This is supposed to be Syrian Gazelle Boy. Here he is in LIFE Magazine, 9 Sept 1946. He looks pretty cross. It might be because he is bound in a really desultory way - that always pisses me off. The 'It tastes like heaven' caption refers to some prune juice rather than Gazelle Boy. I think.
OK, so this kind of famous picture is obviously faked.
These letters to the editor of Oct 14 1946 point out that 'Gazelle Boy' has some rather obvious tan lines going on. Then there's the whole fringe thing - I like the hairstyle, but I'm not convinced it was perpetrated by gazelles? Gazelles have these really flat teeth designed to grind up the kind of tough vegetation that their diet consists of - they're not really up to cutting hair. 'Gazelle Boy' is some local kid with a casual approach to grooming posed by some bored photographers probably - or some kind of WWII desert soft porn.
There's another missing photograph, obviously I can't show it to you because it's - missing. Jean-Claude Armen's seen it - so has at least one other person, but I haven't. You'll have to take my word for it. Apparently it's just like the one above, only much more authentic.
So this hoax photograph pretty much invalidates the whole idea of some superfast desert kid raised on gazelle milk and scrubby grass - except - I don't know? There's these stories ...
A wild boy had been caught in the desert straddling Transjordan, Syria and Iraq. Amir Lawrence al Sha’alan, chief of the Ruweili tribe, was out hunting in this inhospitable region, whose only inhabitants were the staff at the British-run stations of the Iraq Petroleum Company.
“I was astonished to see what looked like a boy running amid a herd of gazelles we were chasing,” said the Amir. “I called to the occupants of the other cars to stop shooting. We were still far away, but could see that the boy was running as fast as the gazelles. We chased the herd in our cars for 50 miles (80km), during which time he kept up with them, bounding along with a half-human, half-animal gait. Suddenly we saw the boy stumble and fall. When we came up to him we found that his leg had been injured by a large stone. He looked up at us with fear starting from his luminous eyes and shrank from our touch, emitting cries like a wounded gazelle.”
The Amir tried to feed and clothe him, but he kept escaping, so he took him to Dr Musa Jalbout at one of the Petroleum Company stations, who later passed him into the care of four Baghdad doctors. Dr Jalbout said he acted, ate and cried like any gazelle, and had no doubt that he had lived all his life among the gazelles, being suckled by them and cropping the sparse desert herbage along with the herd. He was thought to be aged about 15.
Apparently speechless, he was covered in fine hair and ate only grass – although a week before Karim’s report he had had his first meal of bread and meat. He could allegedly run at 50 mph (80km/h), twice the Olympic record. He was 5ft 6in (1.7m) tall, “so thin that the bones could be counted easily beneath the flesh, yet stronger physically than a normal full-grown man.” (Amir Lawrence al Sha'alan, as reported in The Sunday Express, maybe)
In 1946 a wild child was discovered in Syria, with some gazelles, a boy apparently twelve to thirteen years old whose galloping leaps enabled him to move as quickly as his animals. It was possible to follow the running child through binoculars, but he was caught only after being chased by an Iraqi army jeep. Though he managed to maintain a speed of 50km/h, he was eventually captured and shamefully bound hand and foot. Tall and slender, with a bushy mop of black hair, powerful ankles and muscles like steel springs, the boy resembled the youths of the Koniagui tribe in Upper Gambia, who hunt with bows and run as fast as their dogs, forcing hares and even antelopes to run for their lives. The child was then entrusted to the care of peasants, who never managed to prevent his constant breaks for freedom. Still alive in 1955, he was taken into the charge of the country’s public assistance authorities, but he proved refractory to all education. In the course of yet another and quite spectacular attempt to escape, he jumped from one of the first floor windows of the establishment, spreading panic in the streets of Damascus with his giant bounds; it seems that his ‘educators’ had no hesitation in subjecting him to a sinister and revolting surgical operation, in which the Achilles tendons were mutilated to prevent him making further attempts to escape. (André Demaison, Le Livre des Enfants Sauvages, ed. Andre Bonne (1st edn.), Paris, 1953. Quoted in Jean-Claude Armen, Gazelle –Boy, (Trans. from the French by Stephen Hardman) London, 1974: pp 98 – 99)
I lived in Damascus in the early 50's. At that time I was teaching at Damascus College and the USIS. In the main Market, there was an extremely thin, wiry, tall boy who was called the "gazelle boy". I was told that he was found in the desert running with the gazelles and had been captured by hunters in a jeep… at first the Syrian Authorities wanted to study him and refused to let American doctors or French doctors take him for study. When the funds weren't forthcoming, the young man was left to live in the streets.
