Monkeys From Africa

I am dreading tomorrow, like I did yesterday. I am an old fellow now, drinking in the bar I have gone to my whole life. My tail is scruffy, missing patches of hair, and weak. My tiny hands shake whenever they reach for my glass. I do not remember the last time I did not have to squint to read a sign. And yet, after all these years, there has only been one thing on my mind.

No one will listen to me.

I miss the old island. I wonder how good the island is doing today. I still live in it, of course, as it is my home and always will be. But I could not have been more disconnected from it and its primates than ever before. I do not know its monkeys, I do not know its streets, I do not know its government. I was never assimilated thoroughly; I hold onto that fact as if it is the last piece of life left in me. I latch onto it like a source of pride, but it does not change the fact it has ended up as a repercussion for me now. Do I have any regrets? I have a million. But that is the one thing I will never regret. They will never take my monkey soul.

Where do I begin? It is a long story. I used to live on an island full of only a decent population of bonnet macaques. We had minimal predators, an abundant source of bananas, and a substantial sense of a tight-knit community. We lived off the island, with its plentiful supply of food and water and trees for shelter. We had a chief, elders, a dance around a fire, feasts of bananas; all we knew of was peace and harmony. Then the monkeys from Africa came.

In the beginning, when they first came, they arrived with the notion of good fortune and prosperity. We were deliriously ecstatic to see the peaceful newcomers from another world. It was as if a little monkey saw a shooting star at night, got excited at the unexplainable phenomenon, and began jumping up and down, screeching in delight. At first, they came in small numbers of hollowed-out log boats with sails made of intricately woven banana leaves. They were a fleet of no more than a dozen, yet offered manifold possibilities. At first, we all thought they were monkeys. We also thought they were coming to greet us peacefully. Look, fellow monkey beings! They look a little funny, but they are primates! They are our friends! In truth, they were a type of animal called a chimpanzee. A type of great ape instead of a monkey. And later, in the following years of their arrival, I would really learn the difference.

The first thing we asked them was where they came from. They did not answer right away. Instead, they puffed their chests rapidly, their lips formed circles, and they made deep, “Hoo-hoo,” sounds as they slapped their hands on the ground like they were beating a drum, jumping up and down as they did so. We all thought they were strange. They did, in fact, look very different from us. They were massive, much bigger than even the biggest of us. They had black hair covering most of their bodies, big, round mouths with wide lips, and a hybrid build that told us they had no trouble walking as a quadruped or upright. But what surprised us the most was that they had no tails. No tails! None of us could imagine living without our tails. But at the same time, they were much like us. When they opened their mouths, they bared long canines at the edges of their teeth. They had strong arms which clearly excelled at climbing and swinging through trees. And, of course, they were primate-kind. Although they were big and clunky, and we were small and nimble, they were our brothers and sisters.

The first interaction with them was silly because we did not know how to understand each others’ languages. Eventually, with strategy, we were able to communicate with them effectively. They said they were from a faraway land called Africa. Is Africa big? we asked. Yes, they said. It is massive and rich and powerful, you are just a tiny island. We chattered amongst ourselves in awe. The next thing we asked was just as important: Why are you here? They said they were looking for another big place like Africa because they wanted to trade their riches for some condiments that would make their bananas tastier, and they merely happened to stumble upon us on their journey.

It would take the next few decades for us to learn the real answer.

The first few of them liked the island and wanted to live here with us. Some stayed here and built their own homes in our forest, trading some goods with us, and some went back to Africa to tell them the news. Okay, we thought, do not get too comfortable. We are happy to have you here, but this is still our island. Then they came in higher numbers, dozen by dozen, over the years. The newcomers disregarded our existence as if we were a rotten banana in their banana pile. They began cutting down our trees to build their homes, drinking from our rivers, taking our bananas. Our island’s condition grew worse and worse every day. All of this while we monkeys were still living on it. We began to dislike them. Soon that disliking would turn into hatred, then soon into fear.

But none of us could stand up to them. Tell me, who would win in a fight between a chimpanzee and a bonnet macaque monkey? The size difference is already too much for a remotely even fight. With one swipe of an arm, a chimpanzee could grab a macaque by the neck and smother his face on the ground. If the macaque were to escape, there is nothing he can do to the chimp. He can dodge the chimp’s grabs with his quickness, but no amount of tenacity will compensate for the inevitably tiny scratches he will do to the chimp’s rough skin. We were useless in a fight against them. They were powerful.

