Month: November 2017

For all intents and purposes, I am a New York City girl. Although I grew up in Westchester, I have been going in and out of the city about twice a week since the time I was sixteen. I was fourteen when my parents let me go on the train by myself, I was sixteen when I got my heavily used metro card and I was eighteen when I got my first summer internship in the city; going through the hustle and bustle of the NYC five days a week from 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM. So for some odd reason, I feel some sort of comfort as we are reading Zone One like I have the upper hand advantage on this one.

It is true that I have never been infected by a disease that turned me into a zombie, but I very well could be. The line that altered me to this fate the most was, “Just another day at the office when she gets bit by some New York whacko while loading up on spring mix at the corner deli’s Salad Lounge. Full of plague but unaware” (p.18) . This line made me giggle as we were reading aloud in class because it was a scene that was almost all too familiar in the scariest sense possible.

When you are in the city something chances, it is almost like the rules change; your expectations change. The ways that you interact with someone in the suburbs is totally different from the way you interact with that same person in the city. If someone were to bite you in the suburbs, you would have stopped what you are doing, told the manager, called the police, probably told the town paper and altered everyone that you know about this problem. In the city however it goes like this; someone bites you, you stop, you roll your eyes, maybe curse at them, and then continue on with your day. I cannot even fault the woman who was infected because it is the way that I, as well as almost every other New Yorker, would have handled this situation. This book works so well because it is so true to its setting. It is the way that New Yorkers would have interacted and while it might shock some who don’t know NYC, it is a complete and total representation of life in the city.

Many of us associate helium with party balloons and helium tanks that you can buy at Walmart for $30. However, helium has many additional uses, is the second most abundant gas in the atmosphere, and has scientists worried. If helium is the second most abundant gas in the atmosphere, next to hydrogen, then why are scientists worried? Continue reading “Helium: Not Just for Party Balloons”

It’s easy to be a saint in paradise – Avery Brooks

It is truly disturbing that crisis and tragedy often give rise to the uglier, more animalistic side of human nature. For every tale of heroism in the face of adversity it seems there are countless more stories of selfishness, savagery, and wickedness. Continue reading “Staring into the Abyss – Why Tragedy Brings out the Worst in Us”

***Please be mindful and considerate of this post. It’s from personal experience and is a sensitive subject for me. I think it’s important to acknowledge racial tampering and distancing within a community, but I’m not here to receive pity from my experience with colorism (that’s a different conversation for another time). Thank you. Continue reading “Racial Tampering in America”

After signing several consent forms while I laid in a hospital bed two weekends ago, I immediately thought of previous class discussions surrounding consent. The first form to sign was the HIPAA law form. I signed this form confidently, knowing what the HIPAA laws entailed. However, the following forms I signed I did not sign confidently because I had no idea what they were for. Some people may question why I signed the following forms if I did not know what they were for, and looking back at my experience I wish I would have asked. However, while I was laying in a hospital bed suffering from the symptoms of dehydration and a viral infection, I was in no mindset to ask what I was agreeing to. At that point in my life I would have consented to almost anything to stop the undesirable symptoms that circulated through my body. Continue reading “What Did I Consent To?”

(This post is a continuation of my last two and is related to my father’s experience with racism in medicine)

After finishing Fortune’s Bones, I Facetimed my father to explain what we learned the black community had suffered through in the name of medicine and how Fortune’s story in particular bothered me. At first, I spoke in detail about Medical Apartheid and how it depicted the many disturbing processes used to obtained cadavers and skeletons from non-consenting black individuals for medical/dental students like himself. One example I gave him was how “hospitals habitually delivered black bodies directly from the wards to the autopsy tables without asking anyone’s consent” and how a similar practice still survives “in policies that continue to appropriate the bodies of “friendless paupers” such as the homeless—a disproportionate number of whom are black—for medical purposes.” (Washington p118.) I tied this to Fortune’s story and how it connected with me on a personal level and made me concerned that our skull might not have just simply been donated. He totally understood and was visibly disturbed by what I had to tell him, too. He said he although he was bothered to learn all of this, that “unfortunately (he) did witness racism while in school but not on any level just described.” Hearing this made me both concerned and interested in what he had to say so I asked him if he could further explain those experiences.

