The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious Writing Politically Oriented Writing
The Fear of Monkeys
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Mission Statement

The Fear of Monkeys will close to submissions once Issue 50--our last issue--is filled. It has been nearly twenty years and time to move on to other things. I would like to encourage those who have written in the zine before to think about submitting something about what Fear of Monkeys has meant to you. In the early days of its youth, it alone provided a market for politically-oriented prose and poetry, and the publishing world looks the same now.

Another few years of hanging from vines and swinging from trees, throwing dung at the neighbours and our friends, and generally trying to encourage good citizens.

I think now that he was the silliest creature I ever met; he had developed in the most wonderful way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the natural folly of a monkey. (Island of Doctor Moreau - H. G. Wells)

Although The Fear of Monkeys comes from a movement in literature and culture that begins with the beast fables of antiquity and runs through Caliban, the Yahoos, the Morlocks and M'ling, more recently it is an E-Zine featuring politically conscious writing. Its purpose is to provide an empty vessel into which we might pour the otherwise marginalized voices of those concerned with political and social responsibility.

The web has news sites, such as Indymedia.org and the Onion, and many more pages are opinion based, but the purpose of this site is to provide a venue for less overtly didactic writing projects. The more edgy prose, that story, article, or poem, you wrote about the neighbour's fighting, about the cops who brutalized your friend, the sludge you saw in the lake, or how you felt in a strip bar or after you read Rachael Carson's Silent Spring, all can find a home here.

At The Fear of Monkeys we believe that any fear of monkeys is mostly based on a misunderstanding:

The Planet of the Apes series tried to explore the implications of historical American slavery, but bound by the temper of its times, it could only write a metaphorical version. Attempting to create a psychic distance from America's contemporaneous racism--by making the slave-owners ruling apes and the slaves humans--this reading of history tried to probe the institutional dehumanization of oppressed peoples. This allegorical reading of history proved to be too much of a logical leap for the American viewing public, however, and instead of the desired result of universal human suffrage, it led merely to an incomprehensible and widespread fear of monkeys.
(Historiographic Metafiction or, Lying With the Truth)

 

I didn't used to be afraid of those red-assed monkeys, showed no respect to them at all. Then, on a drive-thru safari with my soon to be in-laws, I opened the car door and held a piece of bread for one just inches from his cage. Apparently I can't read or else I might have noticed the sign: KEEP HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES AND DON'T FEED THE ANIMALS.
He stared at me until I started making cute here-kitty-kitty sounds, then without warning shot his hand through the gap and grabbed me by the wrist. I ripped my hand away and fell against the car while that bastard started hooting and bobbing his head up and down and bouncing his red ass all over the cage. Back in the car, my heart machine-gunned lava to my cheeks while my arms and legs goosebumped and everyone laughed. They're baboons, goddammit, and they have huge fangs. Huge. (Jared Ward)
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