Sherry Chandler

The Factories of Lost Children

Just read this. I can’t excerpt from it.

I found this little tidbit while reading a NYTimes review of a new memoir by a Masuda Sultan, a Muslim woman of Afghan heritage:

Her family escaped Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1983 when she was 5 by hiring a car to spirit them across the treacherous Khojak Pass into Quetta, Pakistan. She grew up in Flatbush and Flushing, which has the city’s largest Afghan enclave, and was a star student, though one not immune to newcomer foibles. Through high school, she writes drolly, she confused the words “prostitute” and “Protestant” and sometimes walked by a church with the nervous curiosity of someone passing a brothel.

There are those who may think she wasn’t so far wrong, if you define prostitution broadly. [Explanatory note: Prostitute: "One who sells one's abilities, talent, or name for an unworthy purpose." I had the world's Falwells and Dobsons in mind, folks, but I didn't express that very well.]

More, on a more serious note, from the review:

In telling her story, she has joined the growing ranks of Muslim women who are offering an insider’s view of Muslim life at a post-9/11 moment when anxious Americans are curious, as Ms. Sultan says, about “what drives Muslims, how do they operate behind closed doors.”

In the memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Azar Nafisi describes a women’s book club that debates the painful conflicts of living under Islamic law. In the novel “Brick Lane,” Monica Ali writes affectingly about a Bangladeshi in London in an arranged marriage whose sister elopes in a “love marriage.” And a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Nomani, published “Standing Alone in Mecca,” about her pilgrimage to Islam’s most holy site last year.

More are on their way: Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights champion, will have a memoir out in May. And Ms. Ali’s editor, Wendy Walker, is publishing a memoir in the fall by Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who was gang-raped by order of a tribal court to avenge her brother’s supposed misconduct.

David Ebershoff, an editor at large at Random House who edited Ms. Ebadi’s book, said that these books have struck a chord with American readers because “the personal is a prism into the larger geopolitical story.” Americans, he said, also respond to the conflicts of women having to juggle their working lives with more traditional roles of wife and mother — however perilous their experiences might be. In her memoir, Ms. Ebadi writes of the night that she was summoned to jail. On the way out the door she tells her daughters to order a pizza for dinner.

No doubt you know by now that a $2.4 million study of the efficacy of prayer in aiding recovery after heart surgery has proved a little less than conclusive. According to the NYTimes:

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

I will leave it up to better minds to point out that such studies are both bad science and bad religion.

What has always disturbed me is the coerciveness of these ascertions that people who are prayed for do better. Implicit in these statements is that atheists or agnostics or just people who don’t think they have an in with God somehow don’t have the spiritual resources needed to combat their disease. They need the help of righteous strangers. When such statements come from authority figures such as doctors, people who seem to have your fate in their hands, the effect is to create a sort of healthcare under class.

It’s a Bell Curve sort of argument: the fault is in you that you don’t have sufficient faith or a big enough prayer circle. It’s like the statements I’ve seen that optimists recover better than pessimists. As if you should all of a sudden change your whole mind set or else you’re going to die. Sort of takes away your freedom to look the truth straight in the eye, doesn’t it?

As a medical editor/writer, I have spent the last couple of decades educating physicians away from medical jargon like “the patient failed treatment.” Perhaps understandably, there is a tendency in medicine toward language that blames the patient. I may be oversensitive here, but this prayer business looks to me like one more example of placing blame on the sick for being sick.

According to William S. Ward’s A Literary History of Kentucky (The University of Tennessee Press, 1988), the first book read in Kentucky was Gulliver’s Travels. The year was 1769. Here is his account:

By pre-arrangement, Boone’s younger brother, Squire, and John Stewart brought fresh supplies from North Carolina through Cumberland Gap and up the Warrior’s Path to a point about four miles west of Pilot Knob where they rendezvoused with Boone and Findley and camped with them near a small stream in what is now Clark County. Here during the evenings Squire Boone read aloud from Swift’s satire… On one occasion Stewart returned to camp and reported that he, like Gulliver, had been to Lorbrulgrud, the capitol of Brobdingnag, and killed two of its inhabitants. He had, in fact, killed two buffaloes. The name Lorbrulgrud, which these campers gave the creek, is still used today, though in the much-shortened form Lulbegrud.