gallimaufry.ws

Here’s a story from my PhD.

A while ago I was writing about the plantation system and the proto-peasantry in the Caribbean. In part of my essay I quoted a passage about cultivating coffee estates in Dominica. It was written in the passive voice (so it was like, “Terraces were built on steep slopes, and the trees were planted in neat rows. The fields were weeded often.” etc.) and I suggested, as an exercise, that re-wording the passage in the active voice and in the first person would take away the distance that the passive voice imparts and help to show that this is a story of actual people in an engagement with the land (so to think of it as “We had to build terraces on steep slopes, and to plant trees in neat rows. We had to weed the fields often.” etc.) I pointed out that, because this cultivation was done by slaves on the estates, it was a forced engagement, and that the historical account, even re-phrased as I proposed, didn’t adequately convey this element of brutal coercion.

So I gave the essay to my supervisor to read and a few days later we met to discuss it. And she said that she thought that what I had done was a really good device, and she had a suggestion for getting the element of coercion across more clearly. “You could write it,” she said helpfully, “like this: ‘We made the slaves build terraces, and we made them plant trees…’ I think that might be better, what do you think?”

And I just looked at her flabbergasted and speechless. Because I just could not believe that this apparently enlightened (white, North American) woman was looking at (black, Caribbean) me and saying that to me, without even an inkling of realisation that her (white, slave-master) “we” was not at all the same as my (black, enslaved) “we”. I mean, she just didn’t get it. She was so mired in her own assumptions and her Eurocentric way of knowing and understanding the world that she really didn’t have a clue.

A friend of mine asked me if I don’t find this upsetting. I told her that I didn’t, but I guess I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the time, a fortnight later, to write about it here. On the other hand, I found it useful and enlightening, because it has made me very aware that I will always have to explain my point of view (my positionality, to use to academic jargon) in ways that other people (who are less ‘other’ than I) will not have to. But on the third hand (or maybe I’m back to the first hand again) it revives my irritation with all the writers I’ve been reading who write about “we” and “us” and “our understandings” and have the privilege of not having to clarify what exactly they mean by “we” and specify who “we” refers to, as if their we is universal and generally understood, whereas my “we” is peculiar and requires explanation.

At home we use the expression “we is we”. But this is a case where we is not we, at all, at all, at all.

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See more of the photos in this series and Kwesi Abbensetts’ work in general at spaceshipgeorge.blogspot.com and kwesiabbensetts.carbonmade.com.

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I posted this over on Green Antilles and I have to post it here too, because it is the best thing I’ve seen in months. I’m sure you will agree that Mr. Jubinot had the thing in the bag from round one; everybody else had to be competing for second place.

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Was blog-hopping today and came across a mention of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book that was immediately was added to my to-read list.

Hilary Mantel reviewed it for the Guardian:

In old-fashioned museums you can see the unconscious benefactors of mankind, trapped in glass cases: the freaks and monsters of their day, the anomalies, sometimes skeletonised and entire, sometimes cut into parts and labelled. When we look at them, fascination and repulsion uneasily mixed, we bow our heads to their contribution to knowledge, but it is hard to locate their humanity. The thread of empathy has frayed and snapped. They have become objects, more stone than flesh: petrified, post-human.

Henrietta Lacks is a medical specimen of quite another kind. No dead woman has done more for the living, and yet we can imagine her easily from her photograph, a vivacious woman who was only 31 years when she died in 1951 in a “coloured ward” in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Beloved by her family, a lively, open-hearted woman, Henrietta died in intractable pain, and at the autopsy her body’s interior was pearled by tumours. Towards the end she had been given only palliative treatment, but no one had explained this to her family, who still hoped she might be cured. She left behind a husband and five children, the youngest only a baby. But she also left behind a slice of tissue, a piece excised from the cervical cancer that was her primary tumour. From this sample her cells were cultured.

Previously, researchers had found it frustratingly difficult to keep alive fragile human cell lines, but these cells were robust and multiplied at an astonishing rate. In the years following Henrietta’s death, the cell line, by laboratory convention known as HeLa, became an unparalleled research tool. Cells were sent to laboratories through the world, bought and sold by research teams. They could be frozen, and their development paused and restarted. Because of them, thousands of experiments on live animals were not needed. Trillions of them are still alive, more than ever grew in Henrietta’s living body. They have been employed in research into the polio vaccine, and into the effects of atomic warfare; they were shot into space, used in AIDS research. But the woman who generated them, frequently misnamed, remained largely unknown, and her family benefited not at all from the unwitting donation of her money-spinning tissues.

I am thunderstruck by this story, truly. And though there has been tremendous benefit from it, I am appalled by the way this poor, black woman’s person was exploited without her knowledge or consent, and I look askance at recent moves to “honour” her contribution to modern medicine and science. I find the whole thing more than slightly disquieting.

If you’re interested, there’s more at Wikipedia about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells, and you can read an excerpt from the book at the New York Times website.

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I will be seeing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on October 19th. I am excited beyond words.

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This paper collage is by young Trinidadian artist Brianna McCarthy. See more of her gorgeous, gorgeous work over at her blog Passion. Fruit.

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I’ve been trying to write bits and pieces of drafts of things that will eventually become part of my thesis. Today I put one of those bits and pieces into the I Write Like analyzer and got this:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft was:

an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction.

Lovecraft’s guiding literary principle was what he termed “cosmicism” or “cosmic horror”, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien.

So. Yes. I don’t know. Should this be a cause for concern?

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