Ellen Drake is a well-known freelance writer and editor who has been living in Botswana for 21 years. She began her African life in Ethiopia, in the early 1970s. She had moved there as a tourist information officer following many adventures and mis-adventures in various parts of the United States: from New York City where she was born; to California where she was educated; to India where she searched; to rural Kansas which was where her roots first developed.
Cats in the Cosmos reflects Drake’s sense of humour (the multiple pun in the title and much more). If humans participate in an endless cycle of deaths and rebirths, inhabiting the universe for numerous lifetimes, are not animals then too capable of reincarnation?
This little book has been produced as a fundraiser for the BSPCA (Botswana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). It is divided into three chapters each devoted to a cat that allowed Drake to know it. The first, Cinnamon, was in Kansas about 60 years ago. The second, Chakol (“haste” in Amharic) was in Ethiopia in 1973 — he was better known to her as “Puss-Puss”. When she had to leave Ethiopia because of the turmoil there she went back to Kansas with “Puss-Puss”.
The two of them arrived in Gaborone in July 1976. “Puss-Puss” lived to the old age of 21 (or if you multiply by seven for each human year, to 147 cat years old). Three days after he died in Botswana in 1994, Drake was adopted by Mouwane (“the fog creeps in on little cat feet” from Carl Sandburg), the son of a feral cat, Moriti (who lived in the shadows in Maru a Pula), who was a part of Drake’s neighbourhood.
I am not sure if the BSPCA shares Drake’s enthusiasm for the idea of animal reincarnation. I once met a woman who claimed she, through the help of a mystic in India, had gone back and learned about all her 33 previous incarnations. The amazing thing about what she had discovered was that in all her previous lives she had been married to the same man. At least she did not have to accuse the mystic of claiming she had been a bigamist.
To Drake, the idea of cat reincarnation was echoed by the way the three cats in her lifetime related to her and behaved. Now were they the same cat come back, or was it just in the nature of cats to be like that? She was convinced by the sign the cat could give when asked to confirm their reality. He replied by looking at her with one eye shut.
Drake’s interest in applying the idea of perpetual rebirth to cats is not new or unique. Other writers have also developed unusual interests in animals. The double Booker prize-winning writer, and Nobel Prize for literature novelist, J. M. Coetzee produced Lives of Animals in 1999. Though he explores many issues, from vegetarianism to Vedic sacrifices, egalitarianism and reciprocal altruism, he does not explore animal reincarnation. He does consider whether or not death matters to an animal—and does an animal understand death?
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, famous for Harmless People (1958) on the life of a San family in the Kalahari, went on to write an amazing book, The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture (1994) but she does not explore the concept of “reincarnation”. Cat reincarnation is found in the children’s story by Dick King-Smith, Cat Lady (2004). It is also found in a CatForum (PetsHub) where a few of the 14,000 members have told about their belief in cat reincarnation.
What is the point? If you are cruel to your cat now, it might come back and seek revenge in its next reincarnation? But we all know cats have nine lives, we had just assumed that it meant they kept their colour, form and shape, not that they came back as a new born kitten. We only got three lives in Paul Gallico’s “Thomasina”, or in the play of the same name in 1963 by Robert Westerby, based on the novel.
Whatever you believe, you might want to seek out this entertaining book, Cats in the Cosmos and at the same time contribute to the BSPCA.
Sheridan Griswold, PO Box 70007, UB, Gaborone or
sheridangriswold@yahoo.com
