Traditional Healing
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
The novel I was reading is about a lot of things: government corruption and the machinations of power, protest and revolution, love and sustainability. In the novel, few things occur without greasing somebody’s palm. Corruption is so rampant and power so opaque that it cripples the entire fictional nation of Aburĩria.
Many of the events of Wizard of the Crow are fantastic, but Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o‘s portrait of dictatorship is based upon Kenya under the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi.1 As Moi consolidated power by charging his advisers with treason; as Moi shut down dissent and tortured Kenyans; so too does Aburĩria’s dictator. In the novel the dictator even attempts to appropriate the traditional medicines and divining power of the Wizard of the Crow. Much of the novel is about how the Wizard thwarts the dictator’s efforts, but as the novel progresses, it is the dictator’s promise to acquire the Wizard’s power that captures Aburĩrians’ imaginations, allows him to institute “reforms,” and gains him the support of the West.
That fictional promise to appropriate magic was made real (again) today when Gambian president Yahya Jammeh—following up on his traditional cure for AIDS—promised that he could cure infertility. As a result, 1,600 women queued to receive treatment.2
1 I have no doubt that—substituting Kenya for Nigeria—Ngũgĩ would agree with Chinua Achebe’s complaint that “Nigeria should not be a third-world country, at this stage. It is very lucky in human and material resources. So to see it going to waste is very annoying.” Annoying because much of that waste was created by greed, corruption, and war.
2 As incredible as is Jammeh’s promise, the numbers of women lining up are unsurprising. Particularly in the U.S., modern treatments for infertility such as IUI and IVF are superbly expensive and often administered in for-profit clinics for people who can pay cash. In other words, treatment is overwhelmingly given to the wealthy. But infertility affects all comers. Indeed, as Marsh and Ronner in The Empty Cradle and Liza Mundy in Everything Conceivable discuss, poor people and minorities experience infertility at even greater rates than the rich; they do not seek—because they cannot afford—treatment as readily as upper-middle-class and wealthy white people do. That is the status of the U.S., but it is a fair representation of the world’s infertility, too.
