Poem Review: Scientific Method by Paul Tran
By Clark Wu
In the 1950s and 60s, behavioral psychologists thought that babies grew attached to their mothers for food. Cognitive psychologist Harry Harlow found comfort, companionship and love to be stronger and more convincing factors through experiments with infant monkeys.
He made two types of inanimate surrogate “mothers”—one made of wire and wood, another made in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. Harlow found that, with or without milk and food, the terry cloth parent and infant monkey formed a stronger bond.
It had a “maternal touch.”
Poet Paul Tran recited the following poem of theirs during Assembly this winter term. Tran uses many enjambed lines, but I’ll pause where I find appropriate to give a little analysis. Naturally, my pauses may appear abrupt to you, the reader, so feel free to enjoy the poem as a whole before and after you read my pompous and incomplete commentary.
Of course I chose the terry cloth surrogate. Milkless
artifice. False idol. Everyone, I’m told, has a mother,
but Master bred me in a laboratory, his colony
of orphans. Rhesus macaque. Macaca mulatta. Old
World monkeys, my matriarchs ruled the grasslands
and forests long before white men like him weaned
their whiteness and maleness from our chromosomes,
We view the world as the rhesus monkey here. The violent syllables and scientific diction work in tandem to immediately set an antagonistic tone.
First, to address the elephant in the room: the odd 2-3 lined stanzas. I think Tran wants to not only disrupt the flow of the read but also to visually establish an unequal power structure. Of course, it’s up to you to decide whether the Master or the monkey is the animal, the monster, and the obsessed.
I love the way Tran plays with language. According to Merriam Webster, “wean” could mean “to accustom (a young child or animal) to take food otherwise than by nursing,” which obviously refers to the lab macaque with its milkless surrogate. But “wean” is also defined as “to detach from a source of dependence,” or “to free from a usually unwholesome habit or interest.”
The line “weaning their whiteness and maleness from our chromosomes” mocks colonization. The white men assaulted and plundered the “macaques,” labelling them as inferior. Tran, however, possibly views whiteness and maleness to be “unwholesome interests.” This is a powerful statement about what it means to be marginalized, and what it means to look at the world through a racist and heteronormative lens of privilege.
slashed and burned our home, what they once called
The Orient. French Indochina. Việt Nam. Master,
like a good despot, besotted and dumbstruck, dying
to discern the genesis of allegiance, the science of love
and loss, nature versus nurture, segregated me at birth
from my maker, pelt sopping with placental blood.
In a chamber where he kept track of me, his pupils
recorded my every movement, my every utterance,
hoping I might evince to them a part of themselves.
But I wasn’t stupid. I knew famine and emaciation,
Tran takes a jab at science, perhaps, for attempting to quantify and understand love. In fact, this Master is so engrossed in his studies of this monkey slave of his that he fails to recognize his own obsession and attachment to his slave.
To me, this eerie scientist-monkey, Master-slave relationship calls to mind the dominant and recessive alleles in chromosomes. If we look at the laboratory as one “body,” the Master has stolen for himself the “best” traits. Maybe Tran’s poem is pessimistic. No matter how the monkey rebels, its voice will always be muffled, recessive and forgotten.
Some very interesting word choices here, too. “Genesis of allegiance” has such a biblical air. The unique “g” sounds also makes the poem more lyrical. “Pupils” is another word with a double meaning. If the Master invited pupils or lab assistants, we could only imagine how the monkey felt paraded.
and nevertheless I picked that lifeless piece of shit
because it was soft to hold. Who wouldn’t want that?
Though it couldn’t hold me, I clung to the yellow-face
devil as though it was my true mother and I grasped
the function of motherhood: witness to my suffering,
companion in hell. Unlike infants with wire mothers
I didn’t hurl myself on the floor in terror or tantrum,
rocking back and forth, colder than a corpse. I had
“and nevertheless I picked that lifeless piece of shit / because it was soft to hold.” I think what Tran left ambiguous here is whether the monkey’s urge to hold its surrogate was innate, even though the monkey itself considered its apparent love for the terry cloth to be almost an act of rebellion, a subversion of its Master’s expectations.
Also recall the first stanza. The monkey is an orphan, its mother a “false idol.” What if all of our mothers are simply false idols? We put our parents on such pedestals sometimes that we both fear and lust over the concept of adulthood. We want to run away from the confines of youth, and yet we are afraid of losing touch with whom we’ve depended on for our entire lives. My fear is that generations will see their mother figures as matriarchs to be invalidated and silenced. Maybe that’s why patriarchy lives on.
“witness to my suffering, companion in hell.” The mother in Tran’s eyes, by its very function, is cast in a helpless role. My mother once told me that almost all children’s relationships with their mothers would be the most special. I’m pretty sure she was trying to get me to run an errand at the time, but the point still stands. I do think there’s something precious about my bond with my mother. Maybe because giving birth to me was hell. Maybe it’s because she made tons of hellish hard sacrifices for me. Maybe I am the cause of her hell.
what Master believed to be a psychological base
of operations. Emotional attachment. Autonomy.
Everything he denied and did to me, his ceaseless
cruelty concealed as inquisition, unthinkable until
it was thought, I endured by keeping for myself
the wisdom he yearned to discover and take credit
for. Love, like me, is a beast no master can maim,
no dungeon can discipline. Love is at once master
and dungeon. So don’t underestimate me. Simple-
minded and subservient as I might appear to be,
I gathered more about Master than he did
about me, which, I guess, is a kind of fidelity
conceived not from fondness but fear magnified
by fascination. Master made me his terry cloth
surrogate, his red-clawed god, nursing his id
on my tits, and for that, I pitied him. All this time
he was the animal. All this time he belonged to me.
There is so much to unpack here.
Tran compares love to the monkey, to a beast, to a master, and to a dungeon. If we break this down through my lens, I would say each of these comparisons represent aspects of unhealthy love. The monkey is an embodiment of manipulation and isolation. The beast, which “no master can maim,” stands for obsession. The master represents possessiveness. And the dungeon is the soil through which violence grows and blossoms.
“Master made me his terry cloth / surrogate...nursing his id / on my tits.” Now the monkey becomes the Master’s surrogate mother, the object of his attachment. The Master feeds his “id,” his base desires and his identity (ID), from the monkey. This is truly some weird, codependent relationship of mutual hatred and fascination.
Tran also compares the monkey to a “red-clawed god,” what I’ve interpreted as Satan. This reinforces the recurring theme of a blurred dichotomy. We may think the Master is the God, controlling the fate of this worthless animal. But the monkey sees itself as the one putting on an act, the one pulling all the strings to fool its Master. Then again, the monkey may be indulging in his own pitiful imagination; its power over the Master may simply be a pipe dream. To quote John Milton from Paradise Lost, the monkey believes itself to reign in Hell, but it never even served in Heaven.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
–– John Milton, Paradise Lost
