{"id":2128,"date":"2011-12-30T19:41:27","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T00:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2128"},"modified":"2019-04-28T20:15:42","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T00:15:42","slug":"the-story-of-how-i-realized-that-for-me-primates-are-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2128","title":{"rendered":"The Story of How I Realized that for Me, Primates are People"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Written in a workshop with Deena Metzger<\/a> at Rowe<\/a> in May 2010)<\/p>\n

It was when my mother broke her hip, and we all went home in turns to help her get from the hospital to the house we grew up in.\u00a0 By the time I got there, a hospital bed had been placed in the living room. And a commode as well.\u00a0 I remember insisting on emptying the commode so that Mama Greene wouldn\u2019t have to.\u00a0 Mama Greene, who was older than Mother, who mothered us all since I was three and named her.\u00a0 Mom said it was because I couldn\u2019t say \u201cMrs\u201d, but I knew a \u201cmama\u201d when I saw one.\u00a0 My biological mother was a \u201cwire mother.\u201d I remember Mama Greene down on her knees cleaning the brass plate at the threshold of the living room.\u00a0 When I told her daughter Catherine that I was worried about her doing so much physical work, Catherine said \u201cTaking care of that house is what keeps her going.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mother had broken her hip on a trip to India, with other wealthy women.\u00a0 She broke it on the first day and had to be flown back.\u00a0 I could sympathize with her disappointment because I had fallen from a ladder on the first day of an eagerly awaited summer as a volunteer at a theater.\u00a0 There were some postcards from her friends who had continued the trip.\u00a0 They spoke of all the wonderful things they were buying.\u00a0 I remember one in particular.\u00a0 My mother\u2019s friend said \u201cThe poverty in Calcutta was not so bad as we had been led to believe.\u201d There were also complaints about the beggars.<\/p>\n

Mother had a friend who came and helped her with her insurance and paying bills.\u00a0 I was there when she came and she & Mom were talking.\u00a0 She told Mom that she had a daughter who worked at a medical research facility.\u00a0 They had gorillas in cages, and she brought in plants and mirrors to give the gorillas the illusion of more comfortable quarters.\u00a0 The daughter was of course very sad when the gorillas had to be \u201csacrificed,\u201d but wasn\u2019t it wonderful that medicine could find out all these new ways for healing people.<\/p>\n

I sat there feeling sick to my stomach.\u00a0 I felt as you would feel on hearing that doctors were experimenting on children of maybe black people or asians, or some racial group that they didn\u2019t consider \u201chuman.\u201d Like the Nazis experimenting on Jews during the Holocaust.\u00a0 I was surprised to find that I considered the gorillas human (perhaps I had read Diane Fossey by then) and realized that I considered all primates human, and the whales and the dolphins and the elephants too.\u00a0 My \u201cwe\u201d encompasses all of them.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this story when two YouTube videos came to me on Facebook:
\nGorillas groom human<\/a>
\nValentina, the Grateful Whale<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Written in a workshop with Deena Metzger at Rowe in May 2010) It was when my mother broke her hip, and we all went home in turns to help her get from the hospital to the house we grew up … Continue reading →<\/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":[14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirit","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}