BioMed
A man with anal pain tries a hospital doctor, traditional healers and a guru in Epeli Hau‘ofa’s bawdy satire of shame and cure-seeking.
One of the book's healers says the trouble comes from the human habit of dividing the body into parts and ranking them, prizing some and despising others. Learning to respect the despised part is presented as the route to relief, for one man and for everyone.
The book mocks the idea that important people sit around because of their eminence, joking that they are physically unable to work. Laughing at the body punctures the dignity the powerful claim, and turns snobbery about the body into a weapon against social rank.
When pain sits in a body part nobody will name, the sufferer hides the real cause even from the doctor and offers a respectable cover story instead. The taboo makes the illness harder to treat honestly, because the healer is working from a false account.
Outsiders who fix a local problem by fitting a part made for themselves find the transplant rejected. The book's mock surgery stands for development advice that ignores what the people receiving it actually need and want.
The book can be read as treating the world as a body, with the Pacific as the backside. That is the part nobody wants to think or talk about, yet it is where the pain comes from. Neglect of a region, along with lasting colonial and military control, works like the taboo around an embarrassing organ.
A person in pain who has lost faith in one system does not stay loyal to any other. He moves from hospital doctor to traditional healers to a spiritual guru, and many of them are crooks or harmless but useless. Desperation, not belief in any one tradition, decides where he goes next.
When the official clinic hands out expired painkillers because nothing else is in the country, and everyone has hospital horror stories, people stop trusting it. That loss of trust sends them to rival healers who may be no better.
Global health officials who suddenly embrace traditional medicine can be as foolish as those who dismissed it. They hold a healers' conference in languages the healers barely speak, and the experts and the locals explaining things to them both end up performing for each other.
A small society caught halfway between old and new ways can end up getting the best of neither. Its people stall in the middle, and both its traditional and its modern institutions turn out to be corrupt or ineffective.