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Cancer speaks in War Language
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- 73 CANCER SPEAKS IN WAR LANGUAGE By Evelyne Accad Introduction I had not been hit by disease until my breast cancer in 1994. With this disease, I entered a world I had never known before which immediately evoked in me violence and war. Throughout my book, Cancer Journeys, I draw consistently on the same parallel as a leitmotif: cancer and war (Accad 2000). They are the two plagues of our century gone mad. The connection between the language of cancer and that of violence and of war became immediately clear to me when I underwent a mastectomy (Accad 2001). I was in terrible pain when I woke up after the operation, and I was given what are commonly known as “pain killers.” I realised then an uncannily frequent use in medicine of words that connote violence. The expression, pain killers, belongs, I believe, to American culture,while in French they are called anti-pains, getting rid of pain! The connection, you might say, is first of all subjective. Having suffered in my body through the war in Lebanon and through breast cancer, having witnessed the agony and death of loved ones during the bombing of the city, and at the bedside of friends succumbing to cancer, I got the feeling that the two were connected. You might say a subjective realisation, but it does depend on what one does with it. Closer analysis has indeed produced a number of similarities. Chemotherapy – an Effect of World War II Let us start with the facts. We should remember that chemotherapy was discovered during World War II, “thanks” if I dare say, to the observed effects of nerve gas. After an explosion of mustard gas bomb containing nitrogen in a submarine, it was observed that those on board who had been exposed were all deficient in white blood cells. Since leukaemia features a surplus of white blood cells, it was thought that nitrogen could halt the proliferation of the undesired cells. Thus, chemotherapy was born. - 74 The Rise of Cancer in Lebanon Another historical link that had a great impact on me has been Lebanon. Lebanon has had its share of war and destruction in the past decades. Between 1975 and 1992 it was torn apart by a civil war fed by many countries worldwide that cashed in with sales of weapons to various militias, sometimes to both sides, regardless of alliance. Some militias in exchange for money and weapons buried nuclear waste products in various parts of Lebanon. The Lebanese population is now paying the price with a rise in cancers of all kinds. Cancers of the mind and heavy depressions plague the youth that have had to deal with the war. The wounds and scars are visible. It will take a long time for the country and its people to heal. And then two summers ago, Israel hit again in response to Hezbollah capturing of two of their soldiers, and managed to destroy the whole infrastructure of the country, polluting the air, sea and land, leaving behind millions of fragmentation bombs. It will take years again for Lebanon to come out of this new disaster! Lebanon is only one case among others. We should remind ourselves here of the scandal caused by depleted uranium (DU), which created so many disasters all over the world, among warring factions of the dominant countries as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, disasters which the military and governments have tried to deny. Military Metaphors in the Treatment of Cancer Here are the facts: In the treatment of cancer, military metaphors and violent images abound. The body is ‘attacked’ by poisons in chemotherapy, “nuked” as some say in radiotherapy; patients undergo “radiation”; surgical intervention is called an “operation”. Such expressions belong to modern, “scientific” medicine which has broken away from crafty traditional medicine going back to Ibn Sina. The patient becomes an operating technical–scientific field exactly like modern warfare. Cancer victims enter, or are pushed into, a space which I have called “a zone of illness,” where they lose control over their lives and their freedom of choice; and this state, too, resembles that of concentration camp victims. Patients enter an organisation conceived as a rational machine, an industrial machine made to treat the disease, one whose discourse is not to give a conscious choice to the patient but to orient her/him in a programmed direction. The patient is not warned about many of the consequences of the treatment...