All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [193]
The more I’ve learned about bonobos, the more enthralled I’ve become. Like chimpanzees, they share 98.7 percent of our DNA. But unlike chimps, who have a male-dominated social structure and engage in humanlike pathologies such as war, rape, and murder, bonobos are peaceful creatures known for strong female alliances that prevent, contain, and correct male aggression. They might squabble, but they resolve social stress without violence. Researchers like Vanessa believe that the key to their pacifism and remarkable group tolerance and cooperation is a matriarchal society: Whenever a male starts to bully or attack a female, she cries out and other females band together and discipline the males, re-establishing calm and cooperation. Bonobos relieve their tension with lots of sexual behavior, giving new and poignant meaning to the slogan “Make love, not war.” They are appealing in many ways, but perhaps what I love best is that a baby can take food out of an adult male’s mouth. A baby chimp would never do that, and aggressive male chimps are known to occasionally kill babies. The bonobos’ endangered status is salient for humans, as studying bonobos can reveal the key to the one thing we have never been able to figure out: how to live without war.
A century ago, Joseph Conrad set his masterpiece novella, Heart of Darkness, in the Congo. At its center is the tale of Kurtz, an idealistic adventurer who is sucked into the madness and savagery that he encounters in the cruelest of colonies. There but for the grace of God go you or I. As always, I am in awe of people who maintain their boundaries, who don’t succumb to despair. I so admire people like Theresa Guber Tapsoba who persevere daily on in the face of hopelessness, and heroes like Zainab Salbi, like Therese and Victor, like the Women for Women program graduates in Goma and other survivors, and those who dedicate their lives to supporting them. But as I packed my bags in my sad little hotel room to return to my privileged life back home in America, I found myself brooding over my own culpability in the hideous drama of Central Africa.
I thought about Astrid, a tiny starving toddler whose cotton dress hung slack on her frame. I met her outside of a ramshackle health clinic in Kinshasa. Her mother had abandoned her, her grandmother walked to the clinic when she was literally on her last legs, and I watched Astrid clutch a UNICEF-provided refeeding formula with the fury and the rage that only the starving can truly understand.
Yet before I knew it, I would be easing back into my velvety world of abundance and first-class problems. I would be barefoot in my office—the back porch—wearing a white nightgown, looking at fireflies, eating black raspberry chocolate-chip ice cream with Dario, surrounded by our well-fed, inoculated pets, while Astrid and all the friends I made on this trip will still be … here.
I couldn’t stop thinking about a photograph in the genocide memorial in Kigali, the one of the Belgian priests measuring the heads of Africans and consigning them to their fates through the delusion of ethnic separation. The priests were committing acts of evil, but did they know it? What about the United Nations countries that ignored the genocide spawned by these false divisions? Were those decision makers perpetuating evil by acts of omission? And what about me? I know I am human, I am fallible, I am capable of greatness, and I am capable of atrocity. In these pictures—I could be on either side: the measured or the measurer; the abused or the abuser. My mind’s eye kept returning again and again to the image of the white priest, the black women … and which side of history I was going to be on.
I am grateful that in