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The poem included at the end of this post is titled “Rebirth” and is authored by Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp. I found the work in “Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature” edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti. The collection of poems centers the voices of indigenous, non-binary, two-spirit folks in an attempt to fill a gap in currently available materials of trans, queer, and indigenous literature. I came across this work while researching non-binary identities of color over the summer. Based on her biography in the “About the Contributors” section of the book: “Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp is a two-spirit, undocumented Cherokee/Lakota mother of three who strives to regift her traditions to her children.” Sarah dedicates her time to preserving endangered foods and medicine plants of native origin for local tribes and trains individuals on her preservation work (Sovereign Erotics, 221).

“Rebirth” details the journey of an indigenous individual finding themself in a process of rebirth with the help of an ambiguous partner of indigenous descent. We know that the partner is indigenous because of the protagonist’s knowledge that a “day would come when indigenous lifts indigenous closer to the sun.” It is insinuated that the partner is godly in character based on their superhuman capabilities. The partner knows multiple languages and is able to teach the protagonist “Taíno, Carib, Guanahatabey, español y poco niño ingles.” The partner is also capable of affecting parts of the protagonist’s body with parts of their own, although it seems that the partner does not have a material body. The reader gets the sense that the partner’s body may encompass the world as we know it and beyond that.

The poem showcases continuous cycles of rebirth of a physical and spiritual nature. Furthermore, the poem sustains a “dialogue of rebirth” in its literal written or spoken form and in the image it draws of indigenous rebirth through a communal sense of nature and an oral tradition.

The connection I would like to discuss is the relation between the imagery of Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp’s “Rebirth” and a course theme of calculating/contextualizing the body and mind. In thinking through current and future characteristics of living laboratories, we were put in a position of thinking through how to best represent bodies in systematic ways. “Rebirth” also calls this process into question with its juxtaposition of numbers in relation to immeasurable, abstract concepts. How we can measure the body or a people with modern medicine, science, or knowledge?  

It is interesting how the Taino sun is centered near the end of this work. The Taíno are an indigenous tribe in the Caribbean almost completely wiped out by Columbus’s colonization. They are often a subject of study albeit in indirect, vague, and colonial ways. Although I have not read much research on the Tainos or Taíno topics, I have picked up that they are often studied through their medicinal practices and in very physical ways. After enrolling in this course I have realized that we continue to make a racialized and gendered laboratory of the Taíno people that posthumously, violently medicalizes them. Can creative works be a possible avenue to redesign how we uplift minoritized voices, much like Sarah Tsigeyu sharp does in her work for indigenous voices?

Note: A second connection I would have made is the similarity in indigenous themes between Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp’s “Rebirth” and Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera.” However, my post was already too long. Similar techniques to think about are: multiple/hybrid languages; connection of indigenous lives to the land and nature; intercise of being indigenous but also colonized.

Rebirth by Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp

Source: Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti (pp.198-199)

We etch home into the palms of our hands

lift them toward the moon, that they might be

magnified by her glory

Dangle feet over boulders in the river

Close eyes tight, pretend these are our homelands

 

Remember past tanglings of spit

and weavings of skin that brought us here,

Birthed us, brought honey to our trembling lips,

food and sweetness for the fight ahead.

Today is a good day to cry.

 

Your eyes like an amber cavern in a thunderstorm

and as bright as the day is long

I shudder under you as your tongue teaches my

body to speak

Taíno, Carib, Guanahatabey, español y poco niño ingles

You are a dialect unto yourself

 

I was the furthest East I’d ever been,

more than 2900 miles from home

you, redefining the word with you small hands

 

I could push sand into your mouth to stifle my terror

lest you speak,

break me into bits and I should tumble down your

throat the end of me

But you and the Taíno sun are inside me now,

for good

 

Then, 41000 feet in the sky, heading steadily away

from you

I cherish the flush/of my lust

You grated me my own heat, bottled tight inside

my frigid, North American heart,

a product of the colonization of my people

 

We were once as wild as you/

some of us still are

some of us just need a little help from our liberated kin

thus, I name you such:

Kin, Sibling in Struggle

 

I knew the day would come when indigenous lifts

indigenous closer to the sun,

I just never could have guessed it would be like this:

you, all eyes and hands and tongue

You are acts of gods exiled long ago

from this, our fertile earth

 

You and I

a dialogue

of rebirth

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/health/breast-cancer-racial-disparities/index.html

According to a recent finding from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, younger black and white women benefit equally from timely breast cancer treatment. However, the death rates of women over 50 are still very disproportionately black. The article notes “that 10% to 20% of all diagnosed breast cancers, occur more often in black women than white women. ” The reason is that Black women will get diagnosed more in the later stages of the cancer, as opposed to white women. This relates to class because we have discussed how race plays a part into treatment. It is far to speculate based on the the content of our class that perhaps certain predominately black neighborhoods have less treatment and prevention facilities and/or precautions to offer black women.

