—King Lear
The Samabula Old People’s Home, situated in the barren outskirts of Suva, Fiji, gained a brief, unlikely notoriety last summer as the erstwhile home of Sujit Kumar, the so-called “Fiji Chicken Man.” Kumar was found at the home three years ago by the president-elect of the Suva Rotary Club, Elizabeth Clayton. The visit, which was videotaped, shows a tanned, ebullient fifty-six-year-old Australian woman in white flannel pants and a pale yellow shirt walking through a series of dingy concrete bunkers and concrete toilets, pointing ruefully at cracks in the wall and the grimy, peeling paint. She looks about as out of place as it is possible for an elegant Australian expatriate to be, but her demonstration is very convincing. Residents wander from forlorn concrete bunker to forlorn concrete bunker, more or less evenly divided between the fully dressed and alert and the halfdressed and bewildered. The Samabula Old People’s Home is a dismal place to make one’s final, wheezing dash around life’s track.
One of the final shots in the video finds Clayton in one of the two men’s bunkers, discussing some much-needed improvements to the ubiquitous concrete. She turns from the wall and points accusingly at a tattered plastic mattress, then, looking directly at the camera, she raises the mattress gingerly from its frame. As she stands up, the camera catches a second incongruous figure in the room. In the far, right-hand corner of the dormitory, separated from the elderly by three or four bed widths, a young Indian man in grey shorts and a grey T-shirt surveys the room with rapid, fidgety head movements. His arms are folded tightly into his chest and tucked below his chin. His eyes flash from the camera to Elizabeth Clayton to his own plastic mattress in a single restless motion.
About a year after this video was shot, in the early summer of 2004, the Fiji Chicken Man made a short, baffling appearance in the international media. The Observer was among the first to report “the boy who was brought up as a chicken,” igniting a print and television fuse that fizzled through Europe and North America before going out with a whimper sometime in early August. The story revolved around a Rotarian “behavioural scientist” who had become Kumar’s de facto guardian after finding him almost two years earlier tied to a bed at a Fiji old people’s home. He had been brought to the home in 1979 after Fiji welfare officers found him caged in a small chicken yard outside Suva, where he had been confined, according to Clayton’s research, “from the time he could walk until he was taken to the Samabula Home at the age of eight.”
Twenty-four years had passed at the home, with Kumar tied to a bed to prevent him from wreaking havoc among the aged and infirm, but reports suggested that he still bore traces of the child who, after his release from the chicken yard, “would mostly hop around like a chicken, peck at his food, perch like a chicken, and make noises like a chicken.” The newspaper that broke the story, the New Zealand Herald, reported expectantly that Sujit was “now being taught to be human.” It was an arresting and entrancing phrase—being taught to be human. It seemed to defy a certain naturalness or self-evidence of humanity, as though “humanness” were a habit or affectation. More pointedly, Sujit’s years among the chickens suggested a mysterious affinity with stories of children who had been raised by animals, who had crossed the nebulous divide between the animal and the human. Is humanness—the elusive thing that allegedly separates us from other animals—something we are born with or something we are “taught?” Does it exist naturally, primordially, tucked beneath the heavy trap door of history and civilization, or is it an invention of civilization? A Toronto Sun columnist stumbled upon the heart of the human/animal conundrum in July 2004. His wisecracks on Kumar and the “cluckers,” as he put it, began with a deceptively homespun question: “Who doesn’t dream of being an animal?” Who indeed?
When reports about the Fiji Chicken Man started appearing last summer, I was already deeply immersed in the lore of animals and humans. It started with the François Truffaut film The Wild Child, about the early-nineteenth-century wild boy Victor of Aveyron, who wandered from the lonely forests of France into a raging Enlightenment debate over the nature of man. When he was found in 1797, the young child had been living alone in the forest for at least four years. Contemporary naturalists, philosophers, and news mongers were both enchanted and appalled by his resemblance to the animals with whom he had taken up residence: not only did he scratch, bite, and masturbate in public, but he did not seem to see himself as a human being.
On the one hand, the forest child was a “purely animal” creature, “more like an animal than a man,” while on the other he was supposed to reveal the essential nature of man. The same people who wanted to civilize the wild child, to teach him to be human, wanted to decipher his enigmatic wildness, as though he held the key to the relationship between the human animal and his barking, growling, clucking neighbours. Victor struck me as a metaphor for our unresolved negotiation of our own “animalness,” of our recalcitrant physicality, our beastly impulses, and our howling irrationality. If man is the rational animal, the animal whose reason lifts him above his animalness, the wild child is his jeering, diabolical double, a creature that resembles him but fails to confirm his self-image.
So I staked out a corner for myself in the Toronto Reference Library—next to a weary but distinguished-looking man named Norman, who has been cracking away at the numeric code hidden in the book of Genesis since his 1993 retirement from an accounting firm—and went to work on the feral child. The mythical genealogy of the concept, I discovered, stretched back to Enkidu, the hirsute beast-man of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh who “knew neither people nor country,” but his history really began in the eighteenth century with a surge of interest in the essential, primeval nature of humankind. For 100 years or so, the wild child was a luminary in the lecture halls and laboratories of Enlightenment Europe—beginning with Wild Peter, who wandered from the woods of Hanover to the salons of Europe and England in 1726. Like “savage” Victor, Peter was greeted as an ambassador of the true natural man; his arrival on the shores of civilization was declared by one prominent naturalist to be “more remarkable than the discovery of Uranus!”
Then I heard about the chicken man. It was early July and I had been bunkered next to Norman for nearly three months. The words “Fiji Chicken Man” conjured up the cast of characters that had taken up residence with me in my library bivouac: the Lithuanian bear-boy, the Hessian wolf-boy, the Bamberg ox-child. Kumar, indeed, has recently been inducted into the monumental electronic resource feralchildren.com, a website that tracks the natural history and mythology of wild children. The life recounted in the Western and Fijian presses, chronicling a child who “ate the same food the chickens ate and adapted their way of getting food” and who arrived at the Old People’s Home “no less [wild] than a wild animal in the wilderness,” seemed to repeat the original narrative of the feral child, of human existence in an unsocialized, natural, or animal condition. And now, after twenty-four years in a forgotten corner of an old people’s home and a childhood among chickens, Sujit Kumar was “being taught to be human” by a fifty-six-year-old Rotarian. Does the chicken man have something to tell us about human nature? Does he tell us about ourselves, about what it means to be human or to be taught to be human? Does he tell us about anything but his own suffering? Norman, I said, I’m going to Fiji.
My first morning in Suva, I meet a man at a restaurant near my hotel. He is standing beside a refrigerator next to the cash register when I walk up to pay my bill, a tall man with puffy cheeks and brown waxy skin. We must love one another, he says, and introduces himself as Jesus. Behind Jesus the cashier is tracing imaginary circles around the side of her head, winking at me, and making googly eyes, but I sense that her diagnosis of Jesus is all wrong. Yes, the man is unbalanced, but his incarnation of Jesus is diabolically sound. He has pursued the central principle of Christianity—the imitation of Christ—to its harrowing mystical conclusion. He has dug his fingers into something profound—an elusive and buoyant thing that allows him to float, precariously, above his real circumstances, and he isn’t letting go. He has taken hold of it and it has taken hold of him. I stare into Jesus’ zealous and slightly clouded eyes. You are right, Jesus, absolutely right. As I leave the restaurant he offers me a cigarette, still leaning against the refrigerator. “I smoke menthol lights,” he says. I don’t smoke, but I accept the cigarette enthusiastically, thinking that I want what Jesus is having.
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