We ache in sympathy for both Janis and Lucy confined to their island prison. With impressive economy of style, Dodds imagines the encounters between Janis, “stuck” in her protective cage, and Lucy: “stuck” on an island thousands of kilometres from the only home that she has ever known. When the Temerlins tire of their scientific experiment after thirteen years, they send Lucy to Baboon Island with a graduate student, Janis Carter, who is tasked with introducing her to the wild to live among other chimpanzees. – “Airplane,” “baby,” “banana,” and “blanket” are among the first words that Lucy learns to sign.ĭodds envisages Lucy frantically signing in “Stuck” (59-61). Indeed, the title of his collection shows that he does not fall into the trap of believing that he is providing a voice for a mute creature. Dodds seems less to be writing to ventriloquise for someone who cannot communicate because she is not human than to be summoning the voice of the dead. He handles Lucy’s story with obvious empathy, writing as much to his subject as for her. He rightly observes in the Afterword that “nobody will ever read Lucy’s autobiography” (76). The baby chimpanzee is raised as a human from the moment she is purchased.ĭodds is aware that the anthropomorphising of an ape is a fraught subject. The poem ends with Jane escorting the baby chimpanzee to Oklahoma on an aeroplane: In playing with perspective, Dodds subtly manipulates the reader’s emotional responses. For a moment not much shorter than the brief time she holds Lucy, the mother chimpanzee becomes the focaliser as she tastes her drink: “Such sweetness / tickles the tongue” (9). The drink is laced with phencyclidine to enable the zoo owners to prize Lucy from her mother’s arms. In “This Woman’s Work” (9), Dodds shows Jane “offer a Coke” in “exchange / for a daughter” (9). Believing that they need to “obtain the subject / before it knows / what it is” (“Professor Bill’s Vision” 8), the Temerlins acquire Lucy from a roadside zoo in Florida. The research subject becomes the voyeur the object being studied launches her own investigation.Īfter the Temerlins’ first chimp, Charlie Brown, suffocates in his security blanket at the age of four, they decide to “adopt” a new one. Her experiments determine which is good to drink, which is a threat to provoke her sharp-toothed wrath, and which is the preferred place for defecation. Each mundane accoutrement becomes an alien object of fascination as Lucy studies it with the mind of an intrepid scientist. The “whiskey sour” (“The Temerlins Entertain” 43) plucked from a cocktail cabinet, the “sun-faded football” with which Steve and his friends play (“Hierarchy” 29), the “green shag rug” under the “coffee table” (“Toilet Training” 20) – these are the trappings of life in Norman, Oklahoma. This setting, so familiar from television sit coms, is rendered incongruous through Dodds’ deft writing. The extraordinary series of events plays out in 1960s and 1970s suburban America. Yet, although Lucy is seen as a disruptive and destructive force by the Temerlins’ neighbours and visitors, the reverse is true: it is humans who have derailed her existence irrevocably, with disastrous consequences. Dr Maurice Temerlin, a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, his wife Jane, a social worker and academic, and their son Steve have their lives upended when they adopt Lucy. Lucy is raised as the “daughter” of the Temerlin family for thirteen years as part of a university cross-fostering program. This is a nuanced and complex reimagining of a true story. In the brilliant and unsettling Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, Benjamin Dodds takes as his muse a chimpanzee called Lucy.
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