We are not as important as bees

The locals named me Wounda. Meaning “close to death” in their dialect. As if we aren’t all close to death all of the time. As if we shouldn’t all be called Wounda. I used to be free. Something that comes with being nameless. Something you won’t understand. Think about it. You are named, branded, tagged and labeled the moment you are conceived. Your forenamed self enters a forenamed world. You are fed unpronounceable ingredients and told that’s what you eat. You are washed with chemicals and told that's how you clean yourself. You are clothed in certain colors and told that’s just what you wear. You even have a name for all the naming. Social constructs. Without names, you are nobodies. And that’s where we part ways. Because I was somebody until you named me.

Something I learned from you during our time together was the concept of projection. I was always being depicted as the victim who had to be saved, while all along it was your displacement of feelings of shame and guilt at play. We both knew I wouldn’t have found myself tossed, unconscious, on the side of a dirt road in the first place if it weren’t for you. I never asked to be displaced. I had no intention of leaving my children to fend for themselves. And I certainly don’t recall ever offering up my body as bushmeat. You did this. And you also felt compelled to undo it. The headline read “First chimp to chimp blood transfusion in Africa”. Never mind calling out the atrocity for what it was. Forget deconstructing how I got from my nook of the jungle to an operating table. Somehow you were painted as the heroes and I the victim to be saved. It’s always a battle of good versus bad with you. The way I see it, there are evils and lesser evils. If you break the door to my home, don’t expect me to thank you when you finally come around to fix it. Just get the fuck out of my house. The door was never open. You were never welcomed. 

One evening I overheard Dr. Rebeca tell Jane “She is now 50 kilos. When she came here, when she was sick, she was 29.” It didn’t take long for you to make a measurement out of me, and soon a case to be studied, and eventually a statistic. As it turns out, you number what you can’t name. There seemed to be a sense of achievement bubbling throughout the Tchimpounga Rehab that I couldn’t quite get on board with. It seemed odd to be the only one not getting in on your celebrations, but I was too busy trying to survive. Remembering to breathe. Reminding myself why. Convincing myself to. Some days it boggled the mind that we could really share practically identical DNA. Others it became crystal clear. In the way we have acquaintances, gangs, best friends, families. In the way we hold our babies. In the way we extend compassion to other species. In the way we show excitement, fear, grief, happiness. In what we eat and how we eat it. In our hands. In our hugs.

I think the thing is you don’t listen. You don’t listen to those around you. More importantly, you don’t listen to yourselves. I know, I know. But I’m really not being sarcastic. As self-involved as you may think you are, trust me, you aren’t. Because if you really were, self-involved, you’d understand yourself enough to understand your place in the grand scheme of things. Stop running away from your insignificance. It will catch up to you eventually.

When you named my son Hope, as obvious a name as my own, it dawned on me that naming is just another form of religion to you. Names are your prayers. You've made bibles out of dictionaries. You do what you have to do to find purpose. I get it. But you may also find solace in simply looking into one another’s eyes. Don’t name it. Just be. There, you might find the person in me. The animal in you. And everything in between.