Performing Power. Or, A Historical Production of the Grotesque...

*This version was updated to reflect the correct name, Winthrop Kellogg, not William. He was a comparative psychologist, not psychiatrist.

In the last thirty-six hours, I’ve been consumed with the research experimentations of Psychologist, Winthrop Kellogg, and his wife. The couple adopted a baby chimpanzee to be raised alongside their toddler son. It happened in 1931. At the time, there had been a few bizarre (mostly unverified) instances of humans raised in the wild and adapting linguistically and socially to that environment. This couple wanted to invert the idea by proving that a chimpanzee could be domesticated. (*read colonized.)

What disturbed me most about this story was not the ambition of the scientists, but the experimentation itself. As the reports go, the Kellogg’s exposed their infant son, Donald, to his adopted sister Chimpanzee, and conducted a series of tests designed to compare their response to stimuli, social cues, and intelligence. Some of these experiments included hitting spoons behind their heads or making loud startling sounds to see who responded first. The experiment lasted all of nine months, following which the baby Chimp died when she turned three, and their son, Donald, grew to middle age and took his own life. (Not to say that the deaths are in anyway connected to the experiments.)

I came upon the Kellogg story after I read Kaitlyn Greenige’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman, a fictive narrative partly inspired by the 1931 incident. In the story, Greenige presents distinct but parallel timelines, in which we meet the Freemans, a Black family recruited in the 90s to adopt a baby chimp, Charlie, and teach him sign language. And then, in the not-too-distant past, a white medical Doctor who conducted bizarre experiments on Black communities because he wanted to prove that they are not in fact ‘animal-like.’ The irony was that in his so-called sketches published across the nation, he painted Black bodies with Chimp faces.

Just so you know, this is not a commentary about the legacy of racism/colonization in the West or its ongoing productions today. I’ll leave that discourse, heated as they get, for my Grad classes. I associated the emotions I felt in relation to these two contexts with the word grotesque after a colleague blurted it out in a discussion forum. It was apt, the perfect descriptor. Grotesque—the morbidly frightful productions of our prejudice and obsessions. There were flashes of this throughout the Greenige story, and of course, in the Kellogg experimentation. Grotesque—our fascination with the wild, with the unfamiliar, with those untamed spaces of our curiosities; our endless grasp towards appropriation, colonization, control. It is the unchecked motions we make towards those curiosities, theories, ideas; all the ways in which we insist upon them—against logic, resistance, and public opinion. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking about and questioning my own obsessions; the outline of my fears, ambitions, its brutal stench, the eager grasp of desire, the desperate pursuits that leave me bloated, anxious, restless—all the needless points I keep trying to prove. These obsessions are in the big things, like showing my worth in relation to others, but also in the small things, like working from a particular space on campus. In both contexts, as well as in its binarized in-betweens, I see how small decisions intended to move us from desire to actualization can quickly mirror our most disturbing compulsions. Desperate obsessions if unchecked will lead to desperate measures.

In her recent Substack letter (I think) Enuma Okoro wrote about the ways in which Fall metaphorized a season of shedding. (It’s obvious, I know, but her explanation was very spot on.) Anyway, much in the spirit of that, I have wondered how I relate to the things I relate to, how I pursue and inhabit them, the ways in which I take up spaces and finally, the risks and marginalization it creates for others. I have also been thinking about the spaces I have had to leave, frequently uprooted from centers I thought would hold. It is not terribly difficult to accept that my actions are of great consequence in complicating the lives of others. And still, I have also been greatly distressed and wounded by people I thought meant me well.

It’s all about power—I think. How we use it, how it ripples to affect others. I am typically hesitant to say (or even if said, to believe) that people are inherently good or bad, because I cannot decide where I stand as a person, constantly shifting, never exactly one fixed thing. My fear-driven motives are a mockery of all my good intentions, my pride a testament of several unresolved traumas. This capacity which I have for the grotesque lies beneath my perfumed presence, festering under a file of socially polished phrases. I can be both mad and afraid, victim and oppressor. I wish that those who wound me would splinter under the weight of their life’s troubles, but have I not wounded others too?

These days I have become even more frantic because I have entered yet another season of dis-agency. Is this what it means to shed, to harvest the lean years? I find that there are no coherent responses to power, and its abuses, if you are speaking from a place of disempowerment. The grotesque is, therefore, also a production of power-that is, how we acquire it and how we are willing to lay claim to it, to hold on to it. I will be thinking more about this as the new month unfolds—my dis-agencies but also my powers, and how I can use my power to make others feel less dis-agented.

Maybe the good we put out there comes back to us. Who knows?

What have you brooded over this past month? Or, what questions do you approach October with? I always want to hear.

Best wishes and a wonderful October to you.

Tochi.