By Rebecca Kumar
With immense thanks to Sheri Davis-Faulkner and Moya Baily of The Crunk Feminist Collective.
Note:
I wrote this letter because I was motivated by my position as a woman of color, a South Asian-American woman, and told to teach a racist book that few others have been calling racist. I post this letter as a reminder that the continued exploitation of the bodies of women of color emblemized by Henrietta Lacks is a South Asian issue – in fact it is everyone’s issue.
Over the summer, several colleges and universities across the United States assigned Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) as the “common” reading for their incoming class of 2016. Every freshman has been told to read Skloot’s book. The first two weeks or more of the semester are dedicated to discussing and writing about Skloot’s book. Some schools have even paid Skloot’s exorbitant fees (rumored to be over $12,000 per visit) so students might “meet the author”. Students would then be able to view those ‘immortal’ ‘HeLa’ cells – taken from the cervix of an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks in 1950, without her knowledge and, therefore, without her consent. Roundtables celebrating the medical advancements made possible by the cells have been organized around the book; panels discuss racial issues under Jim Crow.
However, I, an adjunct freshmen writing instructor at one such institution, do not share the excitement surrounding Skloot’s book. Quite the opposite. I am appalled and deeply offended by this required reading selection and the praise given to it. Let me be clear: my letter should not be confused with a call to censor Skloot or not teach her book. It is, rather, a call for critical pedagogy. This adjunct PhD candidate would simply like to rally those few who do not unquestioningly praise this book and encourage their critique.
Administrators and educators who chose Skloot’s book as the required summer reading:
I write to you today with the hope you might reevaluate your ethical stances. I urge you to pause for a moment and reconsider Skloot’s book with my observations as both a teacher and a woman of color in mind. You put me – indeed, all freshmen instructors this fall – in an unfair position. For depending on how we teach Skloot’s book, we may be complicit in perpetuating and even endorsing the same racism faced by Henrietta Lacks and the countless number of poor women whose bodies were and continue to be exploited in the pursuit of ‘knowledge’. That is, the teachability of Skloot’s narrative is blatantly obvious. We, like Skloot, can feel both smart and morally satisfied criticizing the way in which Henrietta Lacks and other black women of the Jim Crow era were treated. And for some readers, such criticism of these horrifying events of the past pacifies feelings of racial guilt or racial exclusion enough to generate negotiations of difference in the present; I’m not dismissing this important possibility. However, what I find problematic and dangerous is that the disbelief, remorse, and contempt that we can easily garner for our racist past is not being translated into our present. Indeed we do not garner the same critical reaction even when the contemporary racism to which I refer is an integral part of the very racist history we’re condemning.What I’m getting at is that Skloot’s representation of events of Henrietta Lacks’s life is, itself, racist and should be read and taught as such.
Skloot practically announces her racism on the first page of the book when she insists that her writing “is a work of nonfiction. No events have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated” (xiii). We can all agree that this is an impossibility. Skloot was not there to witness majority of the important events that she recounts. While she has ostensibly taken pains to write objectively – stringing together “more than a thousand hours of interviews with family and friends of Henrietta Lacks, as well as with lawyers, ethicists, scientists, and journalists”…” and “archival photos and documents, scientific and historical research, and the personal journals of Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks” – the style and content of the story is ultimately the result of her choices (xiii). As Salman Rushdie points out, “Description itself is a political act” (“Imaginary Homelands” 1982). Skloot’s “descriptions” are loaded with political implications and consequences. Indeed, the whole of the Lacks family, including Henrietta herself, can speak only through Skloot. While she tried to incorporate many voices - notably Deborah's - she is the only agent. (And the only "author" of the book; it is not co-written with Deborah Lacks.) Skloot has control over the voices – and, not completely unlike the doctors, Henrietta’s body. I offer, for instance, this painfully explicit passage:
Henrietta went to the bathroom and found blood spotting her underwear when it wasn’t her time of the month.
She filled her bathtub, lowered herself into the warm water, and spread her legs. With the door closed to her children, husband, and cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of the opening of her womb (15)
If nobody was in the bathroom with Henrietta, or even knew that she was in there, how can Skloot know that Henrietta “spread her legs” and “slid a finger inside herself”? My freshmen giggle and blush when this passage is read aloud. It’s not that they find it humorous; their giggles and blushes are how they negotiate a naked body on display. Not a fictional body, according to Skloot. This is a real one. And so my students feel, I venture to say, a bit like a voyeur caught in the act.
What makes the racism of Skloot’s account all the more insidious is that she could have foreclosed my accusation that she was unquestioningly appropriating Henrietta Lacks’s body by admitting that Henrietta’s self-touching was, indeed, a fabrication, a “it-could-have-happened-like-this” situation. She could have admitted the unreliability of her narration.
