The Almanac - Issue No. 2
An excerpt from Frantz Fanon's Medicine & Colonialism; Toni Morrison's thoughts on root workers; connections between Black history & plant names; & why procrastination is about emotional regulation.
Frantz Fanon: Medicine and Colonialism
If I could publish this entire chapter here, I would. (But thankfully, it is available at the link above.) This text is crucial to understanding the power dynamics between formerly colonized and enslaved people and Western medicine.
The Gist:
It is necessary to analyze, patiently and lucidly, each one of the reactions of the colonized, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are at the heart of the drama-that of the impossibility of finding a meeting ground in any colonial situation. For some time it was maintained that the native's reluctance to entrust himself to a European doctor was due to his attachment to his traditional medical techniques or to his dependence on the sorcerers or healers of his group. Such psychological reactions do obviously exist, and they were to be observed, not too many years ago, not only among the masses of generally advanced countries, but also among doctors themselves. Leriche has reported to us the hesitancies or the refusals of certain doctors to adopt the thermometer because they were accustomed to estimating the temperature by taking the pulse. Examples of this kind could be indefinitely multiplied. It is hardly abnormal, therefore, for individuals accustomed to practicing certain customs in the treatment of a given ailment, to adopting certain procedures when confronted with the disorder that illness constitutes, to refuse to abandon these customs and procedures because others are imposed on them, in other words because the new technique takes over completely and does not tolerate the persistence of any shred of tradition.
Here again we hear the same refrain: "If I abandon what J am in the habit of doing when my wife coughs and I authorize the European doctor to give her injections; if I find myself literally insulted and told I am a savage [this happens], because I have made scratches on the forehead of my son who has been complaining of a headache for three days; if I tell this insulter he is right and I admit that I was wrong to make those scratches which custom has taught me to do-if I do all these things I am acting, from a strictly rational point of view, in a positive way. For, as a matter of fact, my son has meningitis and it really has to be treated as a meningitis ought to be treated. But the colonial constellation is such that what should be the brotherly and tender insistence of one who wants only to help me is interpreted as a manifestation of the conqueror's arrogance and desire to humiliate."
The Nutgraf:
In a non-colonial society, the attitude of a sick man in the presence of a medical practitioner is one of confidence. The patient trusts the doctor; he puts himself in his hands. He yields his body to him. He accepts the fact that pain may be awakened or exacerbated by the physician, for the patient realizes that the intensifying of suffering in the course of examination may pave the way to peace in his body.
At no time, in a non-colonial society, does the patient mistrust his doctor. On the level of technique, of knowledge, it is clear that a certain doubt can filter into the patient's mind, but this may be due to a hesitation on the part of the doctor which modifies the original confidence. This can happen anywhere. But it is obvious that certain circumstances can appreciably change the doctor-patient relationship.
Journal Article: Getting to the Root of US Healthcare Injustices through Morrison’s Root Workers
The Gist:
Beginning with M’Dear, the formidable old woman who is fetched to cure Cholly’s Aunt Jimmy in Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), I examine portraits of several Hoodoo practitioners, naturopaths, and midwives in the Nobel Laureate’s other work, most prominently Ajax’s mother in Sula (1973)—initially labelled as “an evil conjure woman” (126)—and Pilate Dead in Song of Solomon (1977), who guides Milkman’s adulthood journey and his passage into the living world by using ethnobotanical knowledge and pluralistic modalities—also known as “roots”—to enable his conception and birth. As many literary critics have asserted, Morrison crafts these characters to convey the strength and longevity of African folk traditions and the fortitude of women, to undermine patriarchal notions about gender and femininity and Western conceptions of conjure as inherently evil, and to communicate the power of the elderly. Just as the coronavirus crisis beginning in 2020 has revealed profound racial and socioeconomic gaps in the configuration of US healthcare, and the footage of George Floyd’s murder instigated yet another round of anti-racism protests against Black and brown people’s brutalization by those sworn “to serve and protect,” analysis of Morrison’s folk-healers also serves to expose many of the structural injustices that hinder African American success in areas all around the country: disparities in employment and income, education, housing, protection under the law, and, especially, medical care.
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