Patient.
"In 2006 I Had an Ordeal with Medicine" from Bettina Judd on Vimeo.
"Bettina Judd’s phenomenal debut poetry collection, Patient., is about
recovery in many senses: recovery of the subjectivity of several
historical figures, through the recovery, reconstitution, and telling of
their stories—among them Anarcha Westcott, Betsey Harris, Lucy
Zimmerman, Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, who were
infamously 'patients' or subjects of inspection and 'plunder' by, among
others, J. Marion Sims, the controversial gynecologist, and P.T. Barnum,
showman and circus founder. Sims (and the speculum) and Barnum are the
featured antagonists in many of these flawlessly empathetic poems, but
an unnamed speaker who adds a contemporary voice to the lyric chorus
implicates those in charge of her care during a present-day hospital
stay at Johns Hopkins—suggesting the linkage of modern medical treatment
to the traumas vulnerable Black women, enslaved and not, suffered at
the hands of unethical scientists and physicians in earlier eras.
In
the collection’s opening poem, the speaker reckons, '…verdicts come in a
bloodline” and she determines “to recover' from 'an ordeal with
medicine' by “learn[ing] why ghosts come to me.' She ends her testimony
by asking, 'Why am I patient?' (Read that line in however many nuanced
ways you want.) In this profoundly layered witnessing, the subject
might be “in the dark ghetto of my body,' or 'an idea of metaphors that
live where bodies cannot.' Yet even as Judd vividly evokes the precise
brutalities visited upon the Black female body and psyche—letting us see
and hear women who 'quieted/ broke into many pieces'—these poems also
speak of “shedding something, ' 'another kind of sloughing.' Ultimately,
Patient. enacts a healing and move toward wholeness, recovery of, as
one speaker puts it, 'spirit [that] flees the body and/ its treacherous/
tearing.'”
—Sharan Strange, author of Ash, and creative writing faculty at Spelman College
think
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
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