Throughout the narrative, instead of self-reflecting, Skloot turns the criticism outward, recounting in great detail how difficult it was for her to get Henrietta’s story. As a result, the black characters in her story are racialized but she is not. They have the problem with racial difference, not her. She has less to get over than they do. She comes in earnestness so can be trusted, she seems to say to both her black subjects and to us, her readers. Skloot recounts the fears and hesitations of the Lacks’s family toward this "white woman" but only to grant her more credibility. They trusted her, so should we. And so we come to trust Skloot more than the Lackses; she is the voice of reason. We suspend our disbelief and go on thinking that it is fine and ethical for her to rewrite Henrietta Lacks’s body in an intimate moment that may not, in fact, even have happened. Yet the proclamation of the book’s truth content begs an analysis of Skloot. What feelings of privilege and authority over another’s body must a writer possess in order to rewrite an already exploited body and call it “non-fiction”?
Throughout the narrative, instead of self-reflecting, Skloot turns the criticism outward, recounting in great detail how difficult it was for her to get Henrietta’s story. As a result, the black characters in her story are racialized but she is not. They have the problem with racial difference, not her. She has less to get over than they do. She comes in earnestness so can be trusted, she seems to say to both her black subjects and to us, her readers. Skloot recounts the fears and hesitations of the Lacks’s family toward this "white woman" but only to grant her more credibility. They trusted her, so should we. And so we come to trust Skloot more than the Lackses; she is the voice of reason. We suspend our disbelief and go on thinking that it is fine and ethical for her to rewrite Henrietta Lacks’s body in an intimate moment that may not, in fact, even have happened. Yet the proclamation of the book’s truth content begs an analysis of Skloot. What feelings of privilege and authority over another’s body must a writer possess in order to rewrite an already exploited body and call it “non-fiction”?
In additional to this sensationalized representation of Lacks’s body, Skloot’s depiction of African American life can only be called cartoonish – with no differentiation been communities and vernaculars of the American North (Baltimore etc) and the American South (Clover etc). All the grammar stilted voices of her black subjects (save the black professionals who sound like her) bleed together in a similar larger-than-life, exoticized depiction of poor religious blackness. Thus, from her minor characters to her major characters, all of Skloot's black subjects are caricatures. Take, for instance, the depiction of Courtney Speed aka “Mama” of Baltimore in the early chapter "Turner Station." When Skloot arrives in Turner Station she meets Speed who supposedly says to her, “‘This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!’” (73, original emphasis). “Mama” reads like a Loony Tunes character; she "bounce"s around despite being described as “motherly” a few pages earlier (72). (Skloot throws in a detail about Speed's deaf cousin for flavor.) Just when I think I might get relief from this minstrelsy representation, I meet “Cootie” who blames Henrietta’s plight on “voodoo” and "spirits" over a religious radio show. Skloot writes: “As [Cootie] talked, the preacher’s voice on the radio grew louder, saying ‘The Lord, He’s gonna help you, but you got to call me right now” (82). Skloot does not spare her major black characters either -- even the one character to which she claims to have taken great pains to represent authentically as possible: Deborah. I think any critical reader would find, for instance, the chapter "Soul Cleansing" an uncomfortable read. Skloot's reliance on typeface (all the loud capitalization, italics, and "mmmmmms") to represent the religiosity unfamiliar to her reduces even her primary black subject to a adipose stereotype -- that has gone problematically unquestioned (291-292). Perhaps it remains unconsidered because in the preceding chapter, readers are presented with "twitchy" "jittery" and "wild eyed" Deborah in juxtaposition to a level-headed Skloot who has had too much of what, tonally, comes across as Deborah's misguided hysteria and paranoia (277-283). Consequently, we've dismissed the fact that while Skloot claims Deborah's soul cleansing was the "furthest thing from crazy she had seen all day," her depiction is nevertheless from the eyes of an eager anthropologist. To me it is clear that Skloot must rely on typeface to do the work in this representation instead of empathetic language because she is unwilling to give up her place as the privileged voice-of-reason and "find [herself] converted" (196).