The years passed by, until one day, they realized we were still here. They had forgotten about us; they had never thrown away their rotten banana in the banana pile. And we still clung to our old ways. We still had dances around fires, we still loved to feast on bananas, we still lived nomadically. They saw us as insignificant vagrants that needed to be educated and disciplined. What better way to do so than school?

They built them all around the island for us. They were nothing like we have ever seen. They called them buildings, and just like their homes, they used the wood from trees to build them and covered the roofs with leaves. As long as we monkeys have known, we have lived in trees. We never built anything. It was all so new and foreign to us. It was also at these schools where I truly learned the extent of their cruelty. We were beasts to be tamed in their eyes. 

My brother and I were eating bananas on some branches one day when two chimps came to the base of our tree. Our mother and father climbed down to greet them, wondering what they could possibly be here for, fearful if it was not anything good. The chimps had a long conversation with them, occasionally slapping the ground forcefully and rapidly and making their chimp noises. They said they wanted to send me and my brother to a school with other monkey children, and that we had no other choice.

We never had very much monkey money, but my grandmother managed to save up enough to buy a new toy just for me. I went to the shop with her and chose a bright orange ball, a tangerine. I was excited to bring my new toy to school!

On the first day, the chimps stripped it away from me. I begged to have it back, but they hid it and ignored me. I never saw my orange ball again. I had cried all day, the other little monkeys were laughing at me, so I was embarrassed the whole day too. I was finally beginning to learn the chimpanzees’ true nature.

The chimps gave us a plethora of rules, rules we monkey children did not understand. They told us not to speak our monkey language. Never to say, “Ooh ooh, ah ah!” or anything of the sort. Whenever we did, they would slap us in the face with their strong chimp arms. They forced us to stop eating our bananas and made us eat their food. I remember being sick once from eating the flesh of an animal they killed. They called it meat. They said it was good for you. Worst of all, they taped our tails to our backs and forced us to walk upright from now on. If we were caught on all fours they would punish us. It was hard for us to walk at all without them. We would lose our balance constantly. We felt unfamiliar, odd, we felt like, well, chimps. We felt like chimps.

One time, when we were sent home for a seasonal break, I remember struggling to find the words to say when trying to speak our monkey language to my grandfather. I did not want to forget how to speak it. I had known it all my life before going to the chimp school. I remember my grandfather telling me, “Little monkey, you will never be successful in life if you keep speaking our language. Learn their language and stay hidden. Obey them and you will not have any trouble.” That was the last time I ever spoke our monkey language.

I saw many things at the school, many things I should not have. One time I saw a little monkey girl crying every morning before we ate breakfast. I decided to find her one morning, before breakfast, to see why. She was nowhere to be found, until I heard noises inside a room in an empty hallway. Her screeching voice was one of them. I peeked inside the room to see her back turned to a chimp with his genitals out, baring his teeth, holding her arms to make her still. It was a sight I did not understand, but a sight that horrified me nonetheless. One time I saw another little monkey, a boy this time, who was much younger than me, accidentally say, “Ooh ooh ah ah!” in the presence of one of the chimp teachers. The chimp glared at him and pulled him away as he screeched an apology. The next day, I saw him with bruises and cuts everywhere, one eye black and swollen, patches of hair missing all over him. Then the next day after that, he was gone and I could not find him anywhere, never to be seen again.

I had tried to comfort and befriend all these little monkeys, I truly did. I talked with the crying girl one breakfast and told her to report the chimp’s actions to the higher authorities of the school. She simply shook her head in tears, as if I did not understand. I tried to talk with the damaged boy on the day he was still here, tried to empathize with his pain, tried to tell him I wanted to be his friend. He did not return the sentiment, he was empty the whole time, not listening, not wanting my help. 

There was this subtle thing the schools did to us little monkeys. It was subtle, but it was there. It was an unseeable force that disconnected us from each other. It was as if when we looked at each other, we did not see other fellow bonnet macaques, we only saw aliens. It is eerie how well the force does it as well. There is no such thing as friendship at the school, only emotionless drones listening to the chimps. We were not a hand of bananas, we were its fingers already separated from the stem. Out of all the atrocities I have seen at the school, this subtle one was the worst.

