In an ongoing series of articles in which the great colonialists explain themselves, King Louie looks into the di erence between victim and executioner
So, this whole back-page thing means I’m a bad guy. Like, I know that, man. We’re promised an opportunity to explain ourselves, to tell the story of how things really went down, but in the end we’re only here to be held up as objects of ridicule. Clowns. Scary clowns, perhaps, but clowns nonetheless. It’s bullshit, man. Like everything you humans do.
You know, all I ever wanted to be was colonised. That was my game, my play. Man’s red flower, being able to walk into town, I wanna be like you (hoo, hoo) and all that jazz. I lived in the ruins of an ancient human civilisation, a slum. I guess some cat thought that summarised both my aspirations and my downfall. Aspiring to live like a human, but having to make do with your leftovers, your failures, your primitive past. Although, in a way, I am your primitive past, cuz. And you kept me in the jungle because you’re ashamed of it. I exist to fulfil your fantasies of superiority, like all your victims do. And the only reason you went to all that trouble to anthropomorphise me, lend me Louis Prima’s voice, was just to demonstrate that I was something other than you. Something worse.
Of course, I was something of a success in my own way. I did create my own civilisation, organised the other apes into a hierarchy, with me at the top. Taught them the importance of having a boss (I learned that from you), and a structure, and not carrying on, willy-nilly, in their disorganised, flea-picking, savage jungle ways. They were backwards, man, sooo primitive. I had to take them in hand, to bring them music and rhythm and culture, and a little less of the ooh oohing. To my monkey minions. You see, I was kind of like you already, man. I’d reached the top and had to stop, but I was for the next step! To cross the species boundary, to betray my own kind. Big fan of Donna Haraway by the way – that chick is out there, man, she puts my thoughts into words, helped me get rid of all my betrayal baggage. She’s like everything I’d hoped Mowgli would be. It’s scary, man. Maybe I was just born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You know, I wasn’t even in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories. I may be indigenous, but I can’t even pretend to be original. Disney made me up. That cat Kipling was probably too busy struggling under his ‘white man’s burden’, as he later put it, to think about inventing me. Whingeing about having to send his ‘sons into exile’ in order ‘to serve their captives’ needs’ and dispensing ‘wisdom’ to the natives. A captor and a servant? A master and a slave? It doesn’t make any sense. Ridiculous. Or not, because in a way that’s my story, man. There’s Kipling, encouraging the £ to go o and ‘civilise’ the crazy people of the Philippines, to get into the whole Empire game (that’s why he wrote ‘The White Man’s Burden’, man). And there’s me. Handsome, clever, not crazy, long, powerful arms that were perfectly suited for sharing burdens and just waiting for the white man to come. ¥, may be Mowgli wasn’t quite white. Sort of orangeybrown, as I recall. But you know, when you live in a jungle in India, needs must.
But Disney just had to keep me down. They build you up so they can knock you down. On the one hand I’m King of the Apes, leader, organiser, cofounder and master of the great ape army; on the other I can’t tell the di erence between an ape and a grey-blue bear (¨ indigenous) with stumpy arms and claws and wearing a banana on his head, a coconut on his mouth and a skimpy grass skirt (that last, man, for reasons that were never really clear to me, but knowing you guys, there was probably some sort of sexism involved). And talking about that, did you ever see any female apes in my troop? No, I don’t think so. The first act of the colonialist is to stop the natives breeding. It happened to the Sami people in Scandinavia, the Uyghurs in China and it also happened to me. No one in The Jungle Book had any genitals to speak of. Except maybe Mowgli, the human, but God knows what he was hiding under his mankini. But hey, you contemporary art cats would have celebrated me. I’d have been the great curator
– of the ruins, man; of the primate culture; the indigenous creatures of the jungle – you people would have asked me about my indigenous customs, invited me to colonise your minds with them, examined how I had constructed a society that lived in harmony with nature, that took only what it needed, even if I needed a lot, adopted my ape terminology for your own curatorial projects and escorted me on tours to teach you how to decolonise your Natural History Museums and collections of Asian artefacts. But Disney taught me that you’d only be doing that to feel pleased about yourselves. To hide your weaknesses, your own impotence. I’d be your curatorial mankini. Jeez – I’m tired of you fools. Anyone got a light?