Chapter 5: Introduction to the Body - Who Is Wellness For?

PART II: JOURNEY TO THE BODY

“The body will always tell the story of our woundedness in a language so direct and simple that it can be too much to bear witness to. As protection, the mind pulls away and keeps itself isolated from the body. The most radical project we could ever engage in during our lives is the project of embodiment. This is the most radical act because there is no liberation without the union of mind and body.”

—Lama Rod Owens

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The body is an inherently political thing.

I think of bodies most in terms of labor, as in which body (correlating with what labor) is deemed more valuable in society? And, of course, within a global context, what kind of body (and labor) is more valuable, period? There are hidden hierarchies that we seem to want to deny. So much of the modern interpretation of being human is cast against the concept of value. When you live in a colonial world, where the impacts are ripe and pervasive, the legacy lingers on every surface, around every corner, lurking. My father lived in a country for over a decade where a significant proportion of the labor force is brought in from Bangladesh, his own home country. He understands that though he came from the same place as these men, his body and class are deemed more valuable—due to the access to education, adjacency to white, privileged spaces, and status conferred through books and intellectualism.

As a society, a collective reckoning is needed about the impact of colonization on the body, so we must begin to understand the body as an inherently political thing. It’s important to look at the disparities between how a disabled person and an able-bodied person are treated in the world; how class creates perimeters to health and access to basic human needs; how caste, race, and anti-Blackness are propagated and wielded in order to control and divide society only to ensure one type of body is better than another.

It’s important to understand that race was concocted by whiteness out of fear, out of a need for domination. That then has a generational impact on the mind, body, self-care, and justice. In the United States, the division is so palpable because the statistics are clear: The livelihood and life expectancy of Black and Native Americans compared to white Americans is vastly unequal, and unfair. In Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, Lama Rod Owens writes, “And the thing about white colonist fear and rage is that I have nothing to do with it but my body still becomes a receptacle for this unmetabolized woundedness. At the end of the day I find myself hauling not just my trauma but also the trauma of whiteness.”^[1] We know now about the intergenerational influence of epigenetics; so what happens to your body when you are healing lineages of exploitation, abuse, murder just because of the body you occupy? “Trauma,” writes Owens, “disrupts the body’s equilibrium.”

In the context of the pandemic, this became clearer than it ever had been before, highlighting the depth of class disparity and racism. Abolition was called for, which was a major turning point in the lexicon of American liberation. Representation has always been important, but shrouding the truth in propaganda is also the American way. “The a priori association of Blackness with guilt and criminality comforts white America by enabling people to believe that Black Americans are deserving of their condition and that the livelihoods of whites are in no way bound up with Black immiseration.”^[2] What is clarified is that within the disposability of bodies—of trans bodies, Native women’s bodies, Black bodies, Palestinian bodies, Dalit bodies, Muslim bodies, disabled bodies, fat bodies, queer bodies—there is this willingness to disconnect from one’s own humanity in order to dehumanize another by taking their life.

Disposability is a big theme in capitalism. It plays into how wealthy people navigated the pandemic, by either having access to better healthcare or being able to escape to safety, while the poorer (and statistically non-white) people in the cities died. In part 8 of Under the Blacklight, Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s podcast, Emery Wright, an organizer, explains, “We are living in a public health system that is not designed to ensure public health.”^[3] This reminds me of what Anand Giridharadas writes in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World: “American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any country—but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in certain years life expectancy actually declines.”^[4]

Is it a lack of care—this complicity? How can our incapacity to think outside of ourselves be diagnosed? How can we rectify this damage? In Close to the Knives, one of my favorite books of all time, David Wojnarowicz explains it perfectly: “Most people tend to accept, at least outwardly, this system of the moral code and thus feel quite safe from any terrible event or problem such as homelessness or AIDS or nonexistent medical care or rampant crime or hunger or unemployment or racism or sexism simply because they go to sleep every night in a house or apartment or dormitory whose clean rooms or smooth walls or regular structures of repeated daily routines provide them with a feeling of safety that never gets intruded upon by the events outside.”^[5] This inequality and inconsideration has seeped into the entire reality of living in the United States. Through silence, the status quo remains; through intimidation, power is asserted, wielded, and eventually dominates.

