This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Maddi Chan (she/her), our guest blogger this week, is a queer, mixed-race femme of and in the Caribbean diaspora. She is a PhD candidate in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research explores how 19^th-century Caribbean women’s articulation of embodied self-knowledge and queer intimacies disrupt the institutionalization and masculinization of Western medicine. Her project seeks to collaboratively reimagine reading the body in and of the text/archive through an epistemological reorientation that accounts for the contributions Caribbean women have already made in shaping the world(s) we inhabit and in producing alternative methods to know, feel, and move ourselves in them.

On Sunday Morning Rituals
Before I stopped going, I attended church with my great grandma and, until I could drive us there myself, we relied on various relatives to take us. Every Sunday, grandma woke early to prepare a large pot of curry beef. As the pot approached a steady simmer, she shuffled around the house to get ready and I waited in the kitchen by the door, enveloped by the aroma of roughly chopped garlic and Lalah’s curry powder, the lingering scent of hair spray and floral perfume that followed my grandmother’s movements. Mindfully attuned to the clock’s stubborn persistence, and the familiar drone of running engines and impatient relatives, I would begin to calculate, and recalculate, the time we had left.

…if we have a 5-minute drive, plus a 2-minute walk from our parking spot, and of course, gotta add the additional five minutes grandma will need to make small talk, then:
we’re running out of time.

“Grandma, we should probably get going.” Thumbing through an expansive collection of faux-fur coats to pair with her perfectly curated, monochromatic ensemble, grandma would offer a gentle and familiar response, “Yes. We go, just now”. This exchange would happen at least four more times before we finally made it out the door.

When I tell this story to anyone in and of the Caribbean diaspora, the response often, if not always, conveys immediate recognition. Laughter converges with memory; a shared response to that familiar and unspoken sense that what we have come to know of the world out there rarely matches what we have learned in the places and spaces we have called home. For, of course, when we go, our going has never involved a full departure from, or complete entry into, any place. And just now has never been limited to this very instance.

My grandmother’s gentle and consistent response—part of the exchange I have affectionately named our Sunday morning ritual—continues to frame my position as listener, student, and collaborator in my scholarly work. In telling and re-telling this story, I have come to recognize my grandmother as a formative teacher in/of Caribbean feminism(s), moving me to embrace Caribbean women’s embodied self-knowledge as ongoing and unfinished movements, rupturing the temporal and spatial logics which structure and sustain colonial world(s) and imaginaries.

On (Un)Desired Outcomes

Situating myself as a scholar in nineteenth-century transatlantic studies and Caribbean feminisms, my work investigates how the medical institution, as an ideological and structural product of colonial, imperial, and heteropatriarchal systems, conditions and constrains bodily and embodied movements. The rapid influx of institutionalization, evidenced across nineteenth-century texts, not only distinguishes the mobilization of characters and individuals, but also establishes the multiform movements of the institution itself—particularly the medical and scientific. The nineteenth-century medical institution, as a colonial response to the Slave Trade Act and the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, was established to preserve colonial futures by discursively legitimizing the racial hierarchy and the patriarchization of human reproduction. Under colonial imaginaries, the reproductive capacity of all women, managed by both medical and legal institutions, discursively and biologically moved colonial civilization. At the same time, a wealth of scientific and medical discourse served to make bodies legible through the observational and physical exploration of racialized and gendered bodies, sanctioned by the medical institution and scrupulously documented in texts made available to both the medical community and public (see, among others, Ivy, 2016). The social authorization of the medical institution, coupled with the naturalized practice of white men legitimizing women’s bodies and experiences, has resulted in the ongoing delegitimization of racialized women’s embodiment as a site of knowledge.

When I started my PhD in 2019, I approached the project as an attempt to interrogate the dominating force of white male voices across nineteenth-century transatlantic medical space and discourse. Yet soon after I began, I found myself unsettled by my efforts to replicate these voices. Conditioned by academia’s call to historicize accurately and fully, my early work was shaped in the excess of medical publications made available for my academic (read: objective and neutral) eye. Observing the underacknowledged relationship between nineteenth-century sentimentality and the publications of renowned medical men, my first publication worked to interrogate J. Marion Sims’ sentimental self-representation which, at once, serves to secure his authority and innocence as a benevolent physician while obscuring the physical, intellectual and representational labour of the enslaved women his work depended upon (Chan, 2022). Yet while my work attempted to account for the colonial archive’s “libidinal investment in violence,” I was not able to see, and thus did not take accountability for, the ways in which my work had aligned with this very investment (Hartman, 2008, p. 5). In prioritizing the publications of nineteenth-century medical men, work that so often validates colonial and patriarchal perspectives through the physical and textual fragmentation of marginalized women’s bodies, I encountered what Marisa Fuentes (2016) calls “our unavoidable complicity in replicating in order to historicize” (p. 7). I had privileged the perspectives of medical men above racialized women in my research. In an instant, “our complicity” became mine and I had to reconcile how, despite any intentions to interrogate or criticize, my project was complicit in the erasure and silencing of certain voices and bodies.

My work has since shifted from critical interrogation of nineteenth-century medical men to collaborative engagement with Caribbean women; from the only story made legible in the colonial archive towards the ongoing potentialities of Caribbean women’s embodied self-knowledge to disrupt the masculinization and institutionalization of colonial world(s). Yet the expertise demanded from the Western academy does not easily enable the epistemological reorientation that is necessary to account for women’s embodied self-knowledge. The lack of scholarly attention afforded to nineteenth-century Caribbean women’s knowledge production corresponds to hegemonic modes of historicization that suppress the presence, participation, and memory of these women in developing the physical, social, and symbolic worlds of the nineteenth-century. It has taken time and ongoing reflection to recognize how my own scholarly method produced an unwitting reluctance to account for the connections between my personal life and academic work. And, only belatedly, that this avoidance, informed by the epistemological frameworks privileged by the academy that promote detached objectivity, authority, and expertise as legitimate science over subjectivity, feeling, and embodied knowledge, had compromised the very woman whose presence had been the driving force before and through my academic career.