Continue reading “First Hand Exposure To Racism in Medicine”

Children bringing hope into a dying world is a recurring theme throughout the novels we have studied. In the latest book, Zone One, the world is recovering from a devastating pandemic and children are rarely seen. So, when the Tromanhauser Triplets were released from the ICU, a sense of promise and hope swept through the camp. Continue reading “New life in the midst of devastation”

In an article published by “The Guardian,” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty , Ed Pilkington reveals details about an epidemic that is ravaging the American south. The proliferation of hookworm is happening under the mainstream radar largely because the parasitic hookworm is only rampant in heavily impoverished areas. It is rampant specifically in areas where people are more likely to come into contact with raw sewage and human waste through drinking water or cracked pipes during heavy rains and because of otherwise shoddy infrastructure. The parasite travels through people’s skin, typically using the soles of barefeet as an entry point. From there, according the the article, it saps the life force from people as it sucks blood from the small intestine leading to cognitive problems, weight loss, anemia and other health problems (Pilkington, 2017). Hookworm prevalence over hundreds of years helped lead to the stigma and stereotype of “the lazy and lethargic southern redneck” (Pilkington, 2017). In a way, the symptoms of hookworm broadly fit the descriptions of a zombie. And, in Zone One, Colson Whitehead uses a virus to explain the means for which the corpses became reanimated.

Where Haitian voodoo traditions employ magic as the means of reanimating a corpse, Zone One uses a plague. Traditional Hatian zombiism involves supernatural magic and because slavery was such an egregious institution of unfathomable evil, it makes sense why supernatural forces relating to spiritualism could be the only source of reanimation in older works of zombie fiction. At the time, slaves could be considered zombies because they were stripped of all “life” as they lost all hope and motivation and were in most instances “dead on the inside” as they were treated grossly inhumanly and were often stripped of their loved ones. Slaves were also traditionally discouraged from learning and becoming literate, further leading to the absence of cognition that signifies a zombie. However, in Zone One, disease and sickness is used as a more literal metaphor to explain that poverty, specifically that faced by blacks in America (NYC ghettos) is a debilitating sickness that is inescapable if not contained. As is the process of dying and being reanimated cyclical, so too is the cycle of poverty. In relating to the hookworm article, Pilkington writes that “[the symptoms of hookworm are constantly] helping to trap [victims] into the poverty in which the disease flourishes.” (Pilkington, 2017)

Just as disease is more easily spread in impoverished areas, so to is zombiism in Zone One as it reads “The construction company had lost liquidity the year before and his parents complained about the eyesore as if under contractual obligation. The plastic sheets rippling where there should have been walls, the great mounds of orange dirt that seeped out in defeat after every rain. It was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, his parents fussed. They spread sickness.” (Whitehead, p. 23) In his article, Pilkington also describes an anecdotal scene of a child playing basketball in his driveway feet away from a puddle of sewage coming from a busted pipe on his lawn, where mosquitoes are described to be congregating (Pilkington, 2017). Just as slave children toiled barefoot in fields, devoid of educational opportunities and subject to disease and nutritional deficiency, so too are impoverished southern poor kids, of both African and European descent, subject to hookworm which stunts cognitive development and leads to malnutrition. So in a sense, for poor, black southern children, some of the perilous consequences felt during slavery are being reanimated and manifesting themselves today.

So, I’ve officially let Clay’s Ark sit with me for a few days now. I still don’t entirely know what to make of it, but I have definitely felt many emotions across the spectrum while processing the events that unfolded in the novel. In my opinion, Octavia Butler does an excellent job at developing a story with such complex characters who really make us (and themselves) question the concept of humanity and being a part of a community. Continue reading “Is Blake a Bad Guy?”