<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Me and You and Us and Them</span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>When I first got put into this class, I was ecstatic. I knew of racism running deep in medical history and practice, but I couldn’t have told you many specifics or examples outside of just knowing it existed. I was much more aware of medical malpractice against women, and how deep-rooted that has become. Nonetheless, I was curious, I’m always curious; I like to notice and understand almost everything. As Dionne Brand once said, “My job is to notice…and notice that you can notice.” I think that this quote perfectly demonstrates what Beth is trying to get across for this course. Curiosity is what drives the learning process. Trying to understand practices that seem almost inconceivable and how they affect today’s society is only possible if you’re curious and have the ability to notice. You have to notice not just the specific experiences, but also all of the context that builds onto each story as a whole. </span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this class, slightly afraid that it would be a watered-down version of the true story that I had yet to find. Scared that it wouldn’t be engaging, that maybe the structure of the class would take away from the content we were supposed to be digesting. And yet, only two books in I have found myself filled with more questions than I could ever imagine, and I love it. These questions have only furthered my drive to want to know why how and who and what of every story we read. Even this briefly into the course I have become even more aware of the power behind becoming aware of my own ignorance. Thinking about the research I was doing on the medical malpractice of women and completely ignored how important it was to inform myself of how it also affected people of color. Beth’s course epigraph encapsulates this, the point of the course is to help us notice. Whether that be to notice what we didn’t know to notice or to dive deeper into the parts of history with these stories that maybe we were avoiding. </span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>As we read “Fortune’s Bones” by Marilyn Nelson, it had me constantly thinking. I kept thinking about how badly I wish we could’ve had accounts of who Fortune was and been able to give life to his existence through who he was and not how he was perceived. We notice that this want is impossible, as I know Marilyn Nelson did and intended for us to do as well. In the last work of poetry, “Not My Bones” she attempts to remind us that the story of his bones, and the brutalization of his existence after death was not Fortune. For Fortune’s existence and humanism ran far beyond his flesh and bones. “You can own someone’s body, but the soul runs free (…) For you are not your body, you are not your body.” (Nelson 17). This poem stuck out to me, I kept thinking about it and reading it over and over and over again. It had me thinking about first and second-line jazz funerals when someone dies in New Orleans. Within these jazz funerals, they grieve over the physical body and person being gone at the funeral for the first line, then at the second line, they celebrate the existence and power that the person had in life: their soul. This story was one of the first that we read in this class. Parts of it were uncomfortable, graphic, confusing, and unanswered. However, it only harvested my curiosity, and want to be able to understand what other works and experiences we are going to come across. </span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>This story was uncomfortable for a multitude of reasons, Nelson opened my eyes to the need to incorporate and recognize these uncomfortable realities in order to digest it in its entirety. I also liked how we read this work in class and discussed each part of it. I think that going over what history meant and diving into the meaning of the poetry relating to it helped me connect to the work a lot better than if I read this on my own. I also think that Beth helped prepare me for how I am going to approach future work.</span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Moving forward I want to continue to tackle these stories in the same way that I did “Fortune’s Bones” and to be able to dissect it in a way that I find most helpful. I think the only thing I’m really aiming to do this semester is take in these stories and create a real thorough understanding of this history. I want to be able to digest these stories for what they really are. This includes erasing the narrative of “it was a different time” that plagues minds at times and also not holding people from a different time to the times of today. I also love the fact that it is stressed that the idea of an “isolated incident” isn’t real, and it isn’t something we should ever consider while we are learning. As this course moves forward I only continue to feel ecstatic about the content that we are going to come across and the way that we are approaching the content. </span>
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