Okwuanya Pius-Vincent
The day could pass for any other
day. It started as a sunny bright day which was a rarity in a week where the
heavens were either pummeling the earth with stone-like hails or caressing it
with a careless drizzle that was as frustrating as it was intermittent. Thus
when I woke up in the morning and saw the rays of sunlight sneaking through the
window and gnawing at my eyes, I knew that I had no other excuse. I had been
wishing that the week’s pattern would continue on that Sunday as I was
frantically searching for reasons to not go to church. I opened my window to glare at the sun but it
was just there smiling indulgently like a teacher trying to pass a lesson to a
particularly thick student. However,
as I started washing up in preparation for
the Sunday Mass, I did not realize what the lesson was. But as soon as I
entered the church, I knew why I had come. The singing was a tad subdued and
lacked enthusiasm, the usually packed pews were empty and the spaces between
the congregation were more pronounced as the worshippers seemed intent on
avoiding any sort of contact with anybody. The highlight of the lesson came
when the priest invited the congregation to share the sign of peace. The
invitation by the priest became a prelude to pandemonium as random murmuring
rent the air. Men and women who were already too far from each other drew
further away as they tried to wave in the most awkward at the man who was sitting less than five feet
away. Some found it funny; others with their gazes non-committal stared blankly
into space as they waited for another cue from the priest. The priest on his
part was solemn, his silence was prolonged. In his eyes I saw his apprehension
and his defeatist demeanor. Our eyes met as he started to genuflect at the
altar. He was a kindred spirit who appreciates the implication of the trends
which has been informed by the outbreak of the ebola pandemic. Men who have
often struggled to maintain any sort of closeness to each other have been given
reasons to be further apart. At the end of the holy mass which is a Catholic
service, I observed as men and women who avoided contact in the church brushed
each other heavily while trying to get through the gate. There were also random
clusters of other worshippers who shared the lesson from the Bible readings of
the day. I on my part had many lessons but most of them were not from the
readings.
This is not just the case in the churches; in
the marketplaces, scared traders and their customers who found it difficult to
shake hands in the church grapple to invent ways of transacting businesses
without the manual exchange of cash. In
the buses and other means of transport, a sweaty man is a red flag. Niccolo
Machiavelli had once written that men are configured to be selfish. Sigmund
Freud toed similar lines while he praised the impact of the society and culture
for reining in the ego. It would appear that the latest outbreak of the deadly
Ebola virus is threatening to return man to his animalistic default. Men are
losing the sense and the need for touch which brings them together to nosophobia. The implication may rankle
through time if the enforced distance becomes the status quo.
Interesting scenes jumped at me from a busy
road on a Monday morning. A man who was ran over by a hit and run driver lay in
a heap at the center of the road. There were lots of people but then there was
no one. The general chorus of the crowd was “ebola”. As I reached the scene,
someone had paved a way through the crowd and was putting the unconscious man
into a bus. I was impressed by such touch of bravery and humanness which can
also be considered stupid in the nosophobic
background but a short rotund woman with a glowing fair skin poured cold water
on my elation. “Na him younger brother na” she had said in the local pidgin.
The scene left me distraught and existential. What if it had been me? I left
with the conviction that I could have bled out on the sidewalk. Like a whole
lot of us, I have often found myself in a locale where I have no immediate
brothers.
This newest cause of this
collective nosophobia has some ramifications
on faith. The faith of man in his neighbor who he had started to see as a
little more than a vector and his faith in God who he has been told many a
times by authorities that He cannot help him. Karl Marx had earlier stated that
religion is the opium of the masses; maybe religion is the opium we need to
anesthetize us from the grueling confrontation with our insensitive egocentrism,
our morbidity and our mortality. When we are faced with a disease that is
highly communicable and that has no tested and proven cure, it is the time to
take a leap of faith. That is, the kind of faith that made the United States of
America to give their afflicted citizens a drug that is yet to be tested on
human subjects. Faith is not advising or taking a salt bath nor is it taking
one’s own urine. It is the addressing of real problems with effort-based and
reasonably possible solutions. It becomes difficult in the 21st
century society where faith is subjected to the “Thomasic” lens where touching
is believing because now we can no longer afford to touch.
“It is all in his touch” sang the
legendary artiste, Celine Dion. In that song, she communicated surreptitiously
the importance of touch and suggests that love cannot be heard or seen but
felt. The loss of touch poses another
palpable challenge. Touching is critical in creating bonds and building
friendship. It is the fastest and the most precise way to communicate emotions
and is also important in the development of attachment. What is there in a
mother’s caress that soothes the infant? It is worrying that one of the
preventive measures of this ebola outbreak is to avoid touching as often as
possible. Matthew Hertenstein, a doctor
in Psychology underlined the importance of touch when he stated that with the
voice, one can only differentiate two distinct signals but a touch can
communicate multiple positive emotions like joy, love, gratitude and sympathy.
These are the kind of emotions that the dreaded ebola is threatening to
eviscerate from the society.
Touches can increase the speed of
communication, Laura Guerrero, coauthor of Close
Encounters: Communication in Relationships who researches non-verbal and
emotional communication at Arizona State University submits that if we are
close enough to touch, it is usually a signal to something. She notes that
human beings feel more connected when they are touched. It is true that we may
not be able to see the impact of touch but Hertenstein feels that it is a great
bonding experience which sees the oxytocin levels go up as the heart rate slows
down. The climax of our humanity is in our ability to touch. To coin a phrase; to
touch is human and thus, any situation that dictates that we do not touch
strips off our humanity. Two hundred years ago, a creature that looked slightly
human was sighted running through the woods of Aveyrnon in Southern France.
Once he was captured, the scientist surmised that he was eleven years and had
run away from home for much of his childhood. One of the renowned psychiatrists
at the time Phillipe Pinel concluded that the child was an incurable idiot but
there was an alternative suggestion from his attendant, Itard who felt that the
child who he had named Victor had been deprived of human physical touch which
had retarded his developmental capacities and had made him profoundly averse to
human society. After therapy, Victor
improved but never regained full normalcy.
This enforced loss of human
physical touch may have strong social consequences. It may cause
self-destructive habits like chain smoking, alcoholism and even
self-mutilation. It can also lead to compulsive sex, physical violence,
aggressiveness, rape and sexual dysfunction and abuses. There have been many psycho-analyses
of deviants which traced the origin of their deviance to the absence of human
touch during their formative years. Dr.
J.H Prescott earlier suggested in a research that touch deprivation in
childhood could lead to physical violence. He found out that most juvenile
delinquents and criminals come from abusive parents. A greater percentage of
the world’s most prolific serial killers came from homes where there were
scarcities of the loving touch that makes man human. It is thus easy to feel
afraid for the future of our society in a world where science, technology and
most pressingly diseases has dictated an aversion for touch. These are not the
times when you will present a handshake to a stranger, an acquaintance or even
a friend. The question that dominates
the consciousness of any man when he runs into a friend currently is “To shake
or not to shake?”
The absence of touch could indeed
render one susceptible to other diseases. Psychoimmunologist Steve Suomi had
argued that touch deprivation can suppress the response of the immune system.
He studied the relationship between physical contacts and the ability of the
body to respond to an immunological challenge, like a tetanus shot. He found
out that there exists a direct relationship between a one year old monkey’s
ability to respond to produce antibodies in response to an immunological
challenge and the amount of contact the monkey received in the first six or
seven months of life. In studies where young monkeys were separated from their
mothers, Suomi found suppressed immune response including subdued natural
killer cells activity (Natural killer cells are the front line of the immune
system and are well known for warding off viral and cancer cells). The lack of
touch could be telling on the ebola patients who sees themselves in an
unfamiliar situation where he must have to suffer alone to avoid the risk of
spreading the highly contagious disease. It is unfamiliar in the sense that in
an African society, sickness sometimes forces a family reunion with the whole
immediate and sometimes extended families gathering to send their wishes and
express their concern. A nurse, Monia Sayah, that worked in Guinea at the start
of the ebola outbreak spoke to the guardian newspapers about the disease but
one part of her interview echoed. She expressed the desperation of the patients
who are mostly alone. According to her, they craved contact and would hold them
tightly through their hazmat suits as they struggled to hang onto life. It
would seem that touching is very important to the patients who cannot be
touched. I could remember my childhood in those occasions in my tender years
when I would be bitten by an ant. My first reaction was usually to cry but then
my mother would rush out. I will simply present the bitten part to her. My
mother was not a doctor or a nurse and had never been one but I found out that
her touch in that painful part suddenly relieved or ameliorated the pains. Such
was the power of touch. Pregnant women in the labour rooms crave it as they
hold onto nurses they may not have hitherto seen at the most critical points in
their lives, drawing strength from strangers as the perform the miracle that
makes women so great.
But will we get the touches
again? I doubt. I received a broadcast via the social network. The broadcast
was tagged Top Ten Most Unsuspected Ebola
Sources to Be wary about (By a Concerned Citizen) and basically listed all
forms of routine kindnesses as possible ebony sources. It advised against the
sharing of pen in banking halls, sharing powders and cosmetics and even helping
someone who had fallen down or who wants to climb a height. I am neither
criticizing the message nor the sender because the message may have emanated
from deep concern and genuine fear, I am merely pointing out that the very
basis of our humanity is under threat of extinction by a very terrible
disease. Why are we scared of a potential
Biblical apocalyptic Armageddon when the battle for our humanity has already
started? I recently encountered a mother who was beating her five year old son
in a market for handshaking his mother’s friend. The friend stood at the side
stupefied as the over-dramatic but possibly cautious mother bought a sachet
water and a soap to watch the boys hands amidst his tears. The woman soon went
to buy meat from a butcher and was touching the meat with her bare hands while
the son watched. A lesson was served but a lesson was lost too.
The task facing us in this viral
outbreak is maintaining the vestiges of our humanity towards ensuring that it
is not killed by the disease too. Because this disease may later be defeated but
the cost of its widespread expedient psychosocial adaptations and some inbred
reflexes may not depart from the society. If we survive the war, let us also
dispose ourselves towards surviving the sort of peace we are engineering as a
consequence of the ebola virus; A “separate peace”.
I am not advocating that
preventive measures should not be taken against this disease; I am merely
stating that panic may not help us individually or as a society. Permit me to sign
off with some facts extracted from www.ebolafacts.com.
Casual contacts do not spread the disease but we do need to avoid contact with
fruit bats and monkeys, someone who is VISIBLY
sick with the disease and the
dead body of anyone who died of the disease.
Hamlet had felt in the
Shakespearean Drama “Hamlet” that “To be or not to be” was the most pressing
question. However, currently the most important question of man especially in
West Africa is “To touch or not to touch.”
okwuanyavin@gmail.com
@Tovincentokwy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment