I was born with the
ground scarcely touching my hands and feet,
suckling safely between
my mother’s body and the trees. Psychedelic yellows and bursts of oranges that
would waterfall down to the forest floor in long, untangled vines. I would
watch my family with intense focus as their tails whimsically whirled around
slender branches, dancing like
their bodies were following their spirits through the trees in
effortless travel. Their eyes like two full moons focusing in on your own
invisible pupils, handing you a share of peachy fruit, dripping juice down
their curled, black fingers: the smell so sweet it tingled in the back of your
throat and excited your saliva glands.
Now the world is
precise whites and metal bars and hunched backbones and only space for oneself
and self-pity. Where we welcome silence until the universal panic of
whether it meant another has been lost, or is in acute pain, or has given up,
or – more likely – awaiting death. I was literally ripped from the treetops I
had only known for a heartbeat, to be slung into boxes that would sooner stop
my heart than start it again. A
laboratory guinea pig, where I am more similar to the people that imprison me
that phrase implies. They seem unregistered to my forlorn melancholy
smacked across my long face, the skin receding from my fingernails and peeling off in clumps from my back,
revealing flesh that peppers the stale air with decay.
I have been wrenched shrieking from my metal jail,
clamped onto cold table-tops, rammed and pierced with needles and drugs and
unlawful pain. Dazed, I then
pass under strip lights and consciousness, naked except for the tape that seals my eyes:
finding myself straggled over metal bars and antiseptic again. I deteste the smell of disinfectant, spewing into my
cavities and infecting my lungs: synthetic fruits, designed to cover over the
stench of horror.
***
On my first first
week, pressed against the back wall by the fear and fumes, I saw a
mirror of myself, hunched behind thick, reflective bars. A monkey like me, with a deep scar snaking
from his left ear to his chin, an extended index finger that looked like it
belonged to his feet than on his hands, and deep-set acid-green eyes: his name was Tumbili. When
the guards in pressed white
coats and fresh white gloves disembarked from our confinement, Tumbili
and I would chatter frequently about our times past, in the forest with our families of cousins and aunts
and uncles and brothers and sisters and mother.
“Did
you know, Uhuru, that one evening it rained mango fruits and my mother gave me
my first bite and I tell you, Uhuru, I have never eaten something so sweet and
palatable ever since I have touched this earth.”
Squashing into branches and plopping onto the forest
floor, I could almost touch the mangos’ soft skin without even stretching my
arms.
Tumbili was an older monkey than I, recounting stories
that far predated my actual existence, and he knew very much. He was even going
to attempt escape – with me – one day. But, the scent of disinfectant lingered over his body for too
long one early sunrise, indicated by the strip lights buzzing: the mosquitoes
had been more inviting. Too
many penetrations entered his body and too many days had been tainted by
the drone of the strip lights. A solemn, helpless appearance took over his face and body as he was
heaved into a yellow disposable bag and slung into a dump. And since then I
have perched, bandaged and sore, in my cage like an animal.
Uhuru = monkey, Tumbili = freedom in Swahili
A piece about testing on animals
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