(April 14, 2016) Newark resident Dr. Benjamin Beck explores the relationship between humans and chimpanzees in a new novel, “Ape,” released last year through Berlin-based Salt Water Media.
Born in Kingston, New York, Beck became the research curator and curator of primates at Brookfield Zoo in 1970, and served at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park as general curator and associate director from 1983, until his retirement in 2003.
His published works include “Animal Tool Behavior” (1980) and the novel “Thirteen Gold Monkeys” (2013), as well as dozens of scientific papers. In 2010, he was appointed scientist emeritus in the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
He and his wife, who also worked at the Smithsonian, were frequent visitors of the lower shore during their time in Washington, D.C.
“We had been camping down here since 1983, and decided to get ourselves a small house, for weekend getaways and that kind of thing,” he said. “We settled on Newark, and we still live in Newark.”
Beck, now 76, said he based “Ape” on work he did in Rwanda from 2007-2012 with the Great Ape Trust, a nongovernmental organization based in Ohio.
The founder of the trust had met with the president of Rwanda, a small, troubled African nation located in the middle of the continent, and together they sought to establish a new national park for the conservation of great apes.
Beck was asked to organize and manage the project.
“We settled on a very small piece of tropical forest that was surrounded by 800,000 hungry people and had about 15 or 20 chimpanzees,” he said. “Our goal was to save what was left of this area, expand it, and turn it into a national park. And we did all of that in five or six years.”
Today, that area, Gishwati, is an established conservation region with more than 30 chimpanzees. Beck said the footprint has “more than doubled” in size, and now enjoys the protections of full, national park status.
He chose to make “Ape” a work of fiction, he said, because he believed it would be more accessible to a general audience.
“A lot of the work I have been privileged to do, a lot of the places I was been privileged to work in, I lot of the people I have been privileged to meet provided a huge amount of backstory – stuff that hadn’t been told in scientific publications,” he said. “I wanted to get the science and those stories out to a larger audience than just professional peers, and that’s why I turned to fiction.”
Several of the main characters in the novel are chimpanzees, creating the challenge of conveying thoughts and emotions – not to mention moving the plot along – without being able to use dialogue as a driving device.
The book begins as a 20-year-old chimpanzee named Mango, craving salt, sneaks into a village where six human infants are sleeping, swaddled in their beds. He picks one up, and shakes it, knowing it will cry and produce salty tears, which he proceeds to lick away. Moments later, after his escape back into the forest, Stone, an elder ape and the tribe’s leader, chastises Mango for his actions.
Not a word of dialogue is spoken during the scene, but Beck thoughtfully conveys both the desires of the young ape, and the realization of the elder that peacefully coexisting with humans is necessary for survival.
In his first novel, Beck wrote about monkeys in Brazil, who could – in the narrative – speak. He carried that device over to the initial draft of “Ape” as well, but later reconsidered.
“Several of my early readers – the folks I turned to, to give me feedback, before we went ahead and published the book – suggested that the story and these chimpanzees [were] sufficiently interesting without that piece of information, and that the descriptions of the behavior were sufficient to convey what the chimps were thinking and feeling,” he said.
“I think a lot of scientists, especially those who work with monkeys and apes, frequently think in terms of the animals as to what they would be saying if they could talk,” Beck continued. “It’s a way of giving you insight into what they might be thinking.”
Beck said there were only about 20 lines of dialogue in the first draft.
“What several of these folks pointed out to me is, ‘Hey, you’re associated with the Smithsonian. When people read these novels, they’re not going to think fiction. They’re going to think everything you’re saying is the real thing,’” he said. “That left me with the responsibly of cutting out the dialogue.
“Although there is some evidence that apes have some of the biological abilities and psychological abilities that are necessary for language, they certainly don’t have language in the sense that we do,” Beck added. “That was a really far reach. The rest of the stuff in there about what they think and they feel has basis in reality.”
The message of the book, according to its author, is that apes are much less different from people than one might think.
“I want the readers to understand that these animals are very closely related to ourselves,” he said. “There is an enormous amount of similarities of anatomy, physiology, genetics, and also psychologically in the way they think and feel,” he said. “I think, when people begin to appreciate that incredible similarity, they’re more inclined to support their conservation in the wild, and, hopefully, support also the conservation of other apes and monkeys, and also rethink our relationships with these animals.”
Beck said that includes reexamining views on everything from whether chimpanzees and other apes should be used in biomedical research, to whether they should be kept in our zoos.
“I wanted people to tackle those sorts of ethical questions,” he said. “Of course there’s no right answer – everybody has to form their own opinions about things – but I think it might bleed over into the way we treat other humans who might be disadvantaged in some ways.
“There was a time, in this county, when we kept African natives in zoos – human beings, on exhibit,” Beck continued. “One of the most famous zoos in the world, the Bronx Zoo in New York, actually had a Congolese native, in a cage, on exhibit in the early 1900s. We’re only 120 years away from a time when there were human beings who were thought that they were so ‘unhuman’ that they could be kept in a zoo.
“I think we see remnants of that, today, in the way we treat other people. I hope that the book will stimulate compassion and concern towards animals, and also to people who are not exactly like us.”
“Ape” is available at Salt Water Media, on 29 Broad Street, Suite 104 in Berlin, or online at www.saltwatermedia.com, as well as through online retailers, like Amazon.com.