In the fall of 2020, months into the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly before her 95^th birthday, Grandma received her diagnosis. Remaining firm in her decision to wait until the “Good Lord was ready” for her, Grandma made it clear that while she might have lived in Canada since the late 1960s, her understanding of care was deeply informed by her experiences and memories of home.

“In Guyana, we took care of we parents.”

“In Guyana, we die in we home.”

Despite solid attempts, the doctors eventually conceded to her stubborn resolve, sending her home with prescriptions for pain medication and the promise of at-home care. As grandma resumed her patient waiting, scheduled nurse visits were supplemented by the care of her children and their respective families. And while her daughter picked up every prescription, her pain medication could often be found unopened, placed on her dresser alongside her various jewelry boxes and a seemingly random display of family photographs: a welcome addition to the sea of lotions and ointments she picked up along the way from our local Caribbean grocery store.

In 2020, I encountered—not as a scholar but as her granddaughter—the layered complexities of providing and receiving care, and the unresolved conflict between women’s embodied self-knowledge and the permanency of colonial, imperial, and patriarchal logics within Western medicine. In hindsight, it is unsurprising that my unsettling coincided with my grandmother’s diagnosis. Amid personal and anticipatory grief, I found myself in sudden allegiance with the very institution I had positioned myself in critical opposition to—silently enraged by my grandma’s decision, I was desperate to persuade her…to listen…to accept treatment…to stop waiting…to do something…to not go…to just stay.  

Following its establishment in the nineteenth century, the Western medical institution has been driven by pursuits to optimize the human body, an endeavor markedly incompatible with embodiment or bodily subjectivities. As a result, a power imbalance endures to privilege the caregiver above the patient and, through what Alison Kafer (2013) calls “curative imaginaries,” to distinguish how to (in)correctly live and die. Within curative imaginaries, futurity is imagined through curative time, wherein compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness intersects with colonial and capitalist logics of progress to frame an “understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention” (Kafer, 2013, p. 27; emphasis in original). Under such imaginaries, “the only appropriate disabled mind/body is one cured or moving toward cure” (p, 28). The grief I experienced undoubtedly signals the love and relation I shared with and for my grandma. At the same time, my anger and desire to change her mind (and thus her body) reveals how I had been conditioned, through curative imaginaries, to neglect both the legitimacy and potentialities of her desire and decision to wait.

Under curative imaginaries, which depend upon binary logics to determine the appropriate responses to illness and death, my desire for grandma to move forward with treatment was incommensurable with her desire to wait. Since diasporic subjectivities are formed through “collective histories of displacement and violent loss [that] cannot be ‘cured’ by merging into a new national community,” James Clifford (1994) suggests instead that “positive articulations of diaspora identity” transcend the limits of dominant spatial and temporal logics (p. 307). To be in relation with my grandma once again required a reorientation that required my movement from the curative and a return to Caribbean feminist temporalities, a return to my diasporic inheritance. To go, just now, together.

On Making Unfinished and Ongoing History

Dear Grandma,

It’s been almost two years. I think of you every day.  

I miss your voice. During one of our last visits, I recorded a few minutes of us talking. You were remembering something from the past, or maybe something someone had told you over the phone that week. You were talking about something I can’t even remember but at the time needed to record because I realized, in that moment, that one day, I wouldn’t be able to call or visit—one day, I wouldn’t hear your voice. I haven’t been able to press play yet. My thumb hovers over your name in my contact list instead.

I miss your house. During one of our last visits, you reminded me that I could take anything. To your (continued) surprise, I asked for photographs. I asked for stories. I took mental notes. I should have written them down. Since you left, your children have taken over. They tell me stories; some that I haven’t heard before. I record them all now.  

For as long as I remember you have been in a state of perpetual waiting. Grandpa passed when I was little, and over the years, as you became one of the last remaining, your stories shifted from mostly memories to mostly awkwardly received recitations of the newspaper’s latest obituaries. I often wondered what it must be like to lose the person you had made a new home, in a new place, with. What it must be like to wait for so long. I’m sorry I forgot that when you got sick. I’m sorry that I was angry with you for returning home to wait, for wanting to go home. I’m sorry I couldn’t understand at the time.

I’m starting to get it now, Grandma. Yes, we go, just now. But never fully. Yes, you were going, but you will never be gone. Yes, we are ongoing; our history now; forever, unfinished.

Until our next Sunday, grandma. With all my love, 

Your “first great-gran”.

P.S. I taught myself to make roti in December. It didn’t taste like yours but maybe one day it will. I left a piece wrapped in paper towel to soak up the oil. The smell reminded me of your kitchen—of curry beef, chow mein, chicken legs, and crystal glasses filled with crushed ice and ginger ale, of custard block and stolen candies, of overlapping voices and embracing bodies, of grandmothers and granddaughters making and (ex)changing their own time.

References

Chan, M. (2022). The Sentimental Physicaian: J. Marion Sims’s Story of My Life. Canadian  Review of American Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3138/cras-2022-009

Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3). 302-338.
Fuentes, M. (2016). Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Souls, 12(2). 1-14.

Ivy, N. (2016). Bodies of Work: A Meditation on Medical Imaginaries and Enslaved Women. Souls, 18(1). 11-31.

Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip.  Indiana University Press.