Often in fiction writing workshops a student will write about something that really happened and we all say, “that does not seem believable.” The student defending her writing cries: “but it really happened!” Sometimes, as the cliché goes, real life is stranger than fiction. But in Skloot’s narrative, I’m not sure that is the case. She seems to go out of her way to make black life seem strange, funny, and sometimes with her depictions of religion, misguided and uninformed. And this makes her the voice of normalcy – authoritative and god-like. There is a marked contrast between Skloot’s language (“white and agnostic in the Pacific Northwest,” “uncomfortable” with the black religiosity that represents) and the “black” language (“Christian from the South”) she purports to represent faithfully. The contrast reveals a racialized power hierarchy imbedded in the language itself. And again, in her foreword, Skloot refuses to acknowledge her own position by essentially arguing that her black subject wanted her to write a racist representation of their language. She writes: “As one of Henrietta’s relatives said to me, ‘If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest” (xiii). This comment by an anonymous relative should not forgive the racial stratification Skloot establishes between her (our) “pretty” politically correct English and theirEnglish (which is, of course, "pretty" in its own exotic way.)
It certainly cannot be forgiven when Skloot says, “I’ve used the language of their times and backgrounds, including words such as colored”. Here, I can’t help but think about Chinua Achebe’s essay on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (xiii, orginal emphasis). Achebe points out that “Conrad certainly had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word should be of interest to psychoanalysts” (“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness” 1977 ). I’d like to know what this psychoanalyst would say about Skloot’s desire – as it is ultimately her choice – to refer to her black subjects who speak “black” and live “black” as colored without quotes.
I especially wonder what this psychoanalyst would say to the fact that Skloot’s motives for writing the book are still disturbingly unclear to me. From what I can glean, she was just curious about the history of this cell. Her childhood curiosity about cells taken from a black women living in poverty under Jim Crow seems to have no other purpose than her book, her writing. She says it’s about Henrietta and her family, but it’s really about Rebecca Skloot writing about Henrietta. Skloot admits this position to an extent and makes it clearer in a New York Times article about The Henrietta Lacks Foundation when she clarifies that she does not consider herself an activist but a writer -- but how could someone telling such a story consider the two mutually exclusive?
What kind of ethical imperative does such a writer have if she separates the two so starkly? (Freshmen should know that Skloot, who writes a book about race, ethics, gender, and medicine see the two as separately situated!) I am shocked that there has been so little made of Skloot’s motivations to write this book at all. And little has been made of the fact that Skloot is profiting from Henrietta Lacks’s story while Lacks’s family relies on The Henrietta Lacks Foundation which is much more about education than healthcare. Nobody wants to disturb healthcare workers. As Sonny is quoted as saying in The Afterward: “I don’t want to cause problems for science” (328). Skloot does not go into the implications of such a statement when black bodies have always been both a problem and a cure for science. Before and after Henrietta Lacks, today too, black women’s bodies have been exploited, probed, and experimented upon. I do not need to remind readers of Marion Sims, Norplant, and the recent controversies surrounding the North Carolina Eugenics Project . (See Terri Kapasalis’s book Public Privates: Performing Both Ends of the Speculum which I teach alongside Skloot’s book and a recent article dated June 2012 about the sterilizations in North Carolina.) I confess that I too have given blood for HPV vaccine research so I could get $75 to help supplement my grad school stipend; I did it so that perhaps one day less women will suffer from HPV, but I admit, shamelessly, I did it for the money as well. When I went to give my blood, the office was populated primarily by African American women, Latina women, and students. Skloot's narrative is therefore part of a much longer history that intimately ties quantifiable "knowledge" to eugenics and the female body.
It should be clear by now that my criticism goes beyond the basic question of “who is allowed to write the other?” It is about how we write the other. We have to consider the assumptions we make not only about the other but about ourselves and our author-ity as writers. In her afterward to the Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison recounts her own dilemmas with representing her black characters and their language; she writes “My choices of language (aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture” (Afterword 1994). Morrison obviously questions her position as a writer and her relationship with both her characters and her audience. Unlike Skloot’s all-knowing narration, Morrison breaks a silence while admitting that there is always going to be a quietness. Freshmen reading Skloot’s book should know that neither David nor Deborah Lacks were able to read Skloot’s narrative; they both died before the publication of the book. Henrietta’s consent and approval has long been lost. The rest, they say, is silence.
The stark hierarchy established between Skloot and her subjects does little to convince me that Skloot truly questioned her position as the author-ity of the narrative. Undoing the racism of this book would be as simple as Skloot acknowledging the unarguable fact that much of her narrative is a lie, a work of historical fiction, by her own definition of “non-fiction.” I wonder if she, in a century and a half from now, will join the ranks of those nineteen century authors Richard Hildreth and Mattie Griffith.
Thus, I am of the opinion that the “immortality” to which the title of the book refers is as much a reference to the racism behind the first cut that took Lacks’s cells as it is to Lacks’s cells themselves. Henrietta Lacks’s body is still used in the name of 'knowing.' I hope I’ve drawn out the ways in which the 'knowledge' of racist and gendered events does not make racism and sexism go away. For that we must do more work.
Yours,
Rebecca Kumar
