OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID161large, inhabiting a lot of skin, and it “openly” does the things it does—it
has even more of itself, its consciousness, to hide.
The creature’s skin can also be read by others since it is “full of the
history of power,” suggesting that the poem might be about race as well
as animal hybridity. The poem is also about the speaker’s “renaissance,”
about being reborn as an English speaker, rising out of the mud, and
confronting the other that is not itself, the human: the being with “the
wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made / to see and
not to see; to hear and not to hear // that tree-trunk without / roots.” The
hybrid here is a point of view simultaneously elephant and human,^10
allowing for the fundamental question: “What / is powerful and what
is not?” This begins as a question about what defines and drives the
elephant—what makes it what it is. It quickly turns into a question of
what can affect it. “My soul shall never // be cut into / by a wooden spear.”
The question about power is in part about the symbolic meaning of the
elephant as the strongest and largest of land animals, a beast whose
strength humans have long admired, allegorized, and harnessed. But
it is also a question about the elephant’s own ability to survive human
predation. Its “feats of strength” are physical, but its “spiritual poise,”
which is both elephant and human, is more mysterious, located both in
its physical being and in something else. As a hybrid figure, the elephant-
speaker of the poem both lacks (as elephant) and has (as ventriloquizing
speaker) the ability to “shout / its own thoughts to itself like a shell.” In
the end, the relation between elephant and human, or any two individ-
ual beings with consciousness (and the elephant has the largest brain of
any land mammal, about four times the size of a human brain), is one
of mutual ignorance and isolation, a struggle to read the other: “the I of
each is to // the I of each / a kind of fretful speech / which sets a limit on
itself.” The hybrid figure in the poem creates a meeting space, where we
might see the “beautiful element of unreason” beneath the skin of both
elephant and human.
It perhaps goes without saying that the hybridity of the talking ani-
mal, or more precisely, of speaking as animal, is problematic and unsta-
ble (as we saw in the previous chapter in Walt Whitman’s “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking”).^11 One might say too that this is in the nature