If You Meet these Poets, these Physicians on the Road, Don’t Kill Them!   By Obododimma Oha   Does a poetic or artistic representation of health and illness really matter? What is there in the literary response to health and illness that normal medical discourse can or has not articulated? Is it just a difference in medium or a diffidence of message? As I pondered over the relevance of the project of anthologizing poetic works on health and illness which Anny Ballardini and I embarked upon, I discovered how challenging it was to inquire into health matters from both professional and non-professional perspectives. From my reading of Sheldon B. Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! I am persuaded to view humanity as making a desperate journey to health, struggling with illness on the way, and trying out various kinds of remedies. Kopp writes that: “In every age, men have set out on pilgrimages, on spiritual journeys, on personal quests. Driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope, singly and in groups they come in search of relief, enlightenment, peace, power, joy or they know not what” (p.3). Art is not just one of those remedies they try on the way to health but also the context and indeed the vehicle or medium in which they have tried to make the pilgrimage much more rewarding. Since the medium is also the message (as well as the massage), as we have learnt from Marshal McLuhan, a poetic response might become a meeting point of inscription and prescription, of symptom and signification. Given that health and illness excite those rare moments in which we are challenged to exchange the pathos of corporeality with the logos of our vulnerability, recognizing that the serpent of the desert that became a staff and became healer inaugurated an undecidable semiotic for the wellness of the world. In the end, it is not the Muse that is sick alone in music; it is also us in our reading of the language of feeling. Already textualized and divergently read, the body is a suitable site where health and illness are part of the expression of an ongoing struggle to reconcile the meanings of life and death. Indeed, “… a necessary condition governing any medical activity is an emphasis upon the value of our bodily existence,” as observed by Jean Starobinski in A History of Medicine (p. 16). Health and illness are principally about bodies – the conditions of bodies and how agents of some sort try to intervene in the (re)conditioning of such bodies. Health and illness are embodiments of narratives or the narrativizations of bodies – bodies of humans and beasts, bodies of land such as villages, cities, countries, continents; bodies abstract and bodies tangible; imagined bodies and real bodies; floating bodies and anchored bodies; bodies of bodies and spirit bodies. The geography of these variable bodies presents interesting “thoughtscapes” that cannot easily elude the poet for whom the body remains a wonderful art form, a complex text, the signifier that is the signified, and indeed the site of inspiration. Anny Ballardini and I felt that asking poets to present their reflections on health and illness at a time that transformations in the media of writing were becoming more and more stunning in their patterns would indeed represent a significant display of conversations. And we were proved right: works that were submitted turned out to be bodies of thought that health workers and all scientists of corporeality cannot afford to ignore.  Some submissions came out clearly to represent health as a corporeal narrative in which the observed or investigated body does not just suggest symptoms as ways of talking about its condition, but also becomes the epic tale of the soul housed in it. A work like Jane Hope’s The Secret Language of the Soul has provided an extensive historical, religious, and cultural survey of enduring ideas about how the health of the human body derives from harmony with the spiritual and the entire creation. Indeed, health is multidimensional and so it is not surprising that some cultural works take us back interesting connections that could be made in its articulation. Anny Ballardini, my virtual companion and co-editor, was such a wonderful source of inspiration as she frequently provided insights that gave the project a wider application and meaning. During our online brainstorming on the title and scope of the project, she threw in the brilliant idea of the metaphoric health or illness of government and societies, and so in the announcement we built this in: The present contextualization could broaden to include the idea of a nation as a single community, a constitutional body characterized by illnesses or healthy states. It could also visualize, and still not be limited to, various economic systems with their dangerous trends/breaths sweeping away hopes or bringing in new ambitious projects, be them healthy or ill. The same history of art or literary criticism could be reviewed under the lens of variables that determine the health or the illness of the category.  