When the Elephants Dance

When the Elephants Dance is a war novel that presents an unblinking account of the horrors of war as experienced by the friends and family gathered in the Karangalan cellar, who refuse to surrender. The characters deal with blasted streets littered with burned and decapitated bodies; with the relentless sounds from the artillery, aircraft, and gunfire; with the constant anxiety and uncertainty over what might happen next; as well as the more practical concerns of daily living: food, water, hygiene. The characters witness arbitrary acts of brutality as innocent people are rounded up, tortured, and executed. To create the immediacy of this experience, Holthe opts to case the narrative in present tense, giving the reader the feeling that this horror is ongoing and pressing. 

Holthe chronicles the group’s daily efforts to work the dangerous streets of Manila to forage for sustenance. It is a grim and often desperate effort because there is little to eat in the city. Survival, however, is more than placating hunger and thirst. The novel suggests that survival depends on others. Under extraordinary pressures, those refugees in the cellar come together and form a tight bond that in the end eases their anxieties, helps pass the time, and works to ensure their survival. Across age, gender, social and economic status, and even ethnicity (two of the refugees are actually Japanese), they help each other.

The characters in the cellar use storytelling to survive the war. Under the sway of involved stories that are shared, exotic tales of enchantment and magic, the group escapes into the welcoming refuge and comforting solace of the imagination. In addition, those in the cellar plan life after the war. They create for themselves not alternative but rather plausible realities, futures that are at once promising and enticing and await them when the war ends. Thus, in the closing scene in which the families and neighbors gather at sunrise for a “feast” of fried fish and rice, the novel affirms the indominable human spirit. 

The novel moves unerringly toward young Alejandro’s brave affirmation of his identity as a Filipino: “I am proud to be a Filipino. I shall lift my first forever in honor of my country. Mabuhay, my Philippines! Long life!” (368). In a contemporary era, sensitive to respecting cultural diversity, the novel is an affirmation of the Filipino culture, suggested by the characters’ frequent use of the native Tagalog language.

As Holthe points out in the Author’s Note that begins the novel, since the Age of Exploration more than four centuries ago, the Philippines has endured multiple occupations by an unbroken succession of Western and Eastern nations. Enticed by the islands’ favorable resource reservoir (particularly mineral metals, oil, fish, and sugar cane) and by its value as a military outpost for the Pacific Rim, these nations, among them the United States but dominated by Spain, made the Philippines a de facto extension of their individual foreign cultures. During that long period of imperialism and colonialization, the islands’ indigenous people struggled to maintain any sense of their own culture. In fact, a free and independent Philippines was declared within months of the end of World War II.

To create a sense of the viability of that nearly extinct indigenous culture, Holthe’s narrative strategy is to intersperse the documentary feel of the narrative of the last days of the Japanese occupation with the tales told by the friends and family hunkered in the Karangalan cellar. These are stories that assert the indigenous culture with its wild sense of the supernatural, the lurid, the fabulous, the paranormal, and even the miraculous, what Holthe terms “delicious darkness and magic” (ix). They are tales that defy the Western sensibility with its need for logic and reason and its unexamined embrace of the tidy miracles of Christianity.

As Holthe recalls in her Author’s Note, she grew up in San Francisco listening to the folk tales of her family’s Filipino culture: “My brothers and sisters and I would sit, riveted, holding our breath. Their storytelling would cast a spell on me each time. I relished every word” (ix). These narrative interludes are more than therapeutic escapes for those in the cellar, and they are more than cautionary tales intended to teach someone in the cellar an important life lesson. They become the narrative’s celebration of the Filipino life, culture, and traditions.