Navigating Abundance and Scarcity in True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway

Abstract

This article focuses on a posthumous fictional memoir by Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light (1999), which narrates his safari trip to Kenya in 1953-4, while the American society of affluence was in full swing. The comparison between those two systems of values is present throughout the entire work: American commodities are opposed to the abundance of African nature. The author rejects Westerners and their constant destruction of foreign lands, whether through imperialism or tourism. He also attacks their consumerism, encouraged by mass media and advertising. On the contrary, in Kenya, he gets to experience a direct relationship with nature, living in a self-reliant and disciplined way. He feels close to the local population and to their environment, and thus decides not to waste any resource, which translates into an aesthetic of scarcity, characterized by the rejection of excess. Therefore, notions of abundance and scarcity are at the heart of the criticism of Western consumerism: constantly redefined and having moral, ecological, and aesthetics implications.