He supported himself living in the "Souk" near Hamidiyee taking handouts.. and people would give him about 25 cents (equivalent) to run alongside a taxi. I saw this several times… about l952- 54.
I remember the Gazelle Boy had long stringy dirty hair and clothes that were blacken with age and grime… he had a pointed face… really animal like… but one did not feel threatened by him.
I used to take him food when I went to the Souk (Hamadieyah Market) a very long straight street ending in a Mosque (now) but had been a church in the second and third century. (J Rocca, quoted at: feralchildren)
Syrian Gazelle Boy seems a kind of forlorn story now. Compare the picture - the pinkish one with the healthy guy running with the gazelles ( I don't know where it's from - sorry - maybe it's the missing photograph?) with these other(s) degraded and hobbled, or not hobbled but reduced to performing circus tricks for small change. This space between the stories is roughly the same size and shape as Saharan Gazelle Boy.
There he is, nibbling some desert bush - untrammelled by a hairstyle.
I got this book the other day: GAZELLE-BOY - Beautiful, Astonishing and True - A Wild Boy's Life in the Sahara. It's written by Jean-Claude Armen, a kind of half-assed pseudonym employed by Basque poet, artist and anthropologist Jean Claude Auger
The book describes Armen/ Auger's solitary travels in the Rio de Oro in 1960-1. He meets some Nemedi people in the middle of nowhere and after supper a boy sings and mimes this story about a fennec and a jackal:
Then he tells this cool story about a boy raised by ostriches. M. Armen/Auger is obviously keen - on the Nemedi boy and the wild child story:
"Noticing my intrigued look, the young Nemdai comes up to me and promises me a much greater surprise of the same kind, at a màrhala (stage) of one days march (nazir-at-yoûm)" (Armen, Gazelle Boy, p 53)
You can guess what the 'greater surprise' is, can't you?
Yeah, you were right - it's another Gazelle Boy. This next section of the book is pretty great, Armen heads off with his camel and his fennec and soon locates Gazelle Boy and the rest of his herd. He then spends a month or so hanging out with them, making his naive manga-ish drawings and these great diagrams about gazelle code:
It's all really idyllic, trippy and magical - Gazelle Boy is completely integrated into his herd, he's fairly clean, strong and well nourished, joyful to the point of ecstasy, and , most significantly, free. There's a lot of blissed out watching, sniffing and licking going on.
Armen decides Gazelle Boy - who appears to be that generic mythical age of 'about ten' was probably Nemdai in origin, fell out of some camel held basket during the night as an infant:
"Moorish children travel in baskets placed on the side of the camel. In all probability, this one of mine fell from a camel at the rear of a caravan, during the night ( the torrid heat of the day would not have spared him). All it would have needed would have been a herd of migrating gazelles spending the same night in the vicinity, and a pregnant female in a nervous state or a female that had lost her fawn (through sickness or to a predatory jackal)." (Armen, Gazelle Boy, p 53)
Armen seems perfectly happy with his sketchy hypothesis - Nemedi kids are well advanced in the motor skills department apparently - an eight or nine month old infant could keep up with a herd of gazelles, no problem.
After about a month the gazelles head off somewhere on urgent gazelle business - Armen/ Auger limps back to human civilisation starving, dehydrated and covered in cuts and sores, but really, really pleased.
Back in the Basque country Armen/ Auger relates his 'discovery' to his old boss at the Institute Français d'Afrique Noire, Professor Théodore Monod. You can check out his letters here.
The crux of the whole Saharan Gazelle Boy story lies here, I think, in the authors expressed intention not to publicise his amazing discovery:
"We agreed not to let this discovery become generally known, for what was at stake was the safety of a creature still too fragile to defend itself against the enterprises of men, well intentioned or otherwise."(Armen, Gazelle-Boy, p 80)
Armen/ Auger is intentionally separating his gazelle boy from the host of other stories about feral children. He is basically suggesting that by removing a child from it's adoptive animal parents and subjecting it to the invasive gaze of 'civilisation',we aren't necessarily doing it any favours.Although Armen/ Auger is some big romantic, Rousseauian proto - hippie, I can't help but admire his touching attempts to undermine the most fundamental of all western capitalist precepts: that society is necessarily a clear-cut hierachy, with the white, western, industrial world right at the top and gazelles somewhere near the bottom.
