Spend enough time in the world of primate rescue and you get to watch the consequences creep into the human psyche. Not only are monkey lives forever damaged but the humans that hang around tend to wear a thinly disguised, unspoken ache.
A South African phenomenon is at play: some farmers kill monkey mothers, forcefully separating their clinging infants. These pink-faced, traumatized orphans are then carried home and proudly presented as gifts to their wives. At first, when the vulnerable, tiny baby clings for comfort and screams for food, the mother-child, power dynamic offers an illusion of permanence.
But monkeys with their strong, hierarchical drive will inevitably push boundaries. Knowing little about their own kind, wild, single pet monkeys regard their human family as their troop. Jostling for higher rank with human companions leads to people being brutally bitten. Unless you’re prepared to live with the risk of being attacked, faecal matter and urine stained walls, incarceration becomes the “practical” option often causing psychosis for a single monkey.
And so the day arrives when the human family and their nonhuman-wild-child part ways.
No one tells us about the impenetrable child-mother bond that slowly forms in the subconscious when nurturing a baby nonhuman primate. No one speaks of the aftermath that occurs when a surrogate mother chooses to abandon the monkey. Not only has the orphan lost a natural mother but the trauma stabs deeper during the second loss. Left with little support in an anthropocentric world that has yet to recognize this particular animal-human form of pain, the human surrogate stoically hides her grief.
Distorted by tears, the haunting faces of grieving women are a small aspect of primate rehab. They’d arrive with sombre, blank-eyed husbands clutching a caged monkey.
“Ya, it was funny, we just found the baby monkey alone outside our kitchen door one day”.
I’d nod, silently. The truth would make its presence later. It always did.
And when they left, without the husband’s knowledge, the women would call for days on end, sometimes for months, wanting news of the substitute child they’d abandoned, begging for confidentiality, even asking for advice on how to deal with the dull, aching depression that had unexpectedly arrived to replace the vibrant, perpetually-present baby they’d let go of.
No one tells you that when you rehabilitate orphaned nonhuman primates, you might need to rehabilitate some human primates along the way as well.
Living with a pet primate is not feasible.
And so, I painted this. It’s about barren love and wild animals that are objectified and controlled to heal the damaged parts of humans. Frida Kahlo, her pets, wounded soul and infertility represent all that.
Primates are not pets.
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