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As mentioned, gender, much like race, is also a construct. “‘Body’ is a key to an understanding of the roots of male dominance and the construction of female social identity,” because, as Silvia Federici writes, “gender should not be considered a purely cultural reality, but should be treated as a specification of class relations.”^[6] In Caliban and the Witch, Federici’s opus, she speaks to the subjugation of the biologically female body and how it’s been exploited through the ages for the perpetuation and spoils of capitalism. “At the core of capitalism there is not only the symbiotic relation between waged contractual labor and enslavement but, together with it, the dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labor-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their lives.”^[7]

Capitalism is a cycle of continued fear, entrenched in a white supremacist standard where one should always want more than their neighbor and that they should compete, exploit, and steal if necessary to gain entrance into a mythical world, one where accruing money brings you true happiness. To want more and more is to be unsatiated, and thus to continue to live in fear. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of the windigo, the legendary monster of the Anishinaabe people. “Windigos are not born, they are made. Its bite will transform victims into cannibals too.”^[8] Kimmerer explains that though this is a folkloric tale to scare children out of the perils of greed, there remains a profound parallel between mythology and reality—what is a windigo if not a modern capitalist? “The consumption driven mind-set masquerades as ‘quality of life’ but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.”^[9]

Billionaires make no sense to me, but societally we allow it, we accept it as is. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve had to digest the disgusting reality that rich people have gotten richer while millions around the world have died preventable deaths. Outside of the uprising for Black liberation, there was no real confrontation of capitalism. Is it too much to demand that a society that talks so freely about its sophistication and superiority might be the first to think about complete prevention by actually caring holistically (and equally) for its citizens? Let alone the world? As in wellness for all? If Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or any and all billionaires decided to redistribute their wealth, we could unleash a true human revolution by redirecting wealth toward the gain of all. So, why must we encourage a society that enshrines greed and applauds it? What does it say about a society that is willing to live with this kind of discrepancy between classes?

With all this unearned capital, we could solve climate change. Why go to Mars when you have a chance of still healing this planet? A planet that has many of its citizens fighting to protect it. “When elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change it not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are,”^[10] Giridharadas shares. “Many of them believe that they are changing the world when they may instead—or also—be protecting a system that is at the root of the problems they wish to solve.”^[11]

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All my life I have been confused by the current state of the Muslim world. The Golden Age of Islam, which occurred alongside the Dark Ages in Europe (a term my father calls inherently racist, as it assumes because the West was in the dark, no other civilizations existed nor mattered), was a time of modern mathematics, philosophy, medicine, poetry, science, and enlightenment—but now, this same land is known for depletion, drones, and American-made or -backed wars, and thus chaos. Centuries-old empires, civilizations—suddenly vanished over mere decades, completely run into dust. As a child, I think this led to the dissolution of what history claims as truth. Under my father’s accidental tutelage, I was taught about the Muslim world through VCR tapes he’d find at our local library or books from the university where he worked. This world, a time of Rumi and Shams, felt deeply aligned to the kinds of things that were beginning to attract me, deep histories of knowledge embedded in mythology and mystique.

For the longest time, if you were a marginalized person living in the West, you no doubt learned how to code switch. For me, this meant speaking in a different language (usually Bangla) to talk about other (namely white) people, especially when they were being rude or discriminatory, which growing up in Australia in the 1990s happened often. Because we weren’t yet a society that allowed us to say “white people,” this allowed for a silence to permeate about the obvious. White supremacy was rampant, and the devastation and ubiquity of white violence could be seen in every facet of life. Whether in the destruction and obliteration of my faith, or the formation of the country I was born in, or the nation-state I was raised in, or the land my parents are from but had to escape. Everything had been touched by white supremacy.

