Excellent Video Poem - Careful What You Wish For Orangutan by Pete Mullineaux
Video Poem - Careful What You Wish For Orangutan by Pete Mullineaux
This poem was inspired by the ruling of an Argentinian court in 2014 that assigned certain legal rights to orang-utans as ‘non-human persons’ – as opposed to unintelligent ‘things’ or ‘objects’. It was hoped by many animal lovers and environmentalists that this progressive ruling would help protect orang-utans from our human disregard for their right to a peaceful existence, notably the wilful destruction of their habitats by palm oil manufacturers. Among multiple ironies the greatest perhaps is that acquiring nominal membership of the human race isn’t in itself much use as we also happily do this kind of thing to disempowered people.
A related quirk in this story is humankind’s scientific questioning of whether apes can ever mimic our own level of intelligence. One indicator that has been put forward is whether they can be taught to tell (human style) lies – fake news! No doubt they are well capable of being devious, able to play tricks, perhaps even tell jokes in their own orang-utan kind of way. This links neatly to the now well known court case taken by Donald Trump (subsequently withdrawn) against a US comedian who insinuated he might be related to this noble species of ape because of a hair likeness. Trump should be so lucky! He succeeds hands down in the lies department but alas, intelligence appears to let him down. - Pete
Pete Mullineaux is a poet, songwriter and dramatist living in Galway Ireland. He works in development education with groups such as Afri (Action from Ireland) on their ‘Just a Second’ programme and Poetry Ireland’s ‘Development Education through Literature Project.’
Pete
Mullineaux grew up in Bristol, UK - where he had his first poem published, aged
13 in Macmillan's anthology Poetry & Song, subsequently recorded on vinyl
by ARGO Records with music by Ewan McColl & Peggy Seeger. He lived in
London for several years, playing with left-wing garage punk band The
Resisters, then going solo as Pete Zero, winning the City of London Poetry/song
prize with Disposable Tissues, (recorded on vinyl by Someone Else's Music. He
was a regular on the London/UK music, performance poetry and new comedy
circuits and host for New Variety in Brixton. He moved to Galway in 1991 and
works teaching global issues in schools. He's published four poetry
collections, most recently How to Bake a Planet (Salmon 2016) – “A gem” –
Poetry Ireland Review. A new collection is forthcoming in 2022. He’s been
interviewed on RTE’s Arena and also had three plays produced by RTE radio. His
work has been described by reviewers as ‘profoundly sensitive’ ‘gorgeous and
resonant’ & ‘grimly funny’, and comparisons made with Roger McGough, John
Clare, John Cooper-Clarke and Pete Seeger. His debut novel Jules & Rom:
Sci-fi meets Shakespeare (Troubador UK) was published in April 2021,
(‘Certainly worth a gander’ – Irish Times). Website:
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