The Camel in the Sun by Griffin Ondaatje (review)

For years a traveling merchant thinks nothing of his put-upon camel’s comfort, viewing it more as a tool to get goods from one place to another than as a living creature. During a trip through the city of Medina, the merchant snoozes in the shade of one of the city’s many gardens while the camel stands tied up in the hot sun. The Prophet Mohammed, living in Medina at the time, sees the camel and compassionately comforts it, an act that unleashes the camel’s sorrow at being treated merely as a conveyance, causing the animal to weep. Its tears soak into the sand and enter the dreams of the merchant, who absorbs the camel’s sadness and begins to see things from the animal’s perspective. Upon waking, the merchant contritely accepts the Prophet’s censure of his behavior towards the camel and humbly begins to treat it more kindly. Ondaatje’s version of this story, inspired by a hadith (“an account of the Prophet’s words or actions passed from generation to generation”), has an elegant simplicity that allows the tale’s lesson to take center stage in a non-didactic way. An author’s note gives background on Ondaatje’s interaction with the tale and provides a cursory explanation of the hadith tradition; a handful of resources are also listed in the author’s acknowledgments. Wolfsgruber’s art, monoprints combined with drawing and printed on matte paper, is stunning in its evocation of the desert setting (and tastefully avoids depicting the Prophet); varying tones of brown and gold are accented with cooler blues and greens while the pencil details give texture and vibrancy to the otherwise stark desert and dusty city backgrounds. This provides a solid, accessible base for some thought-provoking discussion about human-animal (or even just human) relationships, compassion, and empathy.