In March 2021, a white man shot down eight people in three spas in Atlanta, killing six Asian women. A law enforcement official said about the killer, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did,” as if being the gunman in a mass shooting is akin to running a red light. The deplorable nature of whiteness is that in order for it to be sustained, everyone has to go along with it. Too many of us have kept quiet about our living realities for so long because the fear was always . . . death.

In a piece about US military bases originally published in the Nation, Alice Slater reported, “In a series of panels over two days, conference speakers from every corner of the globe proceeded to describe the extraordinary cruelty and toxic lethality of U.S. foreign policy despite (Dr. Martin Luther) King’s warning more than 50 years ago,” at Riverside Church, where he declared the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”^[12] This, factually, is true. The United States has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, with an estimated 138,000 soldiers stationed around the globe. This is the same country that invaded Iraq under false presumption that Saddam Hussein, who was assassinated without trial by the American government, was carrying weapons of mass destruction. Who thinks about the wellness of Iraqis and Afghans after the American war machine? I can still hear Bush’s colloquial drawl, sounding more like a Muppet than a president. Perhaps modern imperialism is unique to the United States, because its self-declared exceptionalism justifies imperial bullying, murder, and complete and utter destruction masked as solutions and diplomacy. The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz once calculated “the historical norm for the United States is to be at war.”^[13] Boy oh boy does the United States love to lecture, but it sure as hell doesn’t care about the diligence it takes to actually be the society it declares itself to be. This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “U.S. nationalism has a religious character. Its destructive mission is imagined as sacred,” adds Slater.^[14]

I’m grateful for the word epistemicide, because it’s the only word I’ve ever seen that carries with it multitudes of deep forgotten history—the explanation of all that has been lost—and the subtleties of that. To live knowing your cultural knowledge has been stolen, exploited, robbed, or destroyed—while being told otherwise—to be taught of the West’s majesty but not of its destruction is to be gaslit every day of your life. The colonized world, and thereby vast knowledge systems that were not Western, is the backbone of the modern world, including within the realm of wellness. The Muslim empire had sanitation and clean running water, and was also at the forefront of modern medicine, while Europe was in the Dark Ages. The vast Indigenous knowledge systems from Mesoamerica, Africa, and the rest of the colonized world were destroyed to ensure our health, our wellness, our livelihood, and our success could be hindered. “At the height of the Al-Andalus Empire in Europe, the city of Cordoba had a library of 500,000 books. This was at a time when other intellectual centers in Europe would have had libraries of between 5,000 and 10,000 books. The Spanish burned the library in Cordoba, and libraries elsewhere. They destroyed most of the codices in the Mayan, Inca and Aztec empires as well. Women’s knowledge, which was largely oral, was simply silenced, as was the knowledge of Africa.”^[15] Federici adds to this by writing to the women who were killed in witch hunts across the globe: “[Witches are] the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeah woman who poisoned the master’s food.”^[16]

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Everything is connected. Knowing and understanding that there is a very specific reason why the West is seen as superior comes down to the aggressive colonial PR machine that propagates the superiority of whiteness. Anyone who questions that is apprehended, quashed, and in many cases murdered by the powers that be. All we need to understand is that vast civilizations were toppled not only by being conquered, but also by being silenced. We were forced to forget so we wouldn’t know who we are, what we come from, what our lineage, family, culture has taught us, history, language, stories, memories—stolen, robbed, put into museums—to make the West more money, as if we disappeared and went extinct. In Unthinking Mastery, Julietta Singh writes, “The colonized body embodies the histories of its oppression by recognizing in material ways that it is not free in relation to the world that surrounds it.”^[17]

But isn’t our collective human reality the one we make, together? The more I think about the expansion of the body, especially within the context of evolution and how bodies have adapted, I see how much there is to uncover, and how many places we could go. Paulo Freire reminds us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves because “the oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves.”^[18] A possible way of doing this, according to Saidiya Hartman, requires an excavation of the margins of history, meaning we need to collectively gather our histories that have been stolen, taken, in order to excavate the “ruins of the dismembered past” and revive the knowledge systems and practices that were deemed illegitimate, pagan, anti-Christian.^[19] Reimagining history relies on objectivity within social relations, as well as an acknowledgment that all peoples have inherent value.

