The other day, I noticed a clock in a tourist shop called “African time.” In place of numbers, it had common African sayings about time–”just now” (which means sometime in the future), “now now” (which kind of means RIGHT now but also sort of means “wait a few more minutes”), “whenever,” “sometime,” etc. I laughed–it’s easy to laugh until you find yourself up against the wall, the frustratingly blank run-around that, yes, is typical. Read More
As an addendum to my paragraph on dangerous Jozi in the last posting, I wanted to show these photos that I took while walking back to Helen and Ross’s house this morning after dropping off my car rental.
This is a fairly typical armed response sign, one you see posted on about 80% of houses. Notice that in addition to the armed response sign (this one is a bit more weathered than they usually are), there is also an electric fence around the top of the fence, with a “danger” sign. Though the idea has flashed through my head to touch them and see what they feel like, I wouldn’t dare. Last summer, a small monkey was killed clinging to the electric fence surrounding my friend Gugu’s house while I was staying there.
This sign to the right is a more unusual sign, though you see these around, too. I would find it hilarious except they are *deadly* serious.
And then there are signs like this one. I’ve never seen this one before, and I’m not sure if this is meant to be a genuine warning sign–”we raise snakes”– or meant to be a warning to criminals–”we have snakes here, ya bastards, and they’re better than guard dogs”–or if it’s just a lie. But regardless, I’m certainly not going to try to find out…
The thing that is both wonderful and terrible about immersing yourself in another culture is how quickly you find yourself humbled by your own flawed expectations about how the world should work.
When I first arrived, I stayed with a Zimbabwean immigrant family on the outskirts of Johannesburg. They run a small local paper, employ Malwaian immigrant workers, and live lives riddled by the contradictions of Zimbabwe/South Africa border politics. Currently, I’m staying with a white South African and her American husband in Pretoria, who have introduced me to local and national politics, the internal world of the ANC, and liberal white culture in South Africa. Read More
From Midwest Book Review: “Maternity is more than putting on a little weight and having a baby show up nine months later. “Labor Pains and Birth Stories” is a collection of anecdotes covering the adventure and misadventure that is oncoming motherhood – as well as oncoming fatherhood. Maternity is a nine month span of joy and worry; joy because of the arrival of a new soul to the world, and worry that every little thing you do during this time could screw them up for life. “Labor Pains and Birth Stories” is a fine choice for future mothers, and should not be ignored by future fathers either. ”
From Ralph Magazine: Kind of an odd review, and thoroughly disagree that the best writing is at the front of the book, but here’s one quote: “We are reminded in a couple of these stories that — in a single twenty-four hour period — there are 300,000 children being born into the world. If there are two words to describe the truth of becoming a mother, one is pain; the other is waiting.”
Check out Bookslut’s provocative discussion of childbirth after reading Labor Pains and Birth Stories. A thoughtful review, not necessarily positive, and I’m certainly appreciative of the time and effort put into this one, though I disagree with the assumption that I had a political agenda and was pushing midwifery/home birth/ natural births and am opposed to cesarean sections, since well ovver half of the contributors (almost 2/3) had hospital births. But it’s true, I didn’t include a cesarean section story–nobody contributed a cesarean section story, so I had none to offer.
And here’s one from MetroActive, one of the Bay Area’s many small newspapers. (Thank you, Tania, for securing this one!) “My hope is that our child’s birth will be simple and smooth. Labor Pains and Birth Stories assures me that this is a delusional fantasy. Labor Pains and Birth Stories reminds me about pelvic exams and pitocin and epidurals and slowed heart rates and complications and death and arrrggghhh. Elisabeth Aron turns in a tear-jerking story of a stillbirth; Ann Angel writes about her teenage daughter giving a child up for adoption; and Sebastopol author Tania Pryputniewicz shows that no matter how carefully one plans for a natural, simple birth, there’s always the possibility of the dreadfully unexpected. Can’t it just be easy? Please?”
The Feminist Review has given LABOR PAINS AND BIRTH STORIES a very positive review here.
Thank you, Feminist Review, and thank you to my wonderful writers for all their hard work and for making this such a great book.
