{"id":1000,"date":"2013-11-21T00:26:07","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T04:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sangamithra.wordpress.com\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2013-11-21T00:26:07","modified_gmt":"2013-11-21T04:26:07","slug":"samenot-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/?p=1000","title":{"rendered":"Same\/Not Same"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe impulse to write a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who\u2019ve lived with apes,\u201d declares Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler\u2019s recent novel We are all Completely Besides Ourselves<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0Rosemary goes on to list those who came before her: \u201cThe Ape and the Child<\/i> is about the Kellogs. Next of Kin<\/i> is about Washoe. Viki is The Ape in Our House<\/i>. The Chimp Who Would be Human<\/i> is Nim.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m no stranger to the genre of primate memoir, particular the stories of chimpanzees who were cross fostered and raised as human children to participate in language studies. I read Roger Fouts\u2019 Next of Kin<\/i> in college. It inspired me to learn American Sign Language and spend a summer with Washoe, Moja, Tatu, Dar and Loulis<\/a> in Ellensburg Washington. It was at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute that I was then introduced to others who had spent their lives among apes. Like Rosemary, I discovered Leakey\u2019s women: \u201c\u2026I checked out every book, I could find on the monkey girls\u2011Jane Goodall (Chimps), Dian Fossey (gorillas), and Birute Galdikas (orangutans)\u201d<\/p>\n

Years later, I read In the Kingdom of Gorillas<\/i>, before a trip to Rwanda. When discussing primate memoirs, I cannot forget to mention Robert Sapolsky\u2019s A Primate\u2019s Memoir<\/em>, which opens with the \u00a0line: \u201cI had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fowler\u2019s novel is a fictional primate memoir, but hers is not the story of a researcher and his\/her subject, but rather about the fate of the human children of researchers who were raised, briefly, with a chimpanzee.\u00a0There\u2019s not too much known about the human siblings of these cross-fostering experiments. Donald Kellogg was raised with the chimpanzee Gua for the first 19 months of his life. His parents terminated the experiment when Donald started picking up chimpanzee vocalizations rather than Gua picking up human ones. Later in life, Donald committed suicide in his early 40s.<\/p>\n

Fowler\u2019s story is loosely based on the Kellogg\u2019s experiment, but also draws from other chimpanzees\u2019 stories. The Cooke Family is based in Bloomington Indiana, where the Kelloggs did their research several decades earlier. At the time of writing the book, Fowler didn\u2019t know the Kellogg\u2019s had another child. Their daughter contacted Fowler after the reading the book. In an interview with BookSlut<\/a>, Fowler notes \u201cShe was born about the time the experiment ended, so she has no memory of it herself, nor would her brother, who was only nineteen months old when the experiment ended. But she feels strongly that it completely deformed her family.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the beginning of Fowler\u2019s novel, the reader learns only that our narrator, Rosemary Cooke, has a mysterious sister named Fern who disappeared when Rosemary was 5 years old and an older brother named Lowell who left home when she was 12. Rosemary only reveals the fact that Fern is a chimpanzee about a third of the way into the book.\u00a0She has her reasons for withholding.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted you to see how it really was. I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already you aren\u2019t thinking of her as my sister. You\u2019re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The novel examines how Lowell and Rosemary\u2019s lives are impacted by being raised with Fern, the trauma of her sudden removal, and the legacy of that loss on the entire family. Lowell, as a teenager learns what happened to Fern, and is then drawn into the world of underground animal activism, disappearing from the Cooke family altogether. Rosemary, too young to understand all the changes in her family after Fern\u2019s disappearance, only begins to piece together the fragments of her traumatized childhood while she is in college at UC Davis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI spend the first 18 years of my life defined by this one fact, that I was raised with a a chimpanzee,\u201d Rosemary confesses. As a young girl, she was often picked on in school and called \u201cmonkey girl.\u201d She naturally corrected her tormentors.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could and did quarrel with their word choice\u2014 were they so stupid, I asked winningly, that they didn\u2019t know the difference between monkeys and apes? Didn\u2019t they know that humans were apes, too? But the implication that I\u2019d be okay with being called ape girl was all my classmates needed to stick with their original choice. And they refused to believe they were apes themselves. Their parents had assured them they weren\u2019t. I was told that whole Sunday school class had been devoted to rebutting me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When she arrives at college, though, she tries to start fresh, and decides to keep \u00a0her chimp sister and human brother a secret. But as she edges toward graduation, this mysterious past begins to haunt her. Memories come back to her of her childhood. Questions remain unanswered. And she is reunited briefly with her activist brother, who is now wanted by the FBI.<\/p>\n

Lowell tells Rosemary about the violence he\u2019s witnessed, and the burdens of sharing what he’s learned:<\/p>\n

\u201c`The world runs,\u2019 Lowell said, `on the fuel of this endless fathomless misery. People know it, but they don\u2019t mind what they don\u2019t see. Make them look and they mind, but you\u2019re the one they hate, because you\u2019re the one that made them look.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rosemary observes that Lowell always uses \u201cthey\u201d whenever he talks \u00a0about humans. \u201cNever us. Never we.\u201d Interestingly, her chimp sister Fern thought she was human. There is a game that Fern used to play when they were young called Same\/Not Same, pairing things that were alike and different. Fern and Rosemary were always Same. When Fern was introduced to a chimpanzee for the first time, she called him \u201cCrawling Poo.\u201d (Washoe also identified herself as human, and when seeing chimpanzees for the first time, called them Black Bugs in American Sign Language).<\/p>\n

Lowell and Rosemary take different paths but each \u00a0begin to question the societal rules that declare Same\/Not Same, between humans and animals, as well as the ethics of science and these experiments themselves. Rosemary at one point considers becoming a scientist and study chimpanzees in the wild at Gombe stream, but remembers what she learned in one of her college lectures about a wild chimpanzee who was raped. \u201cSome scientist had observed all that, had actually watched a chimp raped 170 times and kept count. Good Scientist. Not me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But her issues with science have largely to do with her father, the psychologist. Rosemary recovered a childhood memory of her father running over a cat, but does not know if it is real or a dream. \u201cWas my father kind to animals?\u201d she wonders. \u201cI thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then. Let\u2019s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it was in the interest of science to be otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an adult, Rosemary attempts to uncover the secrets in her family to ultimately discover what happened to Fern and why. Fowler skillfully connects these pieces much like a memoirist would when writing a narrative of trauma. The story is fragmented, associative, and not chronological, starting in the middle while working toward reconciling the ends.<\/p>\n

For more primate memoir writing, check out\u00a0<\/em>Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice<\/a>\u00a0(University of Illinois Press) and\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy and Sanctuary<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0(University of Utah Press)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe impulse to write a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who\u2019ve lived with apes,\u201d declares Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler\u2019s recent novel We are all Completely Besides Ourselves.\u00a0Rosemary goes on to list those who came before her: \u201cThe Ape and the Child is about the Kellogs. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Same\/Not Same”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14,16],"tags":[29,35,75,93],"class_list":["post-1000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-primates","category-writing","tag-books","tag-chimpanzees","tag-primates-2","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}