"Lyrical, redemptive . . . Songs of the Gorilla Nation is as much a rhapsody to gorillas as it is an anatomy of autism." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A primer on self-preservation and love." -- O Magazine

"Gorilla Nation proves Prince-Hughes is a great writer—and an inspiration to anyone searching for a voice." -- Seattle Magazine

This is a book about autism. Specifically, it is about my autism, which is both like and unlike other people's autism. But just as much, it is a story about how I emerged from the darkness of it into the beauty of it. It is about how I moved full circle from being a wild thing out of context as a child, to being a wild thing in context with a family of gorillas, who taught me how to be civilized. They taught me the beauty of being wild and gentle together and as one.

What does it mean to be autistic? There are two types of autism, which I will detail in Chapter 2, but my form is called Asperger's Syndrome, and it is characterized by difficulties in processing stimuli, sensory oversensitivities, and challenges in social interaction. Though I now know what I am and believe I know what caused me to be that way -- I have an official diagnosis of autism and have used that information to find coping strategies that give me and those around me a measure of peace -- I will always be autistic and it will always manifest itself. I am both proud and discouraged when people say "You're autistic? Wow! I would never have known." I am glad that I am so successful at appearing normal (whatever that is), but I also wish at times people knew how hard I work at it. So much goes on that other people can't see.

I count numbers in my head or curl my toes over and over while I am talking to someone. When I am not drawn in by another person's choice of topic, I often start thinking of things that I am more interested in and don't hear anything they say. I get a physical thrill when I encounter symmetry: I love the lines and color of tennis courts and love to run on them; I love driving through tunnels and being surrounded by their roundness. When I get homesick and cry, it is because I miss times and places and not necessarily individual people. I continue to have "sense addictions": I smell all the purple irises I can when I go for walks; I still love to smell tin boxes of Band-Aids. I love the feel of having my scalp massaged and my arms tickled lightly more than traditional forms of physical contact. In times of stress I revert to eating the same thing at the same time of day for weeks at a stretch. I wear dark glasses and earplugs for the same reason. I startle and must fight rage when someone touches me unexpectedly, and I still have a very hard time with groups of people. My social awkwardness, though controlled, will always make interaction difficult for me.

Yet I believe autism can be a beautiful way of seeing the world. I believe that within autism there is not only the group -- the label -- but the individual as well; there is strength in it, and there is terror in its power. When I speak of emerging from the darkness of autism, I do not mean that I offer a success story neatly wrapped and finished with a "cure." I and the others who are autistic do not want to be cured. What I mean when I say "emergence" is that my soul was lifted from the context of my earlier autism and became autistic in another context, one filled with wonder and discovery and full of the feelings that so poetically inform each human life. When I emerged, I had learned -- from the gorillas -- far better how I could achieve these things.

I went forward by going backward. I went backward in time into the most primal and ancient part of myself. Back into the quiet recesses of the mind, where evolution has paused to breathe, bringing its people with it. I did this with the first and best friends I ever had: a family of captive gorillas, people of an ancient nation. These gorillas, so sensitive and so trapped, were mirrors for my soul as it struggled behind bars, gawked at by the distorted faces of my world, taken out of a context that was meaningful and embracing. They taught me songs about themselves, about meaning and context, about the world, and about me.

Because gorillas are subtle and unthreatening, I was able to look at them, to watch them, in ways I had never been able to do with human people. Through this process I learned that persons are more than chaotic knots of random actions; I learned that they have feelings, needs for one another, and valuable perspectives, and that as people we are reflected in one another. Because the gorillas were so like me in so many ways, I was able to see myself in them, and in turn I saw them -- and eventually myself -- in other human people.

Gorillas, like autistic people, are misunderstood. They are seen as ugly, as caricatures of fully formed humanity, as unfinished or trapped in an anachronistic world that has no value. Prejudices about what it means to be a person necessarily exclude those who are not bright on the stage of common action; those who do not welcome the glare of shining, blinding smiles, who do not lean closer to hear the roar and macramé of shouted words, who do not cut themselves and mold their flesh and spirit to fit the narrow human path, funneling upward without looking back. Autistic people can be left behind, hunted and haunted, looking through an often opaque glass.

