Locating Cure: Leprosy and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging

KALAUPAPA, Hawaii--The spade-shaped Kalaupapa Peninsula on the northern coast of Molokai island might be ideal for a golf resort. Ocean breezes perfume the land. Palms sway, evoking the hula's grace. Waves roll off the Pacific, pushing brilliant white froth onto the foot of the world's tallest sea cliffs. But no golf rounds will be played out here, only a chapter of history born in fear, blighted by lawlessness, cruelty and despair--and redeemed by a young Belgian priest's self-sacrifice. --Mary Ellen Botter, Dallas Morning News In this 2002 travel feature, Mary Ellen Botter entices readers with the language of romantic melodrama. She opens with a brochure-like landscape that sells its scene with metaphors of Hawaiian stereotypes: golfing, perfumed breezes, hula dancers, and dramatic natural formations. Her second paragraph turns to another form of romance, but not the kind celebrated by honeymooners. Instead, she narrates a story of lost, lawless natives and their white, Christian savior. As the story goes, from 1865 till 1969, Hawaiians with leprosy (1) were legally exiled to the Kalaupapa Peninsula. In the first decades of the settlement, new residents were often sold by bounty hunters for $5 to $10 a head or deposited by frightened ship captains in the waters around the cape to swim to safety or drown. Kalaupapa received international attention after 1873 when Belgian missionary Father Damien left his assignment on the Big Island to live among the sick. He died in 1889, five years after being diagnosed with leprosy. In most official histories, the redemