If only we could keep our blood in our bodies where it belongs. But the stuff insists on getting out, through accident, design or metaphor.
Lawrence Hill’s new book, Blood: The Stuff of Life, is a cry for common sense over beliefs and prejudices. We cannot live without our blood. But this life-giving substance has also been used to divide us, to spawn ethnic and racial hatred, and to justify all kinds of crimes and atrocities.
Hill’s book, published by House of Anansi Press, comprises the 2013 Massey Lectures aired on CBC Radio’s Ideas series.
His earlier books include the novels The Book of Negroes and Any Known Blood, and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.
In this volume, Hill follows what he calls a lifelong obsession with blood into numerous fields. He write about how our notions of blood have evolved and how blood is tied up with truth and honour.
Yes, Lance Armstrong and crew appear in this discussion. No mountain in the Tour de France was too high for Armstrong and his teammates to cheat their way over. Hill writes about one day in 2004 when the crew’s bus driver feigned engine trouble in order to give the riders time to remain inside and undergo blood transfusions.
Hill also writes in this chapter about stem cell research, tainted blood scandals and blood donation policies.
“Blood, to us,” he writes, “is sacred.”
It’s also the perfect metaphor for identity and belonging — so muuch so that we buy into the metaphor completely.
Hill relates a volunteer trip to Niger at age 22 with several Quebec volunteers. For him, the journey was a voyage back to roots and his father’s ancestral slave forebears. Back to an African identity for a boy who had grown up in a mixed-race family in a white suburb of Toronto.
He wound up in hospital in Niamey with gastroenteritis. He needed blood transfusions. He also needed those travelling companions, who ended up sleeping on the floor of his hospital room and basically keeping him alive.
Everything changed in Hill’s body and mind during that hospital stay. Staring at those blood bags — and thinking about where that blood might have come from — gave him a different view of blood, in all of its shades.
“If the donor had been a black man or woman, did the transfusion make me more African? Of course not. My blood had been boosted and changed, but I was the same person. Its real impact, in terms of my body and soul, was an entirely private matter. Race has nothing to do with one’s true blood, or skin colour, and everything to do with perception — self-perception and the perceptions of others.”
That’s the theme that sustains Hill’s ramble through blood matters for the rest of the book. He covers a lot of ground, from adoption, citizenship and discrimination (his mother, Donna Hill, argued against federal immigration policy in the early 1950s while working for the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights) to First Nations.
One chapter discusses our fascination for bloodshed in fairy tales and Twilight tales, the French Revolution, sports and sacrifices. He ends by discussing bllood screts, from Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress, Sally Hemings, to Holocaust survivors to long-lost ancestors.
He draws on plenty of Canadian examples. He writes in a lucid, conversational voice that I also heard in person here in Guelph two weeks ago when Hill spoke during the Massey Lectures.
Also here in Guelph this past weekend, I caught a tie-in to Blood. The local film festival included a screening of Hue: A Matter of Choice by Canadian filmmaker Vic Sarin.
He took us around the world to look at colourism, a form of discrimination within ethnic groups based on skin colour.
We met a skin-whitening mogul in the Philippines who launched her business mostly as a backlash against childhood trauma over having been called dark. Ethical questions? Her daughters are now part of the business.
Sarin also took us to a compound housing albino children in Tanzania, who must be protected from threats of mutilation and murder by witch doctors using their body parts for “healing” rituals.
From blood to skin, plenty of paradoxes and questions about what’s barely beneath the surface.