Bodies in a Broken World: Women Novelists of Color and the Politics of Medicine (review)

Bodies in a Broken World posits that illness and injury are rooted in historical oppression and social injustice; the title could just as easily be Broken Bodies in a Broken World. Ann Folwell Stanford's compelling new interpretation of multicultural feminist fiction from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, however, moves from critique to the possibility of a new medical model, one in which illness and healing become a collective responsibility, driven by the understanding that "[h]ealth is rooted in the world's body" (14). This notion of the "world's body" leads Stanford to conclude that physical, emotional, and spiritual vigor is determined by an individual's relationship to community and memory.

Stanford draws her analysis from popular fictional works like Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Sandra Cisneros's story "Woman Hollering Creek," Sapphire's Push, Ana Castillo's So Far From God, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, and Octavia Butler's two novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Stanford revisits characters such as Velma, from The Salt Eaters, to explore the idea that "living human bodies pay the price for and carry within them the symptoms of a sick world" (15) and to show the way history is written on the body as illness. Velma's suicide attempt, then, is not an individual manifestation of a failing body, but instead, a manifestation of a collective illness that dislocates Velma from her African American heritage. Stanford observes, "The imagery of splitting, splinters, and disjunction characterizes not only Velma's experience but the nature of the illness attributed to the community and the broader world as well" (18). Implicit in this analysis are the ways in which contemporary medicine proves unequal to the task of healing. Bambara positions alternative forms of healing against institutionalized medicine as Velma's recovery is made possible by Minnie Ransom, a natural healer, with whom "the medical establishment . . . is clearly uncomfortable" (17).

The first five chapters of Bodies in a Broken World focus on characters like Velma and Silko's Tayo, from Ceremony, whose illnesses stem from breaks with their communities, histories, and cultures, and whose journeys toward health come through reconnection to these elements. In most cases, characters experience "illness" not as an isolated symptom but as a complete physical, mental, and spiritual rupture from their earlier selves. Further, their illnesses defy treatment, which leads them to eschew conventional medicine, opting instead for alternative, communal healing practices. Illness is understood, then, as resistance to historical forces of injustice and oppression. "Wellness" can be achieved only by locating healing outside of the medical establishment. As with Velma, Western doctors fail Tayo; instead, he finds healing in two Laguna medicine men.

Other characters suffer from social violence, such as Cisneros's Cleófilas, beaten and broken by her husband and alienated from any hope of rescue by her inability to speak English, and Sapphire's disaffected, socially marginalized character, Precious, who has endured rape and HIV infection by her own father. These defeated individuals seek a voice and Stanford suggests that "making the space for the emergence of that voice is an important role medicine can play beyond the bandaging of wounds" (135).

Stanford moves from analysis of character and text to analysis of the medical establishment, contemplating a way it might function differently. This critique is most profound in chapter four, where she discusses Morrison's Pecola Breedlove and Pauline Puyat from The Bluest Eye. These characters "see themselves and the world through the eyes of the dominant white culture, which at best renders them invisible and, at its worst, wants them dead" (106). Central to Morrison's work is an understanding of the ways in which racialized "others" become invisible...