Interestingly, our project was born at a time the world was deep in what was described as an “economic melt-down,” an interesting metaphor that tends to present the wealth of nations as a huge mountain of snow which, at the touch of international economic heat, began its change of state and collapse. The illness of the economic system in many countries, particularly economic institutions like banks, is gradually clearing but the recuperation appears to be slow indeed. The health of wealth also matters! As it is with global economy, so it is with the governance of many countries. Many countries of the Third World, especially in Africa, have been experiencing instability ranging from ethnic conflicts to the rigging of elections and the perpetuation of regimes. These, very clearly, constitute serious national illness that could serve as inspirations to some works we hoped to receive from Africa and the rest of the Third World. As our project progressed, events in some countries justified our desire to extend the scope to the illness of nations. In Nigeria, my own country, the President, Shehu Musa Yar’ Adua, took ill and was flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment. His absence was not only very long, it was also somewhat mysterious for not even the key figures in his government were sure that he was alive. In the Nigerian media, the discourse about a president ruling from his sick-bed in Saudi Arabia, later ambulanced into his country at night and kept away from even the members of his government, or a “dead man ruling Nigeria,” became dominant. Thinking about Nigeria’s ailing president leads one into thinking about ailing and dying nation states. From Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, one learns that a nation could become an abiku, a Yoruba word that refers to a spirit-child who lives in the in-between of the human and the spirit world, having made a vow before birth to die soon and be reborn in an endless cycle. Okri explains: The spirit-child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child. There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilizations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. (p.487) The post-colonial condition of in-betweenness and anxiety demonstrated in the feelings of being nationally or culturally unwell is indeed a partaking in the condition of the abiku.   Let’s say Nigerians have raised the discourse of their ailing president to the level of art, for one gets very interesting connections between one man’s illness and narratives about the illness that is unreliable governance, or how a ruler’s illness is a text that symbolizes prevailing national malady and even prophesies a greater manifestation of catastrophe. Henri Troyat’s Ivan the Terrible provides one with an engaging account of how the illness of Vasily III, the Grand Duke of Moscow, ushered in the scourge that was the reign of Ivan, the first Czar who, according to a Boston Records’ blurb comment, had the reputation of ascribing to himself “the power of a god” and left behind “a record that would make Satan himself blush….” Vasily wanted an heir badly and had to forcefully remove his wife Salomonia to a convent to make it possible for him to take another wife, Elena. The second marriage did not immediately give him a son and the Grand Duke had to carry out several rituals and also asked for prayers from monks before his wife could give birth to a son, who was rumoured to have been fathered secretly by Prince Obolensky-Telepnev, who was close to Princess Elena. Vasily was struck by the strange illness that first manifested as a sharp pain on his left thigh while he was riding through a forest on a hunting expedition. The hunter became the hunted. Troyat’s account suggests that Ivan the Terrible was a punishment, indeed a plague unknowingly inflicted on the kingdom by his father, Vasily who had “forced” his birth. Like Ivan the Terrible, bad rulers are often metaphorized as an “illness” that scourges the populations they govern. Indeed, the significance of our project on poetic representations of health and illness is located in the wider sphere where readers are invited to consider the general well-being of an individual within the context of an imagined deteriorating health of larger communities, including the global community. A threat to that art form called the human body in respect of a singular case also represents a threat to other human bodies and to the body of community. The call for respect for human life, or the expression of the human right to life, remains valid and cogent. Perhaps one should return to Ben Okri’s statement cited earlier, to derive an additional meaning of our project. Okri says that art forms, too, partake in the condition of the spirit-child. This project is indeed one of such, for it is art that returns to be reborn as medical science. Our contributors in the volume do not just present narratives in interestingly diverse modes; their narratives are also diagnoses about diagnosis, therapies about therapy, and recommendations about preventions. As the world gets more and more reckless in its march to civilization, disrupting its balance and threatening survival, this return of art to its medical forms, and vice versa, becomes urgent. Life may be short and art long, but life that knows its art is less painful, less crushing. References Kopp, Sheldon B. (1976) If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him, New York: Bantam Books. Hope, Jane (2003) The Secret Language of the Soul, San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Okri, Ben (1996) The Famished Road, Ibadan/London: Safari/Spectrum Books Starobinski, Jean (n.d.) A History of Medicine, S.A.: Editions Rencontre & Edito-service/Library of Science & Invention. Troyat, Henri (1986) Ivan the Terrible (Trans. Joan Pinkham), New York: Berkley Books.