Author: abeach99

I’m choosing to look at a section of the introduction of Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat. Tweedy recounts a black man who suffered from a stroke, and the conversation that this situation sparked: “In suffering a crippling stroke at age thirty-nine, Jim had become another casualty of inequality, a fresh case that Dr. Wilson could use to illustrate the health burden of being black,” (4).

I found this quote interesting for a number of reasons. For starters, Tweedy uses diction that seems to contrast each other. At the beginning of the sentence, he uses words like “suffering,” “crippling,” and “casualty.” These are words that indicate pain and destruction that have life-altering consequences. However, the last half of the sentence uses words such as “fresh case,” “illustrate,” and “health burden.” In contrast to the previous words, these retain a sense of clinical detachment. They strip away the pain of Jim’s experience in order to relate it to science and medical practices.

I also found the phrase “health burden of being black” very interesting. Pairing the words “health” and “burden” together suggests that not only can health be a burden in terms of illness, but also the very experience of dealing with one’s health is burdensome. The fact that this health burden results from “being black” seems to suggest that African Americans are inherently more likely to experience these health burdens. However, we can see that this is not Tweedy’s intention because he mentions the “casualty of inequality,” which furthers the idea that the inequalities African Americans face results in these health burdens.

Ashlyn Beach

Professors Rivkin-Fish & Thrailkill

ANTH 272

March 4, 2020

Reading Response 2

The text I chose to examine was Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Revisiting the memoir after reading it several weeks ago, I was able to see the ways that different kinds of narratives are expressed. Specifically, I wanted to focus on how Bauby uses the chaos narrative within his memoir.

Bauby seems to employ the chaos narrative when explaining his emotional and mental wellbeing after becoming paralyzed. One aspect of this narrative he draws on is the paradoxical nature of illness narratives, in that they are stories that cannot truly be told. In the Prologue he says, “Paralyzed from head to toe, the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, unable to speak or move,” (Bauby 4). In a literal sense, Bauby cannot physically speak to tell his story. He also says, “There are no words to express it. My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible,” (Bauby 71). His situation is so overwhelming and painful that, even though he is in fact telling us about it, he feels as if his words are not accurately capturing the distress he is experiencing. When describing himself and the other paralyzed patients in the hospital, he refers to them as “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom,” (Bauby 32). The paradoxical language serves as a metaphor for how Bauby views his body as a detachment from his mind and voice. All of these quotations from the memoir reveal the features of a chaos narrative – the inability to actually tell an illness story, and the physical body being devoid of a voice.