"The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems" Response
By Lila Kalick
Five years ago this month, at the age of 22, I lay, back pressed against the crinkling paper of a doctor's examination table, as my internist felt my left breast. "Hmm," she murmured with curiosity. "You have a small lump."
"What?" I asked, my blood pressure shooting from the normal level measured just moments before to high alert, red alarm status.
Here she said, guiding my hand to the spot. "You can feel it." Then she explained calmly, too calmly, that I should get an ultrasound. She said nothing more, handing me a script to bring to the receptionist.
I called my mother. "They found a lump in my breast," I said, the words sticking in my mouth like leftover tufts of cotton absorbing bleeding during a dental procedure. My mother began pre-humously eulogizing me over the phone. "Everything is going to be fine. You're wonderful, you're going to meet a nice man, have a nice family. You're going to live a long, incredible life." I called the ultrasound office. They couldn't take me until later in the following week. Oh no. My birthday was the following Monday. I couldn't sit with this uncertainty while turning 23. I couldn't wait to know my fate. I had to explore the possibilities. I pulled out my phone doing exactly what one shouldn't do in these moments: I Googled the sh*t out of breast cancer.
By the time I'd walked back into the newsroom where I worked, I felt like a subject matter expert in the worst-case-scenario. A big pink ribbon began to wrap around my vision. I walked into the women's bathroom and closed myself in in a stall. When it seemed as though everyone else in the bathroom had left, I had a panic attack. When I emerged from the stall, another editor, about 10 years older, was waiting for me. I recognized her from the Healthy Living section. I'd really thought I was alone.
"Hey, what's going on?" she asked. I crumpled. "There's... Aayyy... Lump... Breast," I sniffled. I explained the lack of ultrasound appointment available that day. "Oh, there's a place right in Union Square" she said. "They will definitely get you in there today. They're all Eastern European ladies, very no nonsense. Here, I'll get you the number." She walked me across the room to her desk. I looked like a mess and there was absolutely nowhere to hide in the open-floor-plan newsroom. Soon I was crossing Union Square, passing under a giant digital clock that ticked above. It made me wonder how much time I had left.
The waiting room at the radiologist was horrifying. I changed into a baby blue robe as directed and sat near another woman openly icing her breasts. By the time I got in to see the tech, I was sweating and shaking. My internist had also ordered an ultrasound of my thyroid and kidneys, and I winced as I felt the hard plastic of the wand dig up and under into my back. A screen on in the background had what looked like a small, but defined green blob on it. I mistook this for a tumor, my tumor. I asked the tech if everything was OK, if that was my breast on the screen. "Oh, that's old, not yours," she said. Then she told me the doctor would be in shortly to discuss the results.
The doctor arrived, a sturdy, breasty woman in her mid 50s, with thickly accented English. The tech passed her my chart. She looked up from the chart at my face and smiled. "She's a baby!" she said motioning toward me. "How old are you?" I told her my age as I began to sob again. "Oh no," she said. She scooped me into a hug. I rested there for a moment, snuggled. She explained that the lump was nothing but a dense knot of fibrous tissue, very normal; especially normal for someone consuming as much caffeine as I clearly was. She sent me along, saying to come in if anything changed, and to get another ultrasound six months later. I did and though the lump remained it was unchanged.
These days, I'm not as freaked out as before about my lump, but I still wince a little when I do a breast exam. I try to forget this knot's presence, but it's hard to live with a foreign-seeming mass inside you. It's hard not to worst-case-scenario-ify it. It's hard not to see the world through that anxious lens of "what if?"
In order to think about it clearly I have to dissociate a bit, to think of it not as my body, but as an abstract mass of cells.
After listening to Faith Adiele's "The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems" I've been thinking a lot about how the author does something similar with the way she characterizes her fibroids. I'm thinking of how she talks about them as "tumors," as "masses," as "the pain," as her "unborn children," and as the "tumor child." I appreciated the author's use of these images because they give the listener a sense of abstraction/separation needed to understand both the disease and the experience of the disease. I also suspect that it created a sense of distance for the writer, herself. As I listened, I was amazed by the way the author was able to talk about her experience so calmly. When she comes to class I intend to ask her about this process of writing from a separated place, and how she conceived of it while writing this "Guide."
After listening, I'm also thinking about the way Adiele describes her time spent in hospitals interacting with doctors, nurses and techs. For me, these parts of her story help to situate us in her world. They also act as a foil for her experience, creating a more textured narrative and richer overall picture for the listener. Along these same lines, the way she frames her experiences reflecting what the white doctors and nurses say back to her med student friends of color was a brilliant technique for illustrating the biases inherent in her experience dealing with this health crisis as a black woman in Iowa. A particularly powerful example of this is when a doctor insists Adiele get a hysterectomy without viewing her chart. When she tells her friends, they reveal all sorts of assumptions this woman has made to arrive at that conclusion. The lens of her friends from graduate school gives important insights to the audience in this instance.
