Postcolonial Disorders

13. Consuming Grief: Infant Death in the Postcolonial Time of Intervention

CONSUMING GRIEF Infant Death in the PostcolonialTime of Intervention Sarah Pinto 13 NAMING DEATH In considering languages of grief in relation to languages of certainty, there is a tension in the ways death can be thought of in connection to modern knowledge . On the one hand, we can consider death as that which underlies the possibility of knowledge, as that end point to the fostering or disallowing of life that stands for the modern configuration of power/knowledge (as Foucault [] had it). And on the other hand, we can imagine death as that which cannot be spoken in languages of modernity (as de Certeau [] suggested). Put differently, this is the distinction between death as the ultimate condition of biopower, the “absconding presence in the institution” (Chatterjee, Chattoo , and Das : ), and death as the final affront to the certitudes of knowledge -power, that which speaks the limits of human effort (de Certeau ). Yet, when death is spoken in a postcolonial site of poverty and intervention, when it is made to speak about the overwhelming quality of everyday life, death may dwell in both realms. This is especially true of infant death, which we might think of as posing a particular challenge to notions of normality, however imagined. In rural areas of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, part of the India representing the shadows of the “India shining” of call centers, technology, outsourcing, and shopping malls, infant death is at once a familiar part of life for many men and women and a key part of the way state and private 359 institutions represent their own moral stances. In a region with some of the highest infant mortality rates in Asia, modes of subjectivity are on offer in relation to childbearing. This is so within health intervention schemes and amid the languages that circulate within and without them.This chapter asks how, in transnational structures of health intervention in the postcolonial world of the “developing country,” ways of accounting for and recounting infant death give shape to as much as they describe conditions of suffering. For people who are defined through cross-cutting abstractions as those for which and because of which intervention exists—in this case rural poor women in north India—how does grief resonate with the political? Likewise, in the cosmopolitan spaces and socialities crafted by structures of health intervention , how does language about suffering bear the split-off, dissociated feel of melancholia? Infant death plays a central role in women’s everyday talk in rural north India, in the chitchat in which people establish the ground of intersubjectivity . In a setting in which women seldom exchange stories about pregnancy and birth, stories about infant and child death are common, shared within and between households, with greater and lesser detail, by way of introduction and after some intimacy is attained.Talk among women about past losses flows within and against a legacy of interventions that bears stamps of both colonialism and postcolonial politics. The stories of loss shared among the men and women with whom I lived in – are part of an ongoing conversation about power and human action. Such talk shares with the universalizing languages of health momentary evasions of specificity that amount to a series of deferrals.Two interwoven ways of speaking of death, that refracting through structures of intervention and that reflecting on personal loss, converge in the way both involve the nonintegration of certain moments and memories into the flow of life and speech.These two forms of local discourse each, at the same time, speak to and about suffering. Both are modes of telling and creating the conditions of life and longing in which “the immediacy of the really real is promised by what appears in contrast to be the mere abstractions of structure, subjectivity, text, plan, or idea” (Mitchell : xiii). Addressing the commonness of infant death in conditions of poverty and under the international gaze of intervention, they create and critique the “world-as-picture” that is modernity (Mitchell : xiv), opening up spaces in which repressed meanings return as symptoms of social disarray. But recollections of loss can also diverge from prescriptive and diagnostic enunciations , even where they incorporate them. They do so both through what, specifically, is deferred and also through what, by extension, is allowed to reemerge as sign of a larger disorder. Madness, Alterity, and Psychiatry 360 CONDITIONS In , I was...