The Girl With No Name: The Incredible Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys
Marina Chapman, Vanessa James, and Lynne Barrett-Lee
Pegasus Books
Nonfiction, Autobiography
Themes: Girl Power, Urban Tales, Wilderness Tales
****
Description
Mid-1950's Colombia was a land of little law, where murder, kidnapping, and child abductions were commonplace. In a small mountain village, a girl eagerly
awaiting her fifth birthday sneaks out of the house to steal pea pods from the garden. Before she knows what's happening, a hand grabs her, and a cloth is
pressed over her face.
She would never see her home or her family again.
Abandoned by her abductors deep in the jungle, the girl would soon forget almost everything about her past - her parents, her language, even her own name - as
she struggles to survive. Her only teachers and companions for years are a troop of capuchin monkeys. Inevitably, she eventually returns to the human world to
be among her own kind... but lessons learned in the wilderness would mean the difference between life and death, even far from the jungle.
Review
This is one of those stories that seems almost impossible, like something out of Kipling, but which apparently actually happened; the tales were pieced together from Marina's memories by her children, with some research help from a ghostwriter, who confirmed what points could be confirmed. (Marina never does recall her birth name or family, and even her exact age is a matter of speculation.) It avoids overly anthropomorphizing the monkeys who proved so instrumental to her survival. While individuals take on distinct personalities, they still remain animals, and there's still an unbreachable barrier between species; they accept the girl's presence and associate with her, but never seem to truly consider her one of their own, and even when Marina learns their "language" and the ways of their troop she's always an outsider. Somewhere deep down she knows she's human and belongs with other humans, though her own species turns out to be the greatest danger she faces in her wild life (her return to civilization finds her sold as an essential slave to a mentally unstable brothel owner, and her prospects scarcely improve after that.) The story moves fairly fast, painting a vivid picture of the green, living jungle and bleak, filthy cities where she must survive before finding true freedom and belonging. Marina's is an interesting story, with more chapters - such as how she wound up married and living in England - still to be told.