Favorite passages from
Songs of the Gorilla Nation
by Dawn Prince-Hughes
Harmony, New York, 2004
When I am not drawn in by another person's choice of topic, I often start thinking of things that I am more interested in. I get a physical thrill when I encounter symmetry: I love the lines and color of tennis courts and love to run on them; I love driving through tunnels and being surrounded by their roundness. When I get homesick and cry, it is because I miss times and places and not necessarily individual people.
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Yet I believe autism can be a beautiful way of seeing the world. I believe that within autism there is not only the group—the label—but the individual as well; there is strength in it, and there is terror in its power. When I speak of emerging from the darkness of autism, I do not mean that I offer a success story neatly wrapped and finished with a "cure." I and the others who are autistic do not want to be cured. What I mean when I say "emergence" is that my soul was lifted from the context of my earlier autism and became autistic in another context, one filled with wonder and discovery and full of the feelings that so poetically inform each human life.
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Prejudices about what it means to be a person necessarily exclude those who are not bright on the stage of common action; those who do not welcome the glare of shining, blinding smiles, who do not lean closer to hear the roar and macramé of shouted words, who do not cut themselves and mold their flesh and spirit to fit the narrow human path, funneling upward without looking back. Autistic people can be left behind, hunted and haunted, looking through an often opaque glass.
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When I was young, my parents and I often stayed at my mother's parents' house, and my favorite uncle lived there also. A hallway ran around the perimeter of the house, past the dining room, the bedrooms, the bathroom, the front door, and through the living room back to the dining room, in a big circle. My favorite game (to the exclusion of all others) was to wait in the dining room for the adults to come up with a word— the more difficult the better—and then I would speed off down the hallway, in the same direction every time, either on my tricycle or on foot, repeating the word over and over.
The word would seem different somehow, taking on new properties, as I passed my cherished landmarks. "Hippopotamus!" I would say as I passed the first leg of the journey, my grandparents' bedroom, where the word would absorb the comfort of my grandparents' bed, their clothing, the beauty of my grandmother's vanity table, the smell of cedar drawers; then on to the bathroom yelling "Hippopotamus!" where the word would absorb the smell of antiseptic, toilet bowl cleaner, baby powder, perfume, and toothpaste; through the second bedroom, where the word would absorb the light from the fixture on the ceiling, with its fascinating mobile. "Hippopotamus, hippopotamus!" I would repeat; I would veer around the corner where the front door stood across from the stairs going to the second floor, where the word would assimilate the power of the dark stairwell; I hurried on through the living room, where the television was always on, and the word would be injected with whatever scene was on the screen.
By the time I made it back to the dining room, I had learned the word and attached it to a long list of contexts. I would never forget it. I would say the word triumphantly as I rolled to a stop in the dining room once again and waited anxiously for another word to echo and learn, echo and learn, desperate to begin moving in the big circle that was the hallway, around and around.
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I wanted to drink only root beer at that point, and I would delight at looking into the comforting depths of the purple world inside the cup, the smell and taste of the root beer like some ancient sea against my lips, blotting out the world.
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The restoration of spirit that I achieved through belonging—first with the gorillas, and then to a group of people like myself at long last—is no different for autistic people than it is for all other people who need companionship. It is this sense of companionship that validates one's experience from afar. It is crucial for our sense of well-being and the awakening of our potential. But it is also, after this kind of healing, essential for our emergence as individuals.
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Like Seven of Nine, I find that I am only part "human" and very much something altogether different; I am overwhelmed by the social demands of "normal life"; and I am lonely. I often don't understand why people do the things they do, like the things they like, and remain unaware of the grossest social contradictions. I don't understand the strange rituals associated with attraction or why people are obsessed with certain physical characteristics.
The objectification of Seven always upsets me, by those who pay heed only to the tightness of her unitard biosuit and the way it accentuates her trim, statuesque, and culturally predictable form. Everyone seems to be rooting for her to become some kind of mindless sex-toy. Her cool directness, her obvious intellectual brilliance, and her sensitivity generate in them only a desire to see her lose these traits in a flood of uncontrolled lust. Instead it should inspire them to see the beauty of her retained distance.
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They didn't look at one another, and they didn't look at me. Instead, they looked at everything.
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It is easy for those who are not captive to forget that those who are remain individuals. An individual with a name, a family who needs them, a past that they stand on, and a future that they dream about. Maybe it is because so many people share the same past and dream the same dreams that they forget how lonely it can be to have a different past, a different dream.
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I contemplated these ways of life often and thought about what I stood for. Physically, I thought about how standing up on two feet leaves you exposed. One's naked belly and chest and genitals are all uncovered and laid bare, as if standing has lifted a great warm cover made of the sacred space between body and ground. Like a plant uprooted, with the last of its anchor and succor falling in abandoning clods, we stretch up to the sky and let the close and nourishing earth fall away. This standing had often been too much for me to bear, and when it was, I would go and curl up somewhere, nursing the raw wound that my upright front had sustained in the million-year tearing away that my ancestors had undertaken. Stand we must, though, in order to move forward and reach up.
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When I meet the family members of someone with autism who haven't told their loved one—usually a child—of the diagnosis, it perturbs me, because they want to "avoid labels." I can assure you that not only does the autistic person always know that they are different, but they suffer deeply from not knowing why. While they try to come to understand themselves without having a name for their condition, other people are labeling them—and usually without the compassion that real education would bring. I have been told that the people in question want to save the autistic person from the "stigma" of being autistic. I don't think they realize how stigmatized the people with autism are—because of their behavior, not because of any label—and if they don't know what is going on with themselves, their behavior isn't likely to change. Further, autistic people are, as a general rule, not likely to care what other people think. Perhaps this is because it is so hard to figure out.
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In my desire to help the world improve, I am not unique as a person with Asperger's. But the gorillas have given me strength to see that if I am to be effective in bettering the planet, my responsibility outweighs my comfort. I think this is true of every human person.
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