Beck will also be featured on an episode of the “So, What’s Your Story?” podcast, produced at Salt Water Media, today, April 14. Episodes are available for download, at no cost, on iTunes.
Born in Kingston, New York, Beck became the research curator and curator of primates at Brookfield Zoo in 1970, and served at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park as general curator and associate director from 1983, until his retirement in 2003.
His published works include “Animal Tool Behavior” (1980) and the novel “Thirteen Gold Monkeys” (2013), as well as dozens of scientific papers. In 2010, he was appointed scientist emeritus in the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
He and his wife, who also worked at the Smithsonian, were frequent visitors of the lower shore during their time in Washington, D.C.
“We had been camping down here since 1983, and decided to get ourselves a small house, for weekend getaways and that kind of thing,” he said. “We settled on Newark, and we still live in Newark.”
Beck, now 76, said he based “Ape” on work he did in Rwanda from 2007-2012 with the Great Ape Trust, a nongovernmental organization based in Ohio.
The founder of the trust had met with the president of Rwanda, a small, troubled African nation located in the middle of the continent, and together they sought to establish a new national park for the conservation of great apes.
Beck was asked to organize and manage the project.
“We settled on a very small piece of tropical forest that was surrounded by 800,000 hungry people and had about 15 or 20 chimpanzees,” he said. “Our goal was to save what was left of this area, expand it, and turn it into a national park. And we did all of that in five or six years.”
Today, that area, Gishwati, is an established conservation region with more than 30 chimpanzees. Beck said the footprint has “more than doubled” in size, and now enjoys the protections of full, national park status.
He chose to make “Ape” a work of fiction, he said, because he believed it would be more accessible to a general audience.
“A lot of the work I have been privileged to do, a lot of the places I was been privileged to work in, I lot of the people I have been privileged to meet provided a huge amount of backstory – stuff that hadn’t been told in scientific publications,” he said. “I wanted to get the science and those stories out to a larger audience than just professional peers, and that’s why I turned to fiction.”
Several of the main characters in the novel are chimpanzees, creating the challenge of conveying thoughts and emotions – not to mention moving the plot along – without being able to use dialogue as a driving device.
The book begins as a 20-year-old chimpanzee named Mango, craving salt, sneaks into a village where six human infants are sleeping, swaddled in their beds. He picks one up, and shakes it, knowing it will cry and produce salty tears, which he proceeds to lick away. Moments later, after his escape back into the forest, Stone, an elder ape and the tribe’s leader, chastises Mango for his actions.
Not a word of dialogue is spoken during the scene, but Beck thoughtfully conveys both the desires of the young ape, and the realization of the elder that peacefully coexisting with humans is necessary for survival.
In his first novel, Beck wrote about monkeys in Brazil, who could – in the narrative – speak. He carried that device over to the initial draft of “Ape” as well, but later reconsidered.
“Several of my early readers – the folks I turned to, to give me feedback, before we went ahead and published the book – suggested that the story and these chimpanzees [were] sufficiently interesting without that piece of information, and that the descriptions of the behavior were sufficient to convey what the chimps were thinking and feeling,” he said.
“I think a lot of scientists, especially those who work with monkeys and apes, frequently think in terms of the animals as to what they would be saying if they could talk,” Beck continued. “It’s a way of giving you insight into what they might be thinking.”
Beck said there were only about 20 lines of dialogue in the first draft.
“What several of these folks pointed out to me is, ‘Hey, you’re associated with the Smithsonian. When people read these novels, they’re not going to think fiction. They’re going to think everything you’re saying is the real thing,’” he said. “That left me with the responsibly of cutting out the dialogue.
“Although there is some evidence that apes have some of the biological abilities and psychological abilities that are necessary for language, they certainly don’t have language in the sense that we do,” Beck added. “That was a really far reach. The rest of the stuff in there about what they think and they feel has basis in reality.”
The message of the book, according to its author, is that apes are much less different from people than one might think.
“I want the readers to understand that these animals are very closely related to ourselves,” he said. “There is an enormous amount of similarities of anatomy, physiology, genetics, and also psychologically in the way they think and feel,” he said. “I think, when people begin to appreciate that incredible similarity, they’re more inclined to support their conservation in the wild, and, hopefully, support also the conservation of other apes and monkeys, and also rethink our relationships with these animals.”
Beck said that includes reexamining views on everything from whether chimpanzees and other apes should be used in biomedical research, to whether they should be kept in our zoos.
“I wanted people to tackle those sorts of ethical questions,” he said. “Of course there’s no right answer – everybody has to form their own opinions about things – but I think it might bleed over into the way we treat other humans who might be disadvantaged in some ways.
“There was a time, in this county, when we kept African natives in zoos – human beings, on exhibit,” Beck continued. “One of the most famous zoos in the world, the Bronx Zoo in New York, actually had a Congolese native, in a cage, on exhibit in the early 1900s. We’re only 120 years away from a time when there were human beings who were thought that they were so ‘unhuman’ that they could be kept in a zoo.
“I think we see remnants of that, today, in the way we treat other people. I hope that the book will stimulate compassion and concern towards animals, and also to people who are not exactly like us.”
“Ape” is available at Salt Water Media, on 29 Broad Street, Suite 104 in Berlin, or online at www.saltwatermedia.com, as well as through online retailers, like Amazon.com.
Beck will also be featured on an episode of the “So, What’s Your Story?” podcast, produced at Salt Water Media, today, April 14. Episodes are available for download, at no cost, on iTunes.