Here’s a couple of short excerpts from the review:
“With twenty-nine compelling essays of pain and strength, each glimpse these writers provide validates the awesomeness and depth of the process of pregnancy. Written from mostly women authors, Powers weaves together a tapestry of debate, conflict, joy, and uncertainty all through the common practice of story-telling our lives….Not only are the individual literary essays gifts for those seeking comfort and company in their own birthing experience; the collection as a whole can be used for critical analysis as to how the world not only accepts children, but how we treat and care for mothers as well.”
Had two fascinating conversations yesterday on the plane with the two gentlemen I was sitting next to.
The first man, an Indian who has lived in South Africa for twenty years, introduced himself by asking me if I’m French. I told him, “Non.”
“Funny,” he said, “you look French.”
His name is Varkey George and he’s the director of the Student Health and Welfare Centres Organisation. He hosts student groups that come to Cape Town to do charity work. I told him about the book I was writing, and he thought it odd that I define healing so broadly.
“Well, why not?” I asked. “People seek healing from all kinds of practitioners and I’m not sure there’s a logical correspondence between the type of illness they’re experiencing and the type of healing they’re seeking. I think people have different ideas of what healing is, so they don’t necessarily feel healed by a medical doctor even if their body is in good shape after seeing one.”
He could understand that. The question, he said, is this: “What is the wound?”
A good question to ask. What IS the wound? Even if you are physically ill, that may not be the wound you’re seeking to cure even when trying to cure your body.
I also sat next to Barnard Gardiner, who works for the Red Cross as the Manager of the HIV Global Programme, Health and Care Department. We had a long and involved conversation about AIDS, especially AIDS in South Africa, and he asked several provocative questions about how we could stop the epidemic in Africa.
First, he asked me if I knew about the theory that HIV is spread when people are engaged in simultaneous relationships, not necessarily promiscuously but one man has two relationships and both his girlfriends also have two relationships, and so on and so forth, until it creates a network where HIV is easily transmitted. Of course I was so he continued. He said that gay men were able to stop the transmission of HIV because, without coordination, they somehow figured this out and realized that they didn’t need to use condoms all the time, but they should use condoms outside of their primary relationship. So they didn’t use condoms with their primary relationship but when they slept with other people, they did.
He suggested that there are two ways to stop the epidemic—either be monogamous or use condoms all the time, something that no group has been able to do. He said that nobody realized that Africans had concurrent relationships—women as well as men—until the epidemic, so he said, “We’re asking Africans to either use condoms all the time (something nobody has been able to do) or to stop being African.”
I thought this was a disturbing way to put it. Is it African to have concurrent relationships all the time? Polygamy, yes, but to my knowledge, there is not a long history of African *women* also being involved in more than one relationship at a time. I pointed out that there was no evidence from archival materials and early European recordings of African behavior that would suggest this was a common part of African culture. And Europeans were certainly happy to exaggerate any behavior they found odd!
“It may be a common part of African culture today,” I said, “but I struggle to believe that it’s a long-standing feature of African culture, that it’s been around for centuries, because there’s no evidence of it in the record. Maybe it could have gone by unnoticed for so long but…”
It disturbed me to think that the reason the epidemic has spread in Africa is intrinsically related to something that is fundamentally African. Maybe that’s true and I just have sickly-sweet, politically correct, academic-trained-by-the-book knee-jerk reactions that are misplaced and misguided. But still…
Then I remembered a few things: thigh sex and Facing Mt. Kenya. I told him that there are African practices that indicate that women did have multiple partners when they were young, but they didn’t engage in penetrative sex. I told him how Jomo Kenyatta outlined practices that the Gikuyu engaged in, that young people were encouraged to indulge in sexual play with multiple partners as long as they didn’t go all the way. And the Zulu trained women how to have “thigh sex,” that is, how to get a man to come by rubbing his penis together with their thighs.
He got kind of excited when I mentioned that and said that this might be the answer—if Africans could re-learn some of these traditional behaviors, then maybe it could stop the epidemic.
Like any good academically-trained historian, I have knee-jerk reactions to the concept of “tradition” as well. There are always people that believe if we go back to some idyllic past, to practices that they believe have been corrupted or have disappeared from society, that we will eliminate or reduce some problem that has cropped up in modern life. But many times, our idea of what is “traditional” is based more in nostalgia and romance than in reality. And furthermore, I’m not sure it’s ever possible to resurrect old practices that way without enormous controversy.
Both interesting conversations on my way to South Africa to explore this topic!
