Page 123 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

need to evaluate other species by what they are.” “Animals,” deWaal says,

“should be given a chance to express their natural behavior. We are developing

a greater interest in their variable lifestyles. Our challenge is to think more like

them, so that we open our minds to their specific circumstances and goals and

observe and understand them on their own terms.”

Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves could put a

twist in the lab coats of de Waal’s cognitive behavioral cohorts. Fowler embeds a

great deal of factual information about chimp studies as she delves deeply into

the nature of identity, family, attachment, loss, and grief on both sides of the

Great Divide. What you might not guess from the title of her book, although it is

ironically implied, is the explosive device at the center of her story.

Rosemary and her sister Fern have grown up as siblings from birth to age five.

They are in all ways similar, except Fern happens to be a chimpanzee—the

boundary between the two sisters so porous that Rosemary acts chimp-like and

Fern thinks she is human. Same-same. When Fern eats the only existing

photograph of Rosemary’s grandmother, Rosemary says if there had been

another she would have eaten it, too. But there are differences. When Rosemary

draws pictures of Fern, she chooses a burnt sienna crayon for her eyes. Fern’s

drawings never get finished because she eats the crayons. And Rosemary does

the very thing that identifies her as a human—non-stop talking.

During their first five years, the sisters were closely observed and documented by

Rosemary’s father, an animal behaviorist. When Fern is forcibly removed from

the home, it feels like ripping Velcro. Devastating for all—humans, chimps, and

this reader. As one might expect, things do not go well for Fern, but Fowler also

details the psychological and spiritual crises for the human family. Rosemary’s

father attempts to comfort young Rosemary with a sanitized version that Fern is

happy with another family, on a farm with other chimps, when in reality she has

been put in a chimp “refuge” with other chimps who have not been human-raised.