The optical illusion here is one of power, namely who has it and who doesn’t, and this always comes back to the body. As mentioned through the annunciation of a technique like Taylorism, the way that bodies were used for capitalist gain is most prominently exemplified by the Atlantic slave trade. “The ruthless use of labor power and the extraction of profit are imagined as the consensual and rational exchange between owner and slave. This is accomplished by representing direct and primary forms of domination as coercive and consensual,”^[20] Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, asking, “How is it possible to think ‘agency’ when the slave’s very condition of being or social existence is defined as a state of determinate negation? In other words, what are the constituents of agency when one’s social condition is defined by negation?”^[21] How can we overlook such an imbalance of power? Facing our barbaric interconnected histories as a species means we must also acknowledge what Hartman calls the “brute force of the racial economic order,”^[22] to fully understand how racial capitalism relies on anti-Blackness, and in general how dehumanization of a supposed willing subject—and, yet, paradoxically, a held captive—still coincides with the racial order of the world. We are still entrenched in these systems, and perhaps that’s why we remain beholden to them. But the perversity of optimization, to assume that bodies need only be controlled to mimic machinery has meant again we accept things as status quo when throughout history we’ve seen that one absolute remains: systems and empires always fall. Part of that, I think, is because patriarchal rule is deficient. Men are inherently predictable, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The history of racial classification, or the formative racial optical illusion, starts with François Bernier, a French physician and traveler known as the first person to create a system of human categorization based on “race.” In 1684, he anonymously wrote “Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l'habitent” (New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races of Man That Inhabit It), publishing it in Journal des sçavans, the earliest academic journal published in Europe, where he placed white Europeans as the norm from which other “races” deviated. Going so far as to distinguish four different races, where the Sami or the “Lappons” (Indigenous Finno-Ugric people inhabiting Sápmi, the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula) as the fourth and last race, describing them as “a small and short race with thick legs, wide shoulders, a short neck, and a face that I don’t know how to describe, except that it’s long, truly awful and seems reminiscent of a bear’s face. I’ve only ever seen them twice in Danzig, but according to the portraits I’ve seen and from what I’ve heard from a number of people they’re ugly animals.”^[23] According to Siep Stuurman, this “can be situated at the ‘beginning’ of the long and complex intellectual trajectory of modern racial thought.” Stuurman also concludes, “The contours of the presumed races are in some cases ill-defined, the status of ‘colour’ is, to say the least, unclear, and Bernier’s sketchy classificatory scheme is a far cry from the later, more theoretically-elaborated, racial typologies. What it has in common with later racial thought, however, is that it is exclusively based on physical criteria.”^[24] Stuurman adds in this chilling observation, “Taking into account that this was written shortly before the infamous Code Noir, regulating the Atlantic slave trade, was promulgated by Louis XIV, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Black Africans are considered ‘natural slaves’ by Bernier. Elsewhere he speaks of certain cannibal tribes, like the Brazilians (the proverbial Tupinambá) and the Huron, in which nature has corrupted itself to such an extent that they ‘retain less humanity.’” This reminds me of what Brazilian architect and urbanist Paulo Tavares writes in “The Political Nature of the Forest: A Botanic Archaeology of Genocide,” in The Word for World Is Still Forest: “The fabrication of this epistemology was intimately connected to colonial imaginaries that functioned as one of the most powerful and enduring instruments in the historical extermination of Indigenous peoples.”^[25]

Bernier represents the violent colonial attitudes that determined much of the way colonizers related (or rather, didn’t) to their subjects and, in particular, their bodies. Because he was the first to propose a system of racial classification that extended to all of humanity, his racial categories became the genesis of scientific racism.^[26] Meaning it became the evidence on which modern science was then built, and this, of course, is deeply rooted in modern white supremacist rhetoric. In 1939, Heinrich Himmler, then the head of the Gestapo, praised two leading researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for their work “that has contributed significantly to the scientific recognition of the racial parts of the national socialist view of the world.” The regurgitation of racist rhetoric to murder and kill is not a modern invention either—the petri dish of genocide began with colonization, and we understand that no bodies are safe under this structure of violence that presupposes others’ lives are more worthy of life.

