Ethiopia. A report that a band of monkeys, crazed with hunger and finding no food available, have begun attacking people and eating them! They have killed two young boys, ages eight and ten, and a grown woman. Killed them and ate them. Ethiopia sounds like hell. Crazed monkeys eating people and the army beating prisoners with clubs made of dried bull penises. Makes me remember that poem about “things fall apart/the center cannot hold/what rough beast/etc.” I can’t remember the end of it, but it clearly describes this moment. Weird freakish things are happening. Ways of dying that cannot be described. Ways of dying that shame the mourners, make them hide so no one will ask them what happened. The story of that little girl whose father held her up at the zoo to feed an elephant and the elephant grabbed her and stomped her, mauled her, killed her right in front of him. A terrible death. An undignified death. The horror mocked by the weirdness of the reality. Eaten alive by monkeys? What kind of monkeys? Might be baboons or those big ones with the multi-colored asses. They are supposed to be vegetarians, but everything is turning against the natural order of things.
And on my car radio, Mick Jagger is screaming a song: “I’m a monkey man/glad you’re a monkey woman, too!” It’s on a Rolling Stones album called Let It Bleed. Now he is barking, yapping as the song fades out. The end vamp is nothing but pure animal sounds. “Things fall apart/the center cannot hold . . .” The rough beast emerges and we are not prepared to meet the thrust and we will lose.
NAIROBI, Kenya (UPI)—Wild monkeys in southern Ethiopia went on a hunger-crazed rampage, devouring a woman and two young boys and herds of livestock. The destruction of natural habitat by a locust plague and drought this year and by a guerilla war which has raged in the area for months may have sparked the outbreak of “monkey madness.” The attacks follow the recent mass migration of large herds of elephants, also as a result of the war. Kenyan rangers had to be called in to shoot and disperse the elephants. (The Atlanta Constitution, November 10, 1978)
Monkeys
Because they are facts,
they are presented as if they were
truth. as if they meant
something tangible. something
real. unalterable.
as if they could be understood
the way recipes and comic books
can be understood.
but there is a difference.
we are not talking here
about when to add the sugar
to the egg whites, or the cheese
to the soufflé. we are not discussing
archie and jughead. betty and veronica.
we are talking here about deaths
we have never seen
no slow squirrels squashed in the street.
no errant possums crushed by the roadside
no belly-up alabama armadillos.
we are talking drought and war. famine.
infants dead before their mothers.
stampeding elephants. meat-eating monkeys.
the facts are these:
packs of giant monkeys driven wild
crazed by hunger,
plagued by locust, displaced by war,
for the first time carnivorous.
red eyes blazing, scattered over the land in packs,
bringing down grazing cattle, small children,
women. tearing flesh from bone
before death is final. squealing and fighting
each other. running. loping, unafraid.
terrified. stumbling, running in the night.
we are talking about world’s end. armageddon. terminal madness.
we understand by reducing it to facts. simple sentences.
manageable syntax. boxed wire copy on the second front page.
the monkeys now only a symptom, no longer a sign.
horrifying, not holocaust. the sky cracks, but does not open.