The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot (Macmillan)
In old-fashioned museums you can see the unconscious benefactors of mankind, trapped in glass cases — the freaks and monsters of their day, the anomalies, sometimes skeletons and entire, sometimes cut into parts and labelled. When we look at them, fascination and repulsion uneasily mixed, we bow our heads to their contribution to knowledge, but it is hard to locate their humanity. The thread of empathy has frayed and snapped. They have become objects, more stone than flesh: petrified, post-human.
Henrietta Lacks is a medical specimen of quite another kind. No dead woman has done more for the living and yet we can imagine her easily from her photograph, a vivacious woman who was only 31 years old when she died in 1951 in a “coloured ward” in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Beloved by her family, a lively, open-hearted woman, Henrietta died in intractable pain and at the autopsy her body’s interior was pearled by tumours. Towards the end she had been given only palliative treatment, but no one had explained this to her family, who still hoped she might be cured. She left behind a husband and five children, the youngest only a baby. But she also left behind a slice of tissue, a piece excised from the cervical cancer that was her primary tumour. From this sample her cells were cultured.
Previously, researchers had found it frustratingly difficult to keep alive fragile human cell lines, but these cells were robust and multiplied at an astonishing rate. In the years following Henrietta’s death, the cell line, by laboratory convention known as HeLa, became an unparalleled research tool. Cells were sent to laboratories all over the world, bought and sold by research teams.
They could be frozen and their development paused and restarted. Because of them, thousands of experiments on live animals were not needed. Trillions of them are still alive, more than ever grew in Henrietta’s living body. They have been employed in research into the polio vaccine and into the effects of atomic warfare; they were shot into space, used in Aids research. But the woman who generated them remained largely unknown and her family benefited not at all from the unwitting donation of her money-spinning tissues.
The dark, inhuman face of unpoliced science shows itself throughout this story, side by side with the bright face of discovery and humanitarian advance. The ironies are no less bitter because they are plain — today Henrietta’s descendents cannot afford health insurance.
Rebecca Skloot revivifies Henrietta, studying her not only as the originator of her cell line but also as a woman embedded in history. Her absorbing book is not just about medicine and science but also about colour, race, class, superstition and enlightenment, about the painful, transfixing romance of being American. Her tenacious detective work into family history, her crisp and lively summation of the science, are virtues that compensate — just about — for a folksy, intrusive, condescending tone.
Skloot is a teacher of “creative non-fiction” and here the “creative” part consists in zigzagging the chronology and appending picturesque details to humanise the hard data. But is the effort needed? If, when Henrietta’s cells were first brought into the lab, the technician was eating a tuna salad sandwich, do we really need our brains burdened by that information?
It would have been better to trust the story and tell it in as straightforward a way as possible.
Skloot’s final discussion of the ethics of the use of human tissue is followed by nine pages of acknowledgments that are more than usually fatuous and self-regarding and the author’s determination to write herself into the story distracts from the dense factual background.
But The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks succeeds despite itself: it is a fascinating, harrowing and necessary book, marred only slightly by the fact that the author wishes to be considered a heroine for writing it. — Hilary Mantel Guardian News & Media 2010
Rainmaker by Don Pinnock (Jacana)
This novel, praised by Sindiwe Magona and shortlisted for the 2009 European Union Award, starts off as a great story about a Bonteheuwel youth who has no option but to be in a gang to survive. He begins to have dreams that show he is not only descended from the vanished /Xam people but would also be a shaman if he answers the calling. Pinnock weaves the exigencies of the life of this teenage boy, Ky, into the ancient folklore, oral history and rock art of the /Xam of the Cederberg, where he is offered refuge when things get too dangerous for him in Bonteheuwel.
Although Ky is credibly portrayed in his Cape Flats setting and also as a city boy now living close to nature in a remote valley, the best parts of this book are the beautiful dreams and the stories of the /Xam, related by the game ranger who is protecting and teaching Ky. He is gradually transformed from a kid who cannot bear to be called Boesman or Hotnot to a person who respects and loves his antecedents.
Pinnock has done well to bring together the past and present in this novel, ascribing great powers in trance and astral travelling to the young Ky. The out-of-body experiences he goes through are wonderfully described. He redresses to some extent the ongoing humiliation suffered by some descendents of our First People.
I read this novel with considerable uneasiness, however, about whether Pinnock, and incidentally the publisher, could really claim that it is fiction. Clearly the creation story, the shamanic dreams and the /Xam cosmology in Rainmaker draw on the work of the excellent linguists and historians, the Bleek family, and the work done by David Lewis-Williams, Pippa Skotnes and many others.
But I found it disturbing that there are absolutely no references, notes or bibliography, so that it appears that Pinnock has indeed invented all of this novel. Whether or not one wishes to raise issues of (mis)appropriation, it could be argued that Rainmaker’s positive view of the First Peoples should outweigh issues of acknowledgement. Nonetheless, I believe a proper list of sources on which the /Xam part of the narrative is based would have been far better and more respectful.
In addition, at least twice in the novel it is remarked that the history of the /Xam is not found in school history books. But before history was subsumed into human and social sciences when outcomes-based education was introduced, at least one publisher, Oxford University Press, brought out a book, In Search of History, Secondary Book 2 (1996). There, the First Peoples are extensively covered. The fact that few learners now study proper history is a great sadness, and a great mistake, but there have been post-apartheid attempts to tell the whole story of South Africa. This can be bracketed together with the lack of acknowledgement as throwing some doubt on the underpinnings of this novel.
And finally, Rainmaker, which began so well, tails off to a rushed and abbreviated ending. Just when the reader could reasonably expect elaboration of some interesting developments about Ky’s real father, his own future as a shaman, his relationship with his old girlfriend, no more than a brief outline is given and dialogue declines to the trite and obvious. A longer novel, more carefully finished off, would perhaps have sustained the initial promise and provided a really satisfying read for its prospective young readers. — Jane Rosenthal