Excerpt
A Culture of One
I was standing at the gate of the zoo, looking up at the same gate I walked out of four years before. Since leaving, I had taken all that the gorillas had given me and made a life in context for myself. I had a family now, as well as friends, and a career as a researcher in a university. The gorillas had brought me full circle, having given me a way to understand the world. Now I gave my students the same opportunity to understand the world differently through the same family of gorillas that had been my own. This trip I had brought several of my students down to the Woodland Park Zoo, in Seattle, Washington, to meet the gorillas so dear to me.
I made my way through the zoo grounds, so familiar after ten years. Through the ticket booth that used to scare me, down the path that split apart, going to different worlds distilled into one. I silently said hello to the walnut trees, the blowing grasses, my slow shuffle scraping on the gritty path, kicking away layers of time and memory, shaking the dust from my feet, leaving it where it lay. Archaeology. I had dug myself up here. Now I was back, as a grown person, a whole person. I was a successful person, possessed of self, Ph.D. behind me now, preparing to introduce my new students at the university to the secret world of gorillas. I was there to look back and to look forward.
I traveled down the path, past the penguins, past the monkeys. A siamang screamed over an undercurrent of birdcalls. The air was heavy with the breath of growing things; it made a warm dark nest in my mouth and in my stomach. I passed through the thick bushes that waved to the path as it swept downward, a torrent, like a stream bed cupping thoughts of the past as they rush by. A spring thaw. I thawed here.
I let the memories wash me as their flow opened up and broadened; the path widened and offered an eddy. A pause. I was in front of the gorilla exhibit. There they were. I stopped thinking. I was home.
The gorillas regarded me. To them, I had never been away, because I had really been there once. Time is different to the gorillas. It is about being together, not about being apart. I am content to feel that kind of time, and I close my eyes and smell deeply the hot lemon smell of gorillas and the thick sweet smell of the hay. A gorilla keeper spots me and walks over, smiling. To her, I have been gone a long time.
I stand with the gorilla keeper. Though I had worked with her over the course of a decade, I am still not comfortable speaking with her, and I avert my eyes, not saying much. Perhaps I am strange to her.
The keeper spoke. "Alafia gave birth last October. The birth went very well. She's been a good mother." She paused between sentences. Perhaps she was feeling awkward with the silence. I glanced at her briefly. I was watching the gorillas and would rather not have been talking.
I was thinking about the process that went into a captive gorilla birth. Gorilla mating is a complex affair, built on rituals that sometimes last hours. The woman will begin to give the silverback man the "estrus gaze" that signals her desire to mate, but her readiness, especially if she is an inexperienced young woman, is often punctuated by discomfort with the unusually close proximity of her mate; turning her relatively smaller frame to his massive body is a process during which she needs much reassurance. She knows that if the dance suffers a misstep, the man of her desire can get frustrated and lash out. Though gorilla women are very seldom hurt physically in these exchanges, the emotional harmony of the group suffers, and the pair have to start once more from the beginning for mating to occur.
Then there is the birth. Captive births, until recently, were not frequent because gorillas need a cultural context--their families, a rich environment, the right foods, and learning traditions--in order to successfully bring children into the world. So up until the last many years births in captivity were seldom, and the birth of a baby gorilla into a nurturing environment where it could truly grow from the beginning was even more rare. The infant I watched was very lucky.
Alafia's baby, like most gorilla infants, probably weighed four or five pounds when she was born and was completely dependent on her mother. Until a baby is about six months old, it does not have the strength and coordination to start moving about away from its mother. Gorilla babies are dependent on their mothers both in captivity and in the wild for up to five years, often nursing until this late age.
This period of dependence is a pivotal one for baby gorillas. It is during this period that they learn to bond, first with their mothers, then with the others in their group, thus laying the solid foundations for a grasp of the social rules they will follow for the rest of their lives. This was the step I had missed in my own life, as my autism prevented me from making those crucial bonds from my earliest days with my family.
"I was glad I was here," the keeper offered brightly, interrupting my inner narrative momentarily. "She sat in the corner of her night room, and all at once the baby came out."
Still lost in my thoughts, I imagined the typical scene of a captive gorilla birth. In my mind's eye I saw Alafia catch the baby and, after looking completely surprised for a moment, begin to eat some of the afterbirth as she wiped the baby's tiny closed eyes and nose with her large callused hands. After some time Alafia may have gently shaken the infant. The baby would have opened her blue newborn eyes and gazed at her mother, letting out a wide yawn and stretching her tiny arms. Alafia would have put the five-pound infant to her chest, and the baby would have rooted around for a nipple, closing her eyes as she latched on.
"Good," I said to the keeper. I smiled. Several more silent moments went by.
"Have you ever experienced a birth?" she asked. Her smile told me that this was a topic to be joyful about, and I smiled back at her again.
"Just two."
"Oh?"
After some time went by I realized she might be waiting to hear about them. "My son's. And my own." I looked at her to see if she was interested.
She was laughing. "Yes, your own. I guess that goes without saying." She continued to laugh, not realizing I hadn't meant to be funny.
I thought about being born, and how I was born yet again--after a long time--with the same gorillas we stood watching. Being born was a long story.
I seem to remember my own birth and elements of the few days following. Though this may sound like a fantastic claim, it is true. My mother was skeptical when I told her this as a small child, but when I described the rooms and events in detail, she had to concede that many points of my account matched her fuzzy memories: the doctor and nurses dressed in light blue, standing in different places at different times, the doctor's black horn-rimmed glasses and the mask on his face. When I was born, I came out, and he lifted me high in the air for my mother to see me, with her red and sweaty face and faint smile; she was rocking her head back and forth; later I learned that they had drugged her. I remember being cold and the light hurting my eyes as I was carried over to a shelf attached to a cabinet of medical supplies right next to the door. My feet were dipped in ink and pressed to a piece of paper. I remember being wheeled to the nursery and the fluorescent lights in the hallway fading in and out in an undulating rhythm as they passed above me while I was pushed along. I remember my mother's bed near the corner far from the door in her recovery room.
When I close my eyes, I can play it back like a three-dimensional tape, replete with the smells, the sensations, and my feelings about it. I have always had this photographic or eidetic memory, and all of my many recollections of the past have a quality that makes them seem almost more real than the present. They allow me to tell the story of my life.Copyright© 2004 by Dawn Prince-Hughes, Ph.D.