LIT 5235-Fall 2025-Okonkwo

The subordination of Africa in health humanities discourse, in studies of literature and medicine more specifically, does not just raise important questions for that interdisciplinary field. It also tacitly devalues African people’s health and wellbeing and under-leverages the twentieth- through twenty-first-century African novel in which African characters’ physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual life and wellness are made more visible, complex, and significant. There are 34 essays in, for instance, the MLA-published volume Teaching Literature and Medicine (2000). None of them centers on anything Africa. Nor does the compilation’s index attenuate the diminution. In this seminar, we will confront and change that erasure. We will focus attention on modern African fiction’s decades-long engagements with matters of health, care, and medicine. Reflecting in formal, thematic, and aesthetic ways the realities of African people’s existence, particularly their persistent straddling of traditional and modern ways of knowing, being, diagnosing and healing in the world, African novels depict characters dealing with various and sometimes “undiagnosed” health challenges, including: alcoholism, anxiety, paranoia, depression, stuttering, poverty, rage, madness, suicide/suicidal ideation, infertility, miscarriage, eating disorder, viral infections, malnutrition, malaria, abiku/ogbanje (sickle cell) crisis, ibeji or cult-of-twins, spirit possession, intersex conflict, war, ecological disasters, PCSD (Post-Colonial Stress Disorder), among other traumas. Through close reading of these select works—Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, Chigozie Obioma’s The Fisherman, Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Are, Buki Papillon’s An Ordinary Wonder, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count—we will titrate African literature’s many contributions to medical/health humanities.