The story itself had so many layers to consider, and Adiele guides us a chance as readers/listeners to consider her story from many different lenses. This book for me was a really effective example of writing intersectionality, with Adiele giving equal balance to concerns around race, gender, culture, nationality and spirituality.
That being said, there was one part of the guide I questioned. I wondered about the author's decision to mimic people's accents in the recording of this story. This seemed especially true of the "Telugu accent" she used in relaying the story about her friend's father, the gynecologist. Following a conversation we had last week with Lilian Howan, I wondered if this would be considered appropriative in any way by the author, or if she had that concern while recording it that way. This is probably a good question for when she visits, but I'm very interested to know what the class thinks here on the blog as well.
I am very happy to have had the chance to listen to this work and observe the choices Adiele made in this piece, and I hope to be able to experiment in the future (as I tried to do above) with writing about health and health related matters with some separation. If I can achieve half as much poise as Adiele in my own writing about health scares and crises, I'd be pretty darn happy!
Five years ago this month, at the age of 22, I lay, back pressed against the crinkling paper of a doctor's examination table, as my internist felt my left breast. "Hmm," she murmured with curiosity. "You have a small lump."
"What?" I asked, my blood pressure shooting from the normal level measured just moments before to high alert, red alarm status.
Here she said, guiding my hand to the spot. "You can feel it." Then she explained calmly, too calmly, that I should get an ultrasound. She said nothing more, handing me a script to bring to the receptionist.
I called my mother. "They found a lump in my breast," I said, the words sticking in my mouth like leftover tufts of cotton absorbing bleeding during a dental procedure. My mother began pre-humously eulogizing me over the phone. "Everything is going to be fine. You're wonderful, you're going to meet a nice man, have a nice family. You're going to live a long, incredible life." I called the ultrasound office. They couldn't take me until later in the following week. Oh no. My birthday was the following Monday. I couldn't sit with this uncertainty while turning 23. I couldn't wait to know my fate. I had to explore the possibilities. I pulled out my phone doing exactly what one shouldn't do in these moments: I Googled the sh*t out of breast cancer.
By the time I'd walked back into the newsroom where I worked, I felt like a subject matter expert in the worst-case-scenario. A big pink ribbon began to wrap around my vision. I walked into the women's bathroom and closed myself in in a stall. When it seemed as though everyone else in the bathroom had left, I had a panic attack. When I emerged from the stall, another editor, about 10 years older, was waiting for me. I recognized her from the Healthy Living section. I'd really thought I was alone.
"Hey, what's going on?" she asked. I crumpled. "There's... Aayyy... Lump... Breast," I sniffled. I explained the lack of ultrasound appointment available that day. "Oh, there's a place right in Union Square" she said. "They will definitely get you in there today. They're all Eastern European ladies, very no nonsense. Here, I'll get you the number." She walked me across the room to her desk. I looked like a mess and there was absolutely nowhere to hide in the open-floor-plan newsroom. Soon I was crossing Union Square, passing under a giant digital clock that ticked above. It made me wonder how much time I had left.
The waiting room at the radiologist was horrifying. I changed into a baby blue robe as directed and sat near another woman openly icing her breasts. By the time I got in to see the tech, I was sweating and shaking. My internist had also ordered an ultrasound of my thyroid and kidneys, and I winced as I felt the hard plastic of the wand dig up and under into my back. A screen on in the background had what looked like a small, but defined green blob on it. I mistook this for a tumor, my tumor. I asked the tech if everything was OK, if that was my breast on the screen. "Oh, that's old, not yours," she said. Then she told me the doctor would be in shortly to discuss the results.
The doctor arrived, a sturdy, breasty woman in her mid 50s, with thickly accented English. The tech passed her my chart. She looked up from the chart at my face and smiled. "She's a baby!" she said motioning toward me. "How old are you?" I told her my age as I began to sob again. "Oh no," she said. She scooped me into a hug. I rested there for a moment, snuggled. She explained that the lump was nothing but a dense knot of fibrous tissue, very normal; especially normal for someone consuming as much caffeine as I clearly was. She sent me along, saying to come in if anything changed, and to get another ultrasound six months later. I did and though the lump remained it was unchanged.
These days, I'm not as freaked out as before about my lump, but I still wince a little when I do a breast exam. I try to forget this knot's presence, but it's hard to live with a foreign-seeming mass inside you. It's hard not to worst-case-scenario-ify it. It's hard not to see the world through that anxious lens of "what if?"
In order to think about it clearly I have to dissociate a bit, to think of it not as my body, but as an abstract mass of cells.