During our school years, my brother became increasingly distant. Most days he had a sort of hollowness in his eyes. Understand this: he was the strongest-willed monkey I knew. I did not know a more resilient monkey, one who had everyone’s backs including mine, and if I had to trust him to take over the world I would. But, eventually, even he was no match for the school’s unseeable force. He succumbed to it and became a hollow, emotionless husk, a monkey who had given up on life. I thought it was impossible. I was wrong.

Then one day, he suddenly died at the school. As far as the chimps knew from their investigation, nothing was wrong with him. No monkeys or chimps had hurt him. He was not unhealthy at all prior to his death. In fact, he had been perfectly healthy. No signs suggested it was a manual end either. Nothing was wrong with him. But yet he had died, and no primate knew why. His body was taken away that day. I remember seeing the chimps drag his body out of the room as all of us little monkeys watched. I remember thinking, maybe he is just sleeping, he is just playing a prank on me. He liked to play pranks on me when we were little. He would take my banana from my mouth and run away as fast as possible. I would see him the next day. My brother can’t be gone, such a reality is impossible. But I did not see him the next day. Or the next. The days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, and sooner or later I was forced to come to terms that I would never see him again.

Despite everything I had experienced at the school, despite the rules that restricted our monkey-ness, despite my brother being alienated from me, despite all of us never really connecting even if we were the same age and monkey species, there was really only one thing I took away from the school that was the worst of all.

I am not a chimpanzee, I am a bonnet macaque monkey. I have been one my whole life. But in the end, I did not feel like one, I felt I had turned into something else. I began to talk like them. I began to act like them. I began to think like them. That was the worst thing of all. We were beasts to be tamed in their eyes, yes. But tell me, who were the ones who had acted more beastly?

When I graduated from the school, becoming an adult, I felt invisible shackles come off my hands as if I were being released from prison. But I did not feel smarter. I did not feel stronger. I did not feel older. I was a mutilated abomination, I did not know what I was. There was a conflict between me wanting to go back to my family and be a monkey again, eat bananas, dance around a fire like in my childhood memories, or leave them behind and move to a chimp town. I ended up doing the latter.

My parents never looked for me. Or perhaps they did, but they never found me. I never looked for them, either.

In my adult years, I became lazy and sad and drank an enormous amount of fermented nectar, a drink the chimps brought from their homeland. My grandmother had said it was a plague on our kind, the drink made you act strange as if a demon controlled you. I had children of my own. I tried to be the best father I could, but my habit of drinking the fermented nectar had gotten to me. I tried to hide it from my little monkeys, but somehow they could always tell that I was a broken, bankrupt, gloomy old macaque. 

They say we have never found extraterrestrial life yet on Earth. Well, I say, what about my children? It was as if the school trained me for this moment, that unseeable force once again making it seem like my daughter was a thousand monkey miles away even as I embraced her. Making it seem like my son was on another planet even when we were talking with each other. And to make things worse, somehow, someway, my sullenness was rubbing off on them.

I saw it happen to them in real-time. That feeling of desolation. My daughter is like my brother, in that she is a strong-willed monkey and has an unmatched determination in succeeding in the world. Her dream is to do good in school (not the chimp schools my generation had attended, which were closed down a while’s worth ago, just a normal school) and prove that she could be a proud macaque in a world of chimps. One time, she was given an unfair F from her chimp teacher in school because the teacher did not think she was smart enough to do the assignment and thought she cheated or copied from a chimp. My daughter is extremely smart, probably smarter than all the other chimps in her class, and I knew she did nothing of the sort, she had done the assignment the best she could and deserved better. It did not matter that she knew all of this, or that I knew all of this. After, she told me she did not want to do good in school anymore and that she had officially given up. I remember trying to find some fermented nectar to drink in our storage that night and noticing some bottles were missing, wondering who had taken them. They were strictly off-limits for my little monkeys, I did not want the demon in them my grandmother talked about to possess them too. I found them in my daughter’s room while she was sleeping. I thought I had failed as a father, and I wondered if I should give up too, like her. I wanted to swim out into the ocean from our island, forever, never to be seen again. I did not know any exorcists for the demon, and it was too late. It was already in her.

