The be Inflamed or not to be Inflamed

How our genealogy and history shapes our susceptibility to illness

“We are all inflamed,” write Rupa Marya and Raj Patel in their co-written book, Inflamed. Throughout the text, they remain consistent in asserting that capitalism and the many toxins the contemporary person has been exposed to, such as microplastics that hinder infertility or the pesticides that shorten our lives, our bodies are tormented by a hostile world. In 2022, microplastics were detected in the breast milk of three-quarters of the women who had recently been given birth. Marya and Patel reveal, among other things, that most of us cannot escape—unless we are ultra-elite—from health catastrophe. The expensive fitness membership plan cannot erase the exposure to plastics. The wheatgrass spirula “juice” may not add extra years to your life. They also direct their critiques to the medical community:

Most doctors—most humans, really—have unwittingly inherited a colonial worldview that emphasizes individual health, disconnecting illness from its social and historical contexts and obscuring our place in the web of life that makes us who we are.

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, as anticolonial struggles were on the rise, the Martinican psychoanalyst France Fanon likened colonial residues to an infection, arguing, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” For Fanon and others like him, colonial violence exacted psychological violence and, with that, colonized people who were made perennially sick. Like a cankerous sore, it remains that income inequalities foster health inequalities. Marya and Patel build on these claims by exploring the “histories, ecologies, narratives, and dynamics of power.” Paying attention to these elements isn’t just an empty or idle declaration; the authors reach for the materials and communities they already know.

Between the two of them, Marya and Patel hold onto a wealth of info. They take the mechanics of medicine and its effects on patients, their profession, and their activism seriously. As an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Dr. Marya treats patients directly and is also part of the “Do No Harm '' collective of health workers, self-titled after Hippocrates’ aphorism. A journalist and researcher, Patel has cultivated a space in food sustainability, even being described by The New Yorker with “ready wit, the sort of um-er cleverness that purports to be mental dishevelledness but implies a suave urbanity.” As a collaborative pair, they are cushioned to know the theory of medicine and the humanity of the oppressed, integrating peer review of scientific literature alongside Indigenous manifestos.

“Colonialism, from my understanding, is a spiritual virus. It’s horrific pathology that is an outgrowth of trauma and disconnection,” states Mohawk member Rowen White. An undimmed view of US settler colonialism, Marya and Patel’s citational practice gives their book more depth, a testament to expansive reading practice. They use this category to think about medical solidarity and treatment from below. By figuring out marginalized voices this way, Marya and Patel are reconsidering the possibilities of writing altogether. 

Marya and Patel document, in full detail, how the history of medical practice was tainted by the abject control over enslaved people’s bodies. “Black women’s bodies,” Marya and Patel write, “have been used as laboratories of scientific knowledge and racial capitalism.” They have the receipts. J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,” began as an ambitious plantation physician, inventor of an inverted speculum and modified catheter. Boasting about his work, in 1854, Sims declared: “For this purpose [therapeutic, surgical experimentation] I was fortunate in having three young, healthy colored girls given to me by their owners in Alabama, I agreeing to not operate without the full consent of the patients.”

Along with the inability to exercise consent, Sims refrained from using anesthesia during his experiments, even though the remedy was available by 1846. A century later, Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman diagnosed with cancer, unknowingly had her cervical cells extracted by researchers, who then later used them for cells for science. Popularly known as HeLA cells, as of today, they are still used for biomedical research, even though her family has demanded but not received retribution and compensation. 

When I read Inflamed last year, the text inspired me to think about how to craft and edit parts of my book, A History of the World in Six Plagues. I don’t merely want to document the health inequities that exist in the world. Still, I want to be curious about our bodies, celebratory of the medical achievements we have made, and thinking about what we can do better to provide everyone with the best healthcare possible. The medical trauma that was imposed during slavery and colonialism was incriminating, but we can do better when we understand the history and center our public health policies with compassion.

Some News

Please read my debut literary essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review, “Who Shall Let This World Be Beautiful.” The essay explores my relationship to nature while hiking in southern France (and elsewhere) and my ongoing queries about land sovereignty, Black literature, and migration. I hope you enjoy it.

With a surge in gang violence, political instability, and internal displacement in Haiti, the country has been on my mind for the past year. I wrote about what it would mean to think about the country in a different light, that is, not as a country occupied by foreign military troops but as a place where people re-imagine constructing and sustaining a Green New Deal in this Caribbean country. If you’re curious about what I say, you can read my article, “Haiti Needs a Green New Deal,” in Aljazeera.

The prolific artist Faith Ringgold passed away earlier this year, which is a significant loss. I wrote “Remembering Faith Ringgold,” an obituary celebrating her early life, activism, and output for Frieze Magazine. As an author and performer, she brought beauty into the world by uplifting her community.

Two months ago, I began teaching “Writing Against the Grain,” a course at the Universität der Künste Berlin. So far, I have produced four playlists corresponding to the course sessions, which you can listen to here.

Some Recommendations

Isabella Hammad eloquently outlines how some writers are clumsy and disingenuous in their analysis of pro-Palestine speech in Acts of Language.

Julia Carpenter discusses what incarcerated people can read in prison.

Hua Hsu reviews two books on fatherhood and what people might expect from them.

Sarah Miller discusses the people who fight at dinner parties. As someone who likes to host dinner parties and stir things up, I felt familiar with some of these moments.

Donna Ferguson informs us about Rare photographs by Dora Maar that cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you all for continuing to read and engage with this newsletter. The best way to help Mobile Fragments grow is to share it with your family, friends, and others who want to keep up with my meanderings. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber (only if you’d like). Your support is appreciated, whether you are a paid subscriber or not.

As always, thank you for reading,

Edna Bonhomme