Crossroads of the Body

(I studied cultural anthropology, with a focus on medical anthropology & gender, so I really loved this book!)

Meanings are inscribed onto bodies. Culturally, societally, institutionally, interpersonally, subjectively. Bodies are classed and gendered and raced and hierarchized and propagandized and violated.

But bodies are not just acted upon; they are also some of our most powerful sites of meaning-making. Throughout human history, people have inscribed meaning onto their bodies through an infinite number of ways, such as tattoo, scarification, cutting, beauty rituals, and dress. People have also made meaning from their bodies via what they ingest and consume, as well as how they inhabit their bodies.  

Adiele’s book captures the ways in which the body – a fundamentally subjective and personal site – is also treated as a profoundly social site of inquiry and meaning. Her book conveys how body is meaning is imposed on the body, as well as made by the body, and how brutal and complex this collision can be. In other words, she may view and value her body in particular way, but as a black half-Nigerian woman in Iowa, there is no avoiding that the people around her view and treat her body differently.

When Adiele seeks out treatment for her fibroids, she must contend with huge and powerful institutions, as her personal pain becomes subjected to outside scrutiny, interpretation, and judgment. She first turns to Western medicine, which is the hegemonic approach to medicine in US culture, but is by no means neutral. Through viewed as an objective institution, Western medicine is deeply entrenched in a particular historical, political, and cultural lens. Adiele confronts and makes real these prejudices when she relates, for example, how doctors suggested a hysterectomy as if it were a logical and obvious next step rather than one of many options, and often without even inquiring whether she wants to bear children. Adiele speculates that these omissions (of alternative options and crucial questions) were likely due to the doctors’ implicit and racist assumption that, as a black woman, she likely already had (too many) children and/or shouldn’t be reproducing at all. It’s important to recognize that such sentiments were not stated overtly, and yet they profoundly and insidiously impacted the “care” Adiele received.  

Of course, her Nigerian culture also imposes meanings onto her body and her illness. Even though she did not grow up in Nigeria, Adiele relates the cultural anxieties and fears she has inherited, wondering whether she has been cursed by the spirits for a litany of reasons.  Her fear and subsequent turning to Nigerian lore makes evident the power that culture has over us especially during moments of illness; For example, in the US, we tend to believe that there is only one way of understanding illness – i.e. “it’s the flu,” or “I have PMS,” – but diseases and bodily experiences are not understood in the same way across cultures. (For example, the notion of PMS and its particular clustering of symptoms doesn’t really exist in many other cultures.) So, while Adiele is pursuing Western medicine – which is much more familiar to her as an American – she cannot avoid grappling with Nigerian cultural anxieties about punishments & curses; even if she doesn’t usually believe in them, this moment of illness suddenly brings them to mind. In some ways, it’s not so different from how people turn to religion during times of crisis – to explain why they’re feeling the way they do and to hopefully provide the antidote.

By framing the book about her body, and in particular her fibroids, Adiele is able to tell a much bigger story about the complexities of being a Nigerian-Nordic woman living in America. This to me is the power of writing from the body -- how it allows us to link our subjectivity to the universal. Bodies are personal, subjective, and necessarily individual, and yet all humans have a body. Centered at the crossroads of her body, Adiele contends with the complexities of living as a black woman in a culture that detests and degrades her black body.