iLiza's eyes

Due to a special request, I've decided to revive the blog. I don't really know why I stopped...maybe because I've been so busy that I haven't been able to see any of my friends, let alone think enough to write. Who could have guessed?
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Today, the New York Times has an excellent feature about women in Africa, mostly teenagers, who have have experienced fistulas while giving birth. This basically means that, because their birth canals are so narrow and they lack sufficient medical attention, their insides (inc. urethra and bowels) are ripped apart as the baby comes down the birth canal....

Five hours with your blood and bowels and baby all smeared around in the equator sun on a bumpy carriage on a dusty path.

This image will haunt me all day--the feeling that I'm lying on my back with my dead baby's head coming out from between my legs and I'm frozen in horror as my insides split apart and lay in chaos within me.

I want to puke.

How can women bear to live in a world where their culture forces them to marry young but can't save them from the ailments that result when tiny, undeveloped people give birth? Can the culture even help it? How can they then shun them away as they spew out urine and feces uncontrollably? These girls wallow in their own shit that someone else tossed them into and can't pull them out from.

I imagine being 12 and pregnant; I imagine being now and pregnant. The inexplicable nature of human reproduction that nags my own body implodes itself in them with no one to hold it up. Perhaps this is feminism: that I can feel at one with their ravaged bodies.

I picture being in Africa with the condition that I had: being unaware that my ovary was growing a toxic ball and slowly commiting suicide as it turned on itself; my tubes turning black; the eggs too infected to escape. And I picture the moment that I avoided with surgery--the moment that was so close, the moment I skimmed past with just a little scar-- the moment my body goes into shock from the dead organ within. I see myself convulsing on the floor in violent ceizures and dying slowly on a straw mat in a mud hut; or during the five hour buggy ride to the nearest hospital; and never even knowing why.

posted by iliza @ 11:16 AM