Political and Socially Conscious Writing - A Literary e-zine: The Fear of Monkeys

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 Caron'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.