In late 1658 onward until his execution, Bernier was the private physician for Prince Dara Shikoh, the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s son, and then for Dara’s brother and rival, Aurangzeb. In India he was able to confirm many of his findings because “he chose not just to describe men and women from various locales in India but to sort them based on their skin color,” Strings writes in Fearing the Black Body. “In fact, he imagines himself an astute interpreter of existing social categories in India, in which he sees skin color.”^[27] As if seeing color, and the inherent supposed superiority or inferiority in that necessitates an abuse of power—as if claiming domination was all it took to be so.

In an interview with Vinson Cunningham for the LA Times, scholar Robin D. G. Kelley speaks to racial capitalism in particular, and why difference encourages exploitation: “So, for example, property may be capital, in the Marxist sense, but property values are dependent on things that are nonmaterial—that are ideological, or super structural—like race. Capitalism is rooted in a civilization that is based on difference. This doesn’t at all mean that white people are the enemy, or that Black people are all victims, which I totally reject. It doesn’t mean that all white people benefit. It just simply means that capitalism is structured through difference.”^[28] That’s one point I keep thinking back to with this research. So much about understanding the body, our collective bodies, but also our individual ones, is about understanding how society envisages us. Because all of this information is stored in our collective experience, our histories that the entire working of the world is determined upon. A refusal to see how this is not only all connected, but how this influences our future, is something that we have to recognize. There is no future that isn’t tied to reckoning with our past, and we must challenge those who choose to deny their responsibility.

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We wonder how physical disease plots the body—where do these things derive from? Why don’t we understand that the mind is not only connected to the body, but it’s linked—they are two different sides of the same coin. Thoth, the Egyptian god symbolized by an ibis, later returned as Hermes in Greek mythology, seen as the father of alchemy, and was often represented by two snakes intertwining to represent healing.^* Ancient symbolism, with the backing of ancient cosmologies understood to heal, meant facing two fronts. Trauma isn’t always the stored knowledge of what has been done to you; sometimes trauma is about what you’ve done, the mistakes you or your ancestors have made, the grave things they were incapable of metabolizing that now sits in your body, like a deluge, bubbling beneath the surface. We have to begin to understand the spectrums of chronic pain, fibromyalgia, arthritis—and how they are tied to trauma. As ancient civilizations have stated, there is spiritual law, and it’s not as fickle as human law. Disease lives and is carried through families, trauma exists in ways we can’t determine, like hungry ghosts planted in the body, and one day they have to come out. Sooner or later, they need to be exorcized. Isn’t it interesting that certain familial genetics hold cancer, while others don’t? What I’m getting at is that our bodies are flashlights toward our ancestors; to better know them, we can know ourselves. We can trace what they are speaking through our bodies, but we must have the patience to listen. I believe if this work does not happen, it will continue to unfurl and cause pain. What I’m trying to say is that time is running out.

I would argue that science has also shielded and provided a gateway for more violence to occur through the lack of objectivity, through an obsession toward control. We’ve lost sight of ourselves and thus each other. But it’s important to see how bodies are political. Our only path is toward an authenticity that holds all truths. Yours, mine, and everybody else’s on this great and vast Earth.

Footnotes

* “At a cosmic level, the Egyptian God Thoth (Tehuiti) symbolized the mind and memory of the Demiurge (Creator) and at the human level he was connected with the various faculties of the mind, its discerning as well as its analytical qualities. Thoth was the patron of magic because he was the embodiment of intelligence (human and divine), while his Greek counterpart, Hermes, the messenger of the Gods, symbolized the ‘dimension’ of the mind as the intermediate level between the human and the Divine. Hermes also came to represent those intellectual and eclectic qualities (in the human being) that were characteristic of the Hellenic spirit and that allowed the birth of the Hermetic tradition.” Source: https://library.acropolis.org/the-magic-of-thoth-hermes/.