Written by Pam Conrad and illustrated by Richard Egielski, Call Me Ahnighito tells the “true” story of a now-famous meteorite housed in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. It begins in the Arctic, where the huge rock landed untold eons ago and has long waited for something to happen.
Readers follow Ahnighito (pronounced Ah-na-HEET-o) as she experiences centuries of sporadic human attention. These periods are filled with hardship and often abuse, as people hack off pieces of Ahnighito or try to move her. Due to her sheer bulk and weight, she is abandoned more than once, but she ends up “at my most glorious… displayed in the center of a warm room” where her beauty and celestial origins bring throngs of admirers.
Themes Explored in Call Me Ahnighito
Loneliness and the desire for acceptance are two major ingredients in the story. The frozen wastes of Greenland, where Ahnighito has languished for centuries or perhaps millennia, represent an emotional isolation that young children are quite capable of understanding. Indeed, it is a child who first generates a feeling of warmth and connection with the rock. Explorer Robert Peary’s four-year-old daughter christens her on the deck of a ship bound for America.
The journey “home” is especially painful for Ahnighito because of her inherent passivity. Readers soon comprehend her deeply internalized condition, akin to Locked-In Syndrome, and the sense of helplessness it produces when explorers, sailors, or dockworkers can’t get her to budge. Set up in this way, her triumph might reassure children with physical disabilities as well as any young reader who has anxieties about separation and being left behind.
Language and Narrative Structure in the Story
Despite the emotional weight of its protagonist’s alienation, Call Me Ahnighito proceeds in a suspenseful and rapidly developing manner. Each page brings a new, fascinating event in the life of the lonely fallen stone. Some might even call it a heroic story, with heroism in this case taking the form of a powerful will to endure and succeed.
Conrad’s text is crisp and earnest, although not lean in the convention of most picture books. (The lesser-used term “picture story-book” applies here.) Most pages contain over a hundred words, more or less dissuading attempts by young listeners to pick out favorite phrases and passages on their own. But this is a minor complaint, since the subject matter overlaps with the need for an adult-child bond.
Artwork and Design Elements of the Book
A widely respected illustrator, Egielski displays a mastery of form and color in Call Me Agnighito. Snow banks, icebergs, and the massive rock itself are rendered with a unique combination of organic curves, craggy contours, and a profound blue-green palette. As warm tones increase with each scenery change, Egielski’s transitions to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Manhattan settings please the eye and stir the heart.
Although energetic, the story’s human participants have a supporting-player feel to them, rather like the two-legged figures in a museum diorama on wooly mammoth hunting. One can observe them going about their individual business, but they are most interesting as parts of a collective drama. Here, true humanity resides in the non-human.
 |