I remember hearing once when I was young that glass is actually a liquid, moving imperceptibly like some ancient sea that separates here from there. You can look through it and not realize it's moving, but all the time the view one has through it is slowly changing. I now know that this isn't actually true, that glass is solid, but I think autistic people and gorillas know some deeper truth about this. I am always aware of a moving sort of glass between me and the world, my present and my heritage, what is seen and what is not seen and only felt. My glass is not like the wall that other people seem to have, a wall that divides and gives no view. The gorillas know this too about their own glass. They see what is beyond it. There are human people there, that is true, but the glass is also a window to their past and their future. I watch them, these slow-moving gorilla people, and they seem to intuit that if they move slowly enough, the glass will stop and show its hidden holes. Perhaps they believe they will find some kind of passage that others don't see; perhaps they feel that this way they can go home.

I found a way to go home through the glass -- the glass of my reality as an autistic person, certainly, but even more I found a way through the glass of a common zoo exhibit. The first time I knew that the glass was moving was a day, like the many days I sat with the gorillas, when we began to know one another. I knew the glass was moving when a gorilla touched me. A gorilla touched me, and I connected to a living person as I had never done before.

It was a busy morning at the zoo, where I had been able to get a job after a long period of despair, depression, and homelessness. Working at the zoo had become my lifeline, and recently I had been allowed to start working more closely with the gorillas as part of a doctoral program I was starting. They had just had their annual medical checkups, and several samples collected that morning had to be cataloged and delivered to the zoo's animal health department. Because the keeper was in a hurry and much needed to be done, she asked me to feed some strawberries to Congo, a huge silverback weighing over five hundred pounds who had recently joined us at the zoo. She showed me very carefully how to lay the strawberries on the edge of the windowsill, between the bars, and how to keep my hands back so that he did not grab my finger.

When she left to deliver the samples, I looked through the bars at the massive gorilla sitting in his corner. I could smell his body, tart and pungently sweet, drawing me in and wrapping around my own body. As I shook the tin bowl full of strawberries, he rose up like a great dark wave of spirit and flesh and hoisted himself up to sit on the ledge under the sill. He was a foot away from me. I was overwhelmed by his sheer size and presence. It was not an unpleasant feeling; it was like lying in the silent dark in the arms of a mighty and compassionate god.

He grunted and nodded his head at the bowl, raising his eyebrows to ask me to share the berries with him. I began placing the berries between the bars, careful to stay ahead of him as he quickly flicked them into his hand and popped them into his wide mouth.

Congo was quite fond of the berries and ate them as fast as I could place them between the bars. Intent on my task and compelled to put the berries in the same repeating order between each of the bars, I didn't realize he was catching up to me and eating the berries faster than I was putting them down. And then, in an instant, it happened. We put our fingers down at the same time. His gigantic finger, black and leathery, soft and warm, rested on my own digit. We stared at our fingers, and neither of us moved. Finally, I looked up into his soft brown eyes. They were dancing with surprise.

We stayed like that for what seemed like a long time, our fingers joining five million years of evolution and reaching out to bridge the gap of generations traveled. He leaned forward slowly until he was six inches from my face. I could feel his breath. His steady eyes peered into my soul, and he did not blink. I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the bars. Our faces were almost touching. We stared at each other, our fingers still together.

I relaxed into his touch and his nearness. This is what it is, I thought. This is what it means to love and be loved. This is what it is to touch and look at another person and feel its meaning. This is what it is to not be alone in the vastness of the space we hurtle through among the coldness and the dying. This is what it is to live, I thought.

Now people in the world are beginning to understand the glass that they call autism. As a result of the increasing awareness of autism and of the fact that it is a continuum, several books have now been written by people with autism. Some authors have been criticized because their stories do not adhere strictly to known patterns of autism. This kind of criticism often occurs when literature from direct sources of experience is too scarce; just a few books are forced by necessity to try to speak to all people's experience. Adults with autism long to see their experiences related and validated by others. I think it is a mistake to judge too quickly the existing books by autistics, for they cannot be all things to all people. This is true of my story also.

What I do want to accomplish with this story is to tell some of what other people with autism have experienced, and much of what I have experienced as a person with autism. Much like the deaf community, we autistics are building an emergent culture. We individuals, with our cultures of one, are building a culture of many.

Copyright © 2004 by Dawn Prince-Hughes