Armen/ Auger returned to the Rio de Oro two years later and re-established his relationship with the boy and his herd, this time somewhat impeded by the nearby presence of a French military captain and his aide-de-camp. I don't know why the author led the military to his gazelle boy - their protestations that they too are merely curious seem implausible to me but whatever - Armen/ Auger ends up in some pursuit and capture situation very reminiscent of those detailed above in the Syrian Gazelle Boy stories, with the boy clocking up some impressive speeds of about 50 km per hour (Usain Bolt's estimated maximum speed is 44.7 km per hour, if you were wondering.) Armen/ Auger heroically wrestles the controls of the military jeep away from the captain and Saharan Gazelle Boy escapes into the desert.
A further attempt at capture is reportedly made by American NATO officers in 1966. They spot the boy and return with two helicopters, a net attached between them, but despite repeated attempts, the boy again evades capture. This is the last sighting of Saharan Gazelle Boy.
Neither of these gazelle boys has a particularly rich cultural life outside of their initial stories - although you'd be pushed to find a Middle Eastern homoerotic poem which doesn't make some kind of gazelle/boy analogy I guess.
I found this theatre piece: The Wild Child which juxtaposes the story of the Saharan Gazelle Boy with that of Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron, (you know, the one in the Truffaut movie?)
"Based on true accounts of children raised by animals and "rescued" by humans, The Wild Child combines the story of a scientist attempting to civilize a feral child with the journey of an artist into a stark desert where she encounters a wild boy living among gazelles . Masks, shadow puppets, song, life-like bunraku puppets and original sound composition combine to create this rich and rewarding performance. The four-actor ensemble switches between characters, gazelles, and puppeteers before the audience's eyes, as the tight walls of the Doctor's closet dissolve into the spare beauty of the desert."
And there's a musician from Kansas who calls himself Saharan Gazelle Boy but I can't really see the relevance of this name choice.
So who wins? I know I presented this as a kind of contest, but I'm not that sure now, what criteria I should judge it on. Saharan Gazelle Boy wins, hands down, if we're comparing evasiveness and retention of freedom. If we compare acquired gazelle super-powers, it's a pretty even match and if we want to contrast authenticity ...? Syrian Gazelle Boy is generally regarded as a pretty piece of fakery - maybe one with a background in some sort of skewed mythical reality but really, just a hoax. Saharan Gazelle Boy on the other hand is often presented as the real deal.
Auger/Armen's story has a lot of holes though - his gazelle child was freaked out by the camera apparently, all we get are a bunch of cute drawings. There are many moments in the text when the reader (me) doubts whether Auger/Armen has ever actually seen a regular boy, let alone a gazelle boy - his description of the boy during his second encounter includes the phrase:
"...but the pubic hair still has the characteristics of childhood"
Which is sort of odd, I would have assumed 'absence' to be the primary childhood characteristic of pubic hair.
Wikipedia suggests that Serge Aroles, Belgian author of Les Enigme des Enfant-Loups (2007) tracked Armen/Auger down in 1997 as part of his wider research into feral children. Armen/Auger admits to Aroles that he had made the whole thing up - Gazelle-Boy was essentially a "book of fiction". I tracked the passage down in Aroles' book - and yeah,sadly - it's there:
" En 1997, l'auteur, auquel je disais avoir enqueté sur les terrain l'année précédente, me confessa par téléphone avoir "fait une oeuvre de fiction" et avoir été supris de la naiveté générale qui en fit une histoire authentique"(Serge Aroles, Les Enigme des Enfant-Loups (2007) p 270)
I spent a really long time stalking M. Armen/Auger - you know, like the web was a desert, the author was a gazelle-boy, and I was a jackal, or an American tourist or something? Inevitably he proved to be completely elusive. I did make some super-dodgy new internet 'friends' though. I really wanted to ask him in person - whether he really saw a gazelle-boy, and also why he ate so much fennec shit? I'm just curious.