With this being said the article does show that the incidence rates are converging. Since 1975 white women have always beat black women in breast cancer diagnosis per year, but as of recently that statistic has shown that it is changing. Now about about 122 Black women for every 100,000 are diagnosed compared to white women and there being 124 diagnosis for every 100,000. This has everything to do with the our class discussions and content because it begs the question: is this a good statistic or a bad one?

On the one hand this could suggest a progress. Perhaps more black women are getting tested and are receiving more treatment. Perhaps black neighborhoods and facilities in those neighborhoods/ communities are improving to a similar caliber as those offered in Predominately White areas. The article also suggests that the black women themselves are finally “heeding to the call for screening tests”, and perhaps self awareness is a factor in this.

However on the flip side this could be a problematic and if anything startling statistic. It could be very much the system at play. Perhaps treatment options and resource distribution hasn’t changed at all for black women, but instead the system working against black people. Maybe pollution and environmental factors have increasingly worsened nationwide for black communities and that is what is causing the increase in rates. In understanding medical apartheid and the discussions surrounding the book in class, the article becomes more nuanced.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/policy-dose/articles/2016-04-14/theres-a-huge-health-equity-gap-between-whites-and-minorities

Earlier in April, U.S. News printed an article about the racial disparities that can be found in healthcare.  This article was suitably titled “Being Black is bad for Your Health.” In the article, the authors compared two communities; one being an affluent white neighborhood and the other being a primarily poor black neighborhood. The comparison revealed that the community that was primarily affluent and white on average had a life expectancy rate around 10 years higher than that of the community that was primarily poor and black. The differences revealed between the communities did not stop at just the mortality rates, but were also exhibited through rates of obesity, asthma, and teen pregnancy. Some of the major points that were highlighted throughout the article were the differences in healthcare between people of color and their white counterparts. Specifically, the article talked about the comparison between the treatments that white people received from physicians and the treatments that people of color received from physicians. Alexander Green, an assistant professor at Harvard and director of the Disparities Solution Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, studied with other researchers the racial disparities in health and discovered an “unconscious bias” that existed in physician behavior towards their patients. Such behavior seemed to extend as far as physicians suggesting more aggressive medications for ailments such as chest pain to a white patient than they would to a patient who is black.

I came across this article as a part of reading assignment that was assigned to me and my classmates in my Freshman Seminar “Is Your Zip Code Your Destiny? Exploring the Social Determinants of Health.” What I found most interesting when reviewing this article was the parallel between the issues that exist in modern day medicine and the issues in historical living laboratories that we have discussed in our Race and Living Laboratories class. What caught my eye in particular, was the noted difference between the recommended treatments provided to black patients and the more aggressive recommended treatments provided to white patients  according to Alexander Green and his fellow researchers’ study. This reminded me of the discussion that we had in class about the historical perspective of physicians neglecting to provide blacks with necessary treatments throughout time and in particular when conducting human experimentation on black people throughout history. In an attempt to reason why physicians might not be inclined to recommend aggressive treatments to patients of color, I recalled what we had talked about in class about the acclaimed “scientifically proven” idea in history that blacks have a much higher tolerance to pain that their white counterparts. As we’ve learned in class, this idea was accepted in science as fact and in turn allowed for many scientists, including the notoriously known Dr. Marion Sims, to subject blacks to cruel scientific treatments and experiments. I found it supremely interesting that there might be a connection or perhaps even a paralleled way of thinking between this archaic notion of higher racial pain tolerance and the medical distribution of lesser aggressive treatments based on race.

Additionally, I thought about the discussion my classmates and I had in class about Ellis Island and how new immigrants would be turned away from America’s doorstep because they fell under the Class C bloc of access denial. The Class C block was designated for those who, although not sick now, were liable to needing healthcare resources in their future years from the American government. In class we discussed that the idea of rejection based on the probability that one will need support later in life stems from the American perception that there are not enough resources for us all with “us” being defined as American born citizens. Taking this view into context, I can picture how the “unconscious behavior” of the physicians in Alexander Green’s research could be under the influence of this notion when recommending the treatments.