warmary
essay by marina manoukian
alright. we’re going to talk about typhoid mary. one last time, i promise.
it was not mary’s fault that her body was hospitable. it was not mary’s fault that there was no cure.
she wasn’t discovered as a fluke. an epidemic fighter by the name of george a. soper, who was investigating the outbreak at oyster bay, tracked her down. her work as a cook wasn’t directly her downfall either, for almost everything she handled would be exposed to high temperatures thus killing the bacteria. instead it was a frozen dessert “which Mary prepared and of which everybody present was extremely fond. This was ice-cream with fresh peaches cut up and frozen in it.” in the beginning there is always a woman and a piece of fruit. whether an apple, a pomegranate, or a peach. an ovarian symmetry persists in propagation.
mary didn’t believe that which she could not see. in her defence, what would you do if a man showed up at your door demanding samples of piss and shit and blood, insistent that you were an accomplice to a crime, unwitting or not.
soper kept tracking mary down. she was increasingly bullish and refused to acknowledge any part in the infection. soper called mary a proved menace to the community. mary retorted that there had been no more typhoid where she was than anywhere else. there was typhoid fever everywhere. the department of health and the police hunted her down. after administering the tests and fully confirming her role as a carrier, she persisted in her denial while they forced her confinement.
after suing for her release three years later she was freed on the grounds that she cease working as a cook. she did not abide by these stipulations. “none of the other limited range of domestic jobs available to a woman in 1910 paid as well as cooking, and working conditions for laundresses and factory workers were much tougher.” when she couldn’t work as a cook she had no home. without other means she continued to work continued to cook continued to infect.
when soper discovered her once more she was again sent to north brother island. this time there was less of a struggle.
she never fully admitted that she agreed with the diagnosis but the fact that enough around her accepted it meant that perhaps she could no longer go about her life in the usual fashion.
no one came to her aid while she was sick and no one came to claim the small sum she left behind. for all intensive care purposes she was alone.
it’s funny that we don’t have other accounts of asymptomatic carriers of the like. then again, how can we expect others to self-report an unrecognizable lack.
‘use,’ collage by marina manoukian.
consider war as a disease. it spreads from one to another while borders are shut hoping to keep out the infection hoping to contain peace. those considered to be instigators are shut up and isolated.
consider that war is self-induced. a mass hysteria of its own. an auto-immune condition that erupts from within.
“war is a disease, a disease not of individuals, but of countries.” this metaphor is neither new nor controversial. but often it is treated as an inevitably malady, something to be contained and limited but unavoidable. laying skeletons and genes bare to decode a resistance to nature while unable to ascribe a resistance to ourselves.
almost everyone is a warmary. asymptomatic carriers who go about their daily business because their own personal lives aren’t interrupted by the sickness. never mind the fact that it is often those daily habits that contribute to the suffering of others, whether witnessed or not.
what would it mean to stop that spread of transmission? how can a sickness that ripples through us all be contained? such questions reveal the limits of the metaphor as well as of our own coping mechanisms.
carrying it within ourselves the potential to spread to aggravate is great. typhoid mary persisted with her habits because it was all she knew. other options were more difficult. they always are.
we have to question the systems that keep us entrenched in asymptomatic warfare.
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metaphors can easily be stretched thin, like butter scraped over too much bread. metaphors can spread like an infection, drawing dangerously false equivalences like the recent economist article that i will not dignify with a link. or become kindling to inflame without elaboration for the sake of a buzzing headline.
war on a virus is proclaimed, willfully oblivious to the fact that a virus cannot sign a peace treaty. aiming for an annihilation of the abstract regardless of the bodies that lie in the wake. bodies are just carriers, patients made culpable by their visibility.
so of what use is this warmary analogy when nothing is quite like another and straws grasped at are hollow nonetheless. perhaps the appeal lies in its ability to reveal complicity without malice. a banality of evil that is at once benign and malignant like a cancer cell who claims it’s just trying to survive like all the rest. but what’s to be gained from acting like there’s opposing sides when there’s only one body.
marina manoukian is a reader and writer and collage artist. she currently resides in berlin while she studies and works. she likes honey and she loves bees. you can find more of her words and images at marinamanoukian.com or twitter/instagram at @crimeiscommon.