GAZELLE-BOY - Beautiful, Astonishing and True - A Wild Boy's Life in the Sahara, Jean-Claude Armen, (1971)
L'énigme des enfants-loups : Une certitude biologique mais un déni des archives, 1304-1954, Serge Aroles, (2007)
www.feralchildren.com
Fortean Times: Wild Things "The Gazelle Boys are near the bottom, just above the Big Cat Boys."
Want to learn how to run like a gazelle?
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p.s. Hey. First time guest-host, future writer of his generation, and d.l. Changeling has a real beauty of a post for you this weekend, and if the p.s. isn't your second stop, please scroll back up then do your eyes and synapses the favor of scrolling very slowly downwards again post-haste and share your consequent thoughts with him. Thanks so much, big C., and thanks to everyone who knows what's good for you. Other than that, ... ** Syreearmwellion, Yeah, don't sadden yourself with those Fahey memories, but the connection is super interesting. I don't think I've ever written anything while high -- well, excluding the odd moment during a coke or speed binge -- that I ended up being able to use anywhere, and I'm always amazed when people do. Yeah, I mean the care you feel that you need to take around certain kinds of drug references is something I know from many 'recovered' friends, and, well, that lead to the 'SiH' article, obviously. The grip is intense. Oh, and now I see after finding your later comment that you've found the notebook. Damn, nice find. Hope the work with it goes really well. ** Statictick, If Kiefer means a lot to you, that's all that matters. Oh, okay, about JJDR, thanks for filling me in. Awesome re: that rare connection. Well, you can upload the photos to Facebook, right? That's where people do that sort of thing. Have a lovin' weekend. ** Pilgarlic, Hey. Oh, I wasn't miffed. My humor's just too dry for text sometimes. I know about the Clermont, by reputation, I mean. Actually, the worst, shithole hotel I ever stayed in was in Atlanta. A Red Roof Inn. Doubt that, if it's still there, it's still as nasty as it was back, oh, in the mid-90s. The sheets hadn't been changed in months. When I checked in, there were four used hypodermic needles in my room in plain sight. The walls were semi-caved in with fist-sized holes. The TV screen was smashed. Sound of gunshots all night. Etc. Why I stayed there anyway, I don't remember. Worst hotel ever. Maybe it's legendary? ** David Ehrenstein, Well, Mr. Adair sounds like one complicated guy, yes. He sure writes well on Bresson despite it all. Strange. Yeah, my IMDB listing, trippy. Let's see if I can parlay my new notoriety into beefing it up a little. ** Bollo, Hunh, weird and cool that it's the one and only Grant Hart, a fella one hears far too little from and about these days. Nice. Be a great weekender, man. ** Kiddiepunk, Yeah, seems I botched my punchine, sorry. See you later on? ** Memoirs of a Heroinhead, Ray Davies?! Your mom certainly was popular among the gods. Wow. Dubai Charli: I don't know, ... do I want to hear about him? You know me. Do I? Bon weekend, sir. ** Mark Gluth, Hey, Mark. ** Tonyoneill, Dude, my total and complete and utter honor. ** Stan_cz, Well, you seem to have warded off the Whitman lovers around this blog at least. Yep, I'm in Paris for a while acting like a novel workaholic as best I can. Otherwise, not too much new other than the odd movie, album, person, clear sky, and all that. Apart from my best friend coming over from LA to visit next week, I'm just trying to commune with the muse. ** _Black_Acrylic, I'd say that if Bresson has a 'hit', it's probably 'Pickpocket'. What do you need to do to finish your Whitehouse entry? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey, Jeff. Totally killer about the six week residency! That's fantastic! Will you be there for the six weeks? Yeah, knowing the ins, outs, trials, and tribulations of getting support for theater projects as I do, that's really great news, man! Novel's very slow for me right now, but that's the nature of the complicated section I'm working on, I hope. Good current listening ... the new Failing Lights, a Prurient/ Kevin Drumm collab, a bit of Hudson Mohawke, the new Gainsbourg/ Birkin reissue, some advance tracks from the upcoming No Age and Deerhunter albums, early Alice Cooper, ... a few other bits and pieces. What are you listening to? ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, The old ways of buying porn, yes, sigh. You can't buy that kind of stress and excitement nowadays. Good luck with all that ancient computer work. I can't imagine. I'm like, 'Yury, how do I empty the trash again?' I read an interview with Jimmy Webb the other day where he debunked the rumor that 'Wichita Lineman' was about cocaine or heroin, and, since it had never occurred to me that the song could be interpreted as a drug song, that was fun. ** JW Veldhoen, In a far better world, you would have reviewed 'Sick City' for the NYTBR. I want to live in that world. Do you? ** Steevee, Excellent about the possibility of being a regular writer for the Tribeca Film Festival's site. Yeah, hope they pay. I'd be kind of, I don't know, surprised both if they don't and if it's much, but fingers crossed on all fronts. ** Pb, I so totally agree, and a hearty welcome. Oh, wait, you're Paula Bomer. Let me fluff up my red carpet a little. I read a story by you just the other day that I really, really liked, and I'm looking forward to 'Baby'. Thanks for being here. ** Robert-nyc, Hey, Robert! How great to see you, pal. I'm doing okay, yeah, lots going on, all of it pretty much good. Your friend's mss. sounds tasty. Glad you're both writing and hitting the reading circuit again. I'll be in NYC in mid-October for I don't know long to do a reading, so, yeah, I'd love to see you. Mm, no, in fact I'm sure I was told I was being sent a copy of the latest Mary, but either they forgot or it's taking its sweet time to get here, now that you mention it. Why do you ask? Are you in it? ** Inthemostpeculiarway, It's true, I've missed the coffee smell. Tomorrow I launch my new brewing routine. I have to remember to the close the window first. Maybe you should try Melatonin if you haven't. Works for me in some very subtle way, although it hasn't done shit for other people I know. I wonder what it means that I've never had a dream (at least that I could remember) in which a celebrity has appeared. I would assume that's unhealthy. I hardly ever even dream about people I know. The people in my dreams are always just unidentifiable, mean murdering nobodies. Anyway, I'm sorry you were in a bad mood. That seems so unfair. My day: Hm. Novel work, not so great, frustrating, soldiering, lots of that. My editor at HP sent me a jpeg of the tentative cover art for the new edition of 'Horror Hospital Unplugged', and it looks great. Stephen (O'Malley), who's designing the package/ layout/ etc. of Gisele's, Peter Rehberg's, and my book/CD project 'Jerk/Through My Tears' sent me the rough draft of what he'd made, and it looks great too. The Christophe Honore film got rave reviews in two big French places -- Les Inrockuptibles and the newspaper Liberation -- and that was nice given how much some critics seem to hate it. In the evening, Oscar and I walked down to the Mk2 theater near the Pompidou and finally saw Sylvain 'Triplets of Belleville' Chomet's new animated film 'L'Illusionniste', and it's fantastic. As I think I mentioned before, it's based on a never filmed screenplay by the ultra-sublime Jacques Tati, and it's like a lost Tati film in animated form. Highly recommended when it gets to the States. When that was over, it was lateish. I ate stuff. I talked to my friend Joel about stuff to do with his impending trip to visit me/Paris on Tuesday. I got sleepy. I slept. Now you have an entire weekend to tell me about, and I look forward to that. ** Misanthrope, Oh, I didn't know I could use a time machine to find a porn star candidate. Can of worms, that option. My ex- Mark Ewert was friends with 'Chance' for a while years back. Well, since my pick's name is Lance Evans and not Lance Black, no wonder you couldn't find him. He's been in some Cobra vids, a couple of daddy/son vids, and a few others. Anyway, he was a spur of the moment choice. It would change day by day, obviously. Bronchitis? Dude, sorry, but you need to get some antibiotics. Maybe your doc will prescribe them to you via the phone or something? ** Bill, I'm fairly sold based solely on that Russian speed eating thing. Do bring that sucker along when you head back over here. Any fun planned for this weekend? ** Sam Jordinson, Hey, greetings, welcome, thank you. I used your blue screen name to click around, and, wow, you've written a bunch of books that look so very readable. Where should I start? And I also found your 'Organic Peas and Orderly Queues' blog, which is pretty killer on an initial read. Kudos, sir. Everyone, this guy Sam Jordinson who kindly entered this realm yesterday has a blog called 'Organic Peas and Orderly Queues', and it's a feast of wit and insight and all that kind of stuff. Check it out. ** Brendan, Your thinking about them is the least I can ask. No, the most I can ask. Or somewhere between least and most. And thank you, B. Make this weekend count. ** Until Monday, be with Changeling and his mysterious Gazelle Boys, yes? See you in a couple.
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