There are many fives in my life. Five a.m. alarm clock. Five hours of sleep. Five bus trips daily. Teacher, grade five. At approximately Ray Bradbury's death hour this morning I scrawled five hieroglyphic phrases on the lined paper next to my bed. Kegan. Jaguar. Tried to warn. Didn't listen. Got me. Later, there was a gorilla I couldn't feed: I tried to scrounge for tossed-out vegetables, as one would give a rabbit, but this rabbit was a thousand pound living bludgeon and all I could find was one tray of discarded red and green bell peppers--hardly enough for a jungle animal that, in dire straits, will eat young gazelle. As if bloodthirsty silverbacks were not enough to drive the psychic message home, for some reason the gorilla attracted to him a throng of uncommonly loyal, dumb and adorable dogs who were depending on me utmostly to also sate their carnivore's diet of ground beef and kibble. Awoke in a sweat--five sweats, to be precise.
Spent all day yesterday reading about the Ik. Colin Turnbull's other ethnography that I've read was about the BaMbuti, a Congolese pygmy tribe who act and look like tiny, dark-skinned Groucho Marxes. It was called The Forest People. In it, the tribe sings songs about the goodness of the forest, likes to laugh, and has a taste for the hilarious and slapstick. The Ik are not the BaMbuti. Their book is called The Mountain People. An excerpt:
When the mother finds a spot in which to gather, she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground....Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there--once that I know of, anyway--and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it, and still further this meant that a leopard was in the vicinity and would be sleeping the child off and thus be an easy kill. The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.
It's like some bizarre Lewis Carroll rabbit-hole where everything is reversed. The Ik are starving. Uganda and Kenya have made them settle in what used to be their spring lands, and forbidden them from hunting in the surrounding "state parks". Their familial allegiances used to be dictated by traveling groups and gathering groups, rather than by biological nuclear families. Now there's no traveling, and there's no gathering. So there are no allegiances. Since there's not enough food to go around, either, there's absolutely no incentive to do something like nurse your infant, or shelter your elderly mother. The most depressing thing is Turnbull's anthropological conclusion that biological family ties are not part of human nature, since the Ik are human and family seems to mean zilch to them. I might argue that analogs of this same behavior can be seen in any situation of acute stress to the survival of the group, like war. Regardless of theory, I'm dreaming of jaguars eating my skull, starving bloodthirsty gorillas, and generally of being put into situations of great responsibility without the resources to handle them.
There's no suitable pun on which to end this post. Pray for me, readers: the jungle approacheth. And it's five a.m., and time to wake up.
