quite inexplicable, the events surrounding General Guise, who, while ‘marching up to Carthagena’ (c.1754), was apparently fired upon by artillery pieces stuffed with pelicans, from which he scoffed that he would make a pie. A commentary in The Spectator notes politely that the General was perhaps ‘a little cracked’.

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¹ The legal historian Grisham relates a 1992 case in which two Supreme Court Justices, Rosenberg and Jensen, were assassinated on the orders of an oil tycoon wishing to drill on nearby marshland which is home to this endangered species. The Justices in question had a history of environmental rulings.

In late July 1579, an enormous, well-dressed and well-armed African bodyguard stepped off a boat into the southern Japanese port of Kochinotsu.

Yasuke – perhaps from ‘Isaac’ in Amharic – had (probably) been abducted as a child by neighbouring Nilotic tribesmen, sold into slavery, and, by 23ish, already travelled (and fought) through northeast Africa, Arabia, and round the long coasts of both India and China.

His employer was the ‘most important Catholic in all of Asia’, Alessandro Valignano, papal ‘Visitor to the Indies’, here to impress the One True Faith upon the Japanese, and build on unsure Catholic footholds in the country.

But Yasuke promptly stole the show. He needed two beds, wore three men’s clothes sewn into one, and couldn’t fit through basic doors. His was a very noticeably muscular Christianity – and his blackness, far from hindering, had potentially divine connotations among the Japanese.

In the next three years he learned their ‘outlandish’ language, was given away (or sold?) to a mercurial warlord, nearly died thanks to an enthusiastic, festive mob, found himself exalted to the status of samurai, served at the forefront of ‘The Age of The Country at War’ – and then abruptly disappeared from the historical record.

The number of direct and unambiguous references to Yasuke in that record, though, is tiny, and beyond the ninjas, monks and ruthless warlords, typhoons, cliff-falls and disease that make up this undeniably rollicking historical yarn (both films and graphic novels have been fashioned out of it), much of this book is, of necessity, about the Jesuits and/or the Japanese internal conflicts of the 16th century.

The co-authorship of a Tokyo-based academic (Lockley) and a ‘historical adventure non-fiction’ writer (Girard) is not without its problems, either. The narrative leans lustily towards the Game of Thrones end of the spectrum, and the boisterous prose is well stocked with unverifiable adjectives, use of the word ‘likely’, and glimpses of Yasuke’s thought-process which surely cannot be substantiated. The extensive research is amply evidenced, but the delivery (there are no footnotes or attributions, per se) leaves the reader unclear as to which threads are the solid historical warp and weft and which are the more speculative embroidery. The chronology can be quite evasive. And there are sporadic and slightly effortful references to latter-day race/gender/slavery issues, which aren’t really in keeping with the adventure-story tone.

All of this, however, opens plenty of interesting windows into seafaring, high-caste homosexuality, palace architecture, and more – and the considerable endnotes and bibliography will be a trove for anyone who might prefer the sterner, rather more scholarly approach.

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For Geographical

‘Nobody wants to do a year in Iraq’, mutters one of the narrators in Phil Klay’s Redeployment, ‘and come back with nothing but stories about the soft-serve ice-cream machine at the embassy cafeteria.’

No kidding. And Klay (rhymes with ‘guy’) will not have been the first soldier, American or otherwise, to return from operations and find that gung-ho anecdotes were frankly expected of him. But a run-down of the opening lines in this debut story-collection – ‘We shot dogs’; ‘In any other vehicle we’d have died’; ‘For a long time I was angry’ – would make for an more-than-acceptable PowerPoint on the diversity of American experience during their nine-year misadventure in Iraq.

Hooked very loosely on Klay’s own 13 months in Anbar Province, as a Marine Public Affairs officer, during the ‘Surge’ of 2007-8, Redeployment progressively gives voice to grunts and morticians, chaplains and Foreign Service officials, as they variously assault bomb-factories, get written up for decorations, stumble upon scenes of torture, wrangle with politicians, and (ever present throughout the project) attempt to deal with the peculiar perturbations of homecoming – which is what, in this context, ‘redeployment’ actually means.

And they tell stories. What Klay’s pieces turn out to be, in the main, are stories about stories. Stories sons hear from their veteran fathers. Hero stories as part of their not so heroic training programme: ‘In boot camp, the DIs teach you Medal of Honor stories.’ Stories made up just to fill in some paperwork. In ‘War Stories’, the protagonists try their best not to tell any stories at all.

The strategy is well-managed, the tactics subtle. Klay is naturally fluent in the distinct registers of military conversation – the salty, the salutary, the inarticulate humanity – but his frames of reference also incorporate the Jesuits, Egyptian poetry and The Wire. He instinctively plays off the rough soldierly humour against the dark realities it has always been intended to deal with, but he approaches the heavier (read ‘predictable’) issues at a cautious angle. An officer in Haditha (‘In Vietnam They Had Whores’) flaps about his troops’ collegial handing round of a ‘pocket-pussy’; a young soldier reflects that if the platoon can’t find the whorehouse they don’t know the city well enough to be there.

‘OIF’ (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is a three-page exercise in the wilful – and often smug – opacity of the military sub-language, and especially its godawful acronyms. You need a dislocated kind of intellect to wind up assessing your personal value in terms of ‘WIA’ vs ‘KIA’ – and a very unusual sensitivity to that environment to compose a story which, for the outsider, is at once completely alienating and yet makes (almost) total sense.

It’s no discredit to his own soldier-turned-author success story that Klay was already a graduate of literature and creative writing before he joined the Marine Corps, or that his Public Affairs role would have consisted substantially of listening to – and indeed shaping – ‘narratives’ on the front lines. He maintains, for the record, that he left for Iraq with no particular writing opportunity in mind. On the evidence of Redeployment, though, it can only have been a matter of time.

Phil Klay has since announced that his follow-up, a novel, is not going to be about war. A pity for military writing. But it’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with instead.

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For Literary Review