After listening to Faith Adiele's "The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems" I've been thinking a lot about how the author does something similar with the way she characterizes her fibroids. I'm thinking of how she talks about them as "tumors," as "masses," as "the pain," as her "unborn children," and as the "tumor child." I appreciated the author's use of these images because they give the listener a sense of abstraction/separation needed to understand both the disease and the experience of the disease. I also suspect that it created a sense of distance for the writer, herself. As I listened, I was amazed by the way the author was able to talk about her experience so calmly. When she comes to class I intend to ask her about this process of writing from a separated place, and how she conceived of it while writing this "Guide."
After listening, I'm also thinking about the way Adiele describes her time spent in hospitals interacting with doctors, nurses and techs. For me, these parts of her story help to situate us in her world. They also act as a foil for her experience, creating a more textured narrative and richer overall picture for the listener. Along these same lines, the way she frames her experiences reflecting what the white doctors and nurses say back to her med student friends of color was a brilliant technique for illustrating the biases inherent in her experience dealing with this health crisis as a black woman in Iowa. A particularly powerful example of this is when a doctor insists Adiele get a hysterectomy without viewing her chart. When she tells her friends, they reveal all sorts of assumptions this woman has made to arrive at that conclusion. The lens of her friends from graduate school gives important insights to the audience in this instance.
The story itself had so many layers to consider, and Adiele guides us a chance as readers/listeners to consider her story from many different lenses. This book for me was a really effective example of writing intersectionality, with Adiele giving equal balance to concerns around race, gender, culture, nationality and spirituality.
That being said, there was one part of the guide I questioned. I wondered about the author's decision to mimic people's accents in the recording of this story. This seemed especially true of the "Telugu accent" she used in relaying the story about her friend's father, the gynecologist. Following a conversation we had last week with Lilian Howan, I wondered if this would be considered appropriative in any way by the author, or if she had that concern while recording it that way. This is probably a good question for when she visits, but I'm very interested to know what the class thinks here on the blog as well.
I am very happy to have had the chance to listen to this work and observe the choices Adiele made in this piece, and I hope to be able to experiment in the future (as I tried to do above) with writing about health and health related matters with some separation. If I can achieve half as much poise as Adiele in my own writing about health scares and crises, I'd be pretty darn happy!
I also picked up on Faith's choice to describe her four fibroids as being akin to pregnancy, to being four months pregnant. I thought there was an added level to that choice--that Faith could be fairly certain her audience would be Westerners, primarily Western women, and that we are likely to be aware therefore of the ongoing debate around abortion. Thus the image of a woman persistently pregnant with children she does not want, who are causing her tremendous pain, is a salient one.
ReplyDeleteI think your question about accents was a good one. I noticed that too. I suspect that Faith's relationship though with appropriation and particularly with what it has come to signify, i.e. "apeing" People of Color, is very different than yours or mine. Much of what she wrote about here was related to finding her own racial identity and rediscovering a connection to Igbo culture, so I ultimately concluded that she was not intending harm. Her tone throughout that segment was quite teasing and gentle, and I think her adoption of the man's accent clearly came out of a very loving and trusting relationship. To me, appropriation as a term requires that the individual doing it be a member of a dominant/more powerful group, the membership in which permits them access to the other individual or group and allows them to take what they want in a non-reciprocal relationship. That didn't seem to be the case here, so I just decided it was not dissimilar to an actress feigning a Scottish accent for a movie.
Your experience with the medical establishment sounds quite hard. I think it's so interesting at the same time how, as white women, our pain is in a sense overvalued, that our colleagues and friends encourage us to get these things "checked out" asap and our doctors squeal and fuss. I think Faith's experience is such a contrast, because she entered the clinic in screaming agony and the doctors still would not take her seriously. White women are encouraged I think to experience ourselves as fragile, desperately in need of a medical establishment to save our lives; meanwhile WOC, particularly Black women, can rarely get adequate medical treatment no matter how much pain they're in, or indeed how hurt they really are.
There's a lot to dissect here. I can't wait to meet Faith in person!
-Ari
this is great, Lila, and i'm glad you have such interesting questions. Thank you for contributing your own experience as well. As Ari says, lots to dissect here!
ReplyDeletee
Thank you for being so brave & vulnerable with sharing about your experiences, Lila <3 There is so much to mine there... Have you written about this at all? I know you're not a fan of memoir, but still.... ;)
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated your point about the foreignness of the fibroids. I had been thinking about the story as centered around the crossroads of her body, but you're totally right that it is also the non-body (the fibroids) that casts a new light on the meaning of her body. And how poignant that Adiele interprets these foreign entities as children, albeit in a different way than the medical profession measures and assesses them. Seeing them as children both normalizes & challenges so many of the assumptions that these foreign entities must be removed. They are benign, and yet they cause her pain -- what to do with this? They are part of her, and they also aren't. They create suffering, but it is also a suffering most medical professionals do not seem to understand. It seems like it's these (false) binaries that generates so much of the heat & power of this book.