The geography of madness : penis thieves, voodoo death, and the search for the meaning of the world's strangest syndromes

177 Pages·2016·1.11 MB·English

by  Bures

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MADNESS
Copyright © 2016 by Frank Bures
First Melville House Printing: April 2016
Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-373-1
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
v3.1
For Bridgit, for everything
Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we
are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need
mending.
, Moby-Dick
—HERMAN MELVILLE
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. The Case of the Missing Manhood
2. Following Threads
3. Culture Bound
4. Modern Minds
5. Savage Minds
6. Bad Buns
7. American Maladies
8. Mingling Medicines
9. Strange Loops
10. The Dragon’s Tail
11. The Chains That Bind Us
12. The Worm Turns
13. Beyond Belief
14. To the Sea
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
In 1990, I left a small town in the Midwest and went to Italy to spend a
year as an exchange student. What I encountered there was a shock, and
what followed was one of the most difficult years of my life. When I got
home, I was not the same.
How was that possible? How could moving from one place, from one
language, from one culture to another … change who you are? Yet it
did. After one short year immersed in Italian society, I felt like a
different person, and I was disturbed by the depth of this change. I didn’t
feel completely American any more, but neither did I feel Italian. I had,
it seemed, left something behind.
What I didn’t know at the time was that that year abroad marked the
beginning of a quest—one that would take years to understand, let alone
complete. The Geography of Madness is the story of that search, which
would take me to places I’d never dreamed I’d go—to Nigeria, Thailand,
Borneo, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere. In those places I
found wandering fox ghosts and lizards that crawl under your skin,
poison pork, and poisoned minds. I also came to see how our ideas can
kill us, how our beliefs can save us, and how these things quietly
determine the course of our lives.
They can also cause your penis to disappear. That was what I found
when I went to Nigeria to investigate the phenomenon of “magical penis
theft,” where people felt that their genitals had disappeared—that they’d
been stolen away through sorcery. Magical penis theft was known in the
medical literature as koro, and was considered a “culture-bound
syndrome.” The victim feels his (or occasionally her) genitals being
sucked into his (or her) body. If this transpires, death will ensue.
But even as I found myself fascinated by the cases of these thefts,
another question grew in my mind: What would it feel like to live in a
world where such a thing were possible—where at any minute your
penis could be whisked away? This question would lead me, in turn, to
the deeper questions underlying it. Namely: What is culture? What is it
made of? And how are we bound to it?
For much of the twentieth century, this question was fiercely debated,
but in the 1990s—the era of globalization—it was abandoned by serious
thinkers. Instead, they argued that culture could not be defined because
it was everything that we do. Meanwhile, others pointed out that if
culture was everything, then it was also nothing. In the end, the word
came to seem like a hopeless paradox, and the world simply moved on.
But I couldn’t move on. I knew that culture wasn’t nothing. I knew this
because I had looked into the eyes of Starrys Obazi, whose penis had
been stolen on a street corner in Lagos. I knew it because I had felt
culture’s power myself, and had been trying to understand it ever since.
Now, after years of asking questions, after traveling through these
places, I believe I have the answers I sought, not only about what culture
is, but also about how it makes us sick and well, sane and insane; how it
gives us hope and takes it away; how it tells us who we are and who we
are not; how it shapes us and how we shape it.
Much of what you’ll encounter in the pages that follow will seem
impossible, or at least hard to believe, but this is a work of nonfiction.
All conversations and events here took place, and are reproduced as
faithfully as possible. Some grammar has been corrected for reading
purposes, but this was checked with the speakers whenever they could
be reached. More to the point, the worlds I’ve tried to convey here do
exist and are real to the people in them. As you read on, and as we travel
together, I hope they will become more so to you as well, and that the
lines between the real and the imagined, between the familiar and the
foreign, begin to blur. By then, I hope you’ll come to see the part we all
play in creating worlds that look strange from outside but that make
perfect sense from within, and how the strands that hold those worlds
together are the same threads that run through our lives, and that hold
us together too.
1
THE CASE OF THE MISSING MANHOOD
The sun was high and the day was already hot when our car rolled into
Alagbado, a dusty, run-down town on the far edge of Lagos, the Nigerian
mega-city where a young man named Wasiu Karimu was reported to
live.1 His penis had been stolen.
A few days earlier, his name had appeared in the paper: The headline
read: “ .” It said that
COURT REMANDS MAN OVER FALSE ALARM ON GENITAL ORGAN DISAPPEARANCE
a certain Wasiu Karimu was on a bus when he “was said to have let out
a strident cry, claiming that his genital organ had disappeared. He
immediately grabbed [Funmi] Bello, who was seated next to him, and
shouted that the woman should restore his ‘stolen’ organ.”
The two of them got off the bus, and a crowd of “miscreants” swarmed
around Bello, ready to kill her. But a passing police patrol intervened,
stopped them from lynching her, and escorted the two to the police
station. There Karimu told the commissioner “his organ was returning
gradually.”
The paper gave the address where Wasiu Karimu lived, so I decided to
try to find out what exactly had transpired in his pants. A friend named
Toni Kan had lent me his car, and had asked Akeem, his mechanic and
sometimes driver, to take me out to the place.
We drove past clapboard shacks and little restaurants, through huge
muddy pools, past people watching us from doorways, until we came to
the address in the paper. Chickens and goats scattered in front of our
car, which said on the windshield. (Toni freelanced for a few Lagos
PRESS
papers and magazines.)
Wasiu Karimu’s house was an ample, two-story affair with a little shop
next to it. We got out and asked a girl working inside if he lived there.
“Yes,” she said, “but he is not around.”
Akeem went into the yard of the house, and a woman jumped in front
of him. She said she was Wasiu’s mother and began yelling at Akeem to
get out of the yard. He retreated to the car, and for a few minutes, we