Today the island is Chimp Island. Its wild nature has been transformed to chimp structures, its population is mostly chimps, its children think it has always been owned by chimps. But us bonnet macaque monkeys are still here. We have a collective (but hopeless and unrealistic) dream of reverting the island to the way it once was, a time when the “monkeys” from Africa never arrived. Sometimes it seems like an impossible task, as if putting in the effort is futile because no individual monkey has the power to change the island. You would be asking a single monkey to move a mountain.

We are not history. We are now. You can still find our island today. You can still find chimpanzees conducting horrific atrocities to bonnet macaque monkeys, if you are good enough to spot them. We are still here, we have always been here, we will always continue to be. The chimps cannot get rid of us, and our problems become their problems. At the same time, we monkeys will never get rid of the chimps. It is impossible now. They ruined our land, they did unspeakable things to us, but now they are permanently here. There are too many of them living here now, with most of them having been born here, not knowing about our story.

Now I am an old monkey. I have learned to walk with my tail again, but I will never get rid of that feeling of off-balance. I am sulking away my sorrows in this chimp bar, drinking fermented nectar, alone on a table. I see glances my way from the chimps occupying the other tables, thinking I am lazy and weak.

I feel so terrible that I think I am dying. It is probably the fermented nectar, the years of consuming it, yet I ignore the thought and sip more of it. I want anyone to help me. Anyone. But I know no one will come, no one cares about a sad old bonnet macaque monkey drinking alone in a bar. 

It is nighttime and the street lights are on. I stumble my way outside, to the dark alley at the side of the building, thinking I am allowed to be there. No one will care about me anyway, so it is not a bad place to die. I find a pile of garbage bags smelling of rotten bananas and crash on them, my whole body and thoughts collapsing. This is it, my time has come. I am ready. No one will care if I die here.

“Excuse me, sir, are you planning to get up? I’ll be terribly sad if you die all alone in the alley here.”

I sit up, rubbing my eyes, taking another swig of my fermented nectar bottle. I try to take a good look at her, but my vision is blurry and I only see her faint outline. I guessed that she was a little monkey girl, a really young one.

“I’ll help you back up, sir. And then I want to hear your story.” 

She helps me up, getting me out of the garbage bags, and carries me somewhere. I am too dazed to know much about where we are going or what is happening. On the way, I hear some chimps yelling at her.

“Leave the old monkey alone! Those primates want to be left alone.”

“They think we’ve done enough to them already. Why would he want you to help him? He hates you.”

“It’s not my fault, it’s my ancestors’ fault. I didn’t do anything to them. I don’t need to help them, and I don’t owe them anything. And you don’t either, little one. Get away from him!”

However, my hearing was muffled and I only got some words and phrases. Although, my vision is beginning to clear, enough so that I see she is taking me back inside the bar. She is propping me on a chair. I exhale. Simply yet another monkey helping their brethren. I suppose we have to stick together in this world of chimps.

“Here you go, sir. Do you want some water?”

“No, no. I am fine.” As she helps me on the chair, I feel her back, expecting to find her tail. I find none. “Little monkey, what happened to your tail? Did a chimp hurt you?”

“I am not a monkey.”

My vision clears at that moment. My eyes finally focus on her face. In front of me is a little chimp. My mouth opens. I had assumed she was a monkey in my drunken, blinded state. But she is a chimp. It is impossible, I think. My eyes are deceiving me. I am too drunk.

“There is no such thing as a chimp with compassion for the monkeys,” I say.

She shakes her head, denying it. 

I am astounded. “You… you said you wanted to hear my story?”

“I do, sir. I’ll sit here next to you and listen all night if I have to. I want to hear it.”

So I do. I start from the very beginning, telling her everything from my childhood to now. I still cannot believe it. A chimp listening to my story. A chimp, who knows nothing about being a monkey, or living the life of one, or our history, wanting to listen to my story. I must have had a big smile throughout my retelling of it all. She had one as well, and it got bigger the longer I went on. Other than my smile, I had something else on my mind as I told her my whole story. It was a thought. A single thought. A thought that said: I have a feeling tomorrow will not be so bad after all.

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