![]() At the same time, Harambe also represents stubborn remembrance in a world of rolling atrocity news – don’t forget it’s been four months since he died, roughly 10,000 years in meme-time – and part of the joke is trying to make anything and everything a tribute to him, countering the compulsive forgetting that the media usually practises. ![]() Some memes have included Harambe in this pantheon of greats, a joke that acts as a sort of release valve from the pressure of constant mourning. Originally, the blinkered mourning of Harambe was a parody of the hysteria expressed by some social media users at the news of its shooting, yet in his afterlife, Harambe’s death and the remembrance of it have been woven into multiple other narratives.Ģ016 has been a year characterised by great lossĢ016, for example, has seen an unprecedented number of major cultural figures pass away, leading to the media to indulge in a perpetual state of bereavement. Meme-makers have seized on this gorilla’s death (initially on Black Instagram, as it happens), honouring the ape in social media posts with a cod-fanaticism that belies references to a number of things. Returning to the subject of death (this is 2016: worst year since records began, after all), you may remember hearing the story of Harambe, the 17-year-old gorilla who was killed in May after a child climbed into his enclosure in Cincinnati Zoo. ![]() And when that is viewed as part of a narrative that has seen white people endlessly appropriate black culture, it becomes about more than just who projected adult emotion on to a kids’ cartoon first. Photograph: Instagram/alexmemepageīut when a meme like this becomes popular, the concept of Black Twitter is often erased from the conversation: in the case of Arthur, many websites wrote about the phenomenon without referencing who came up with it. Arthur’s first has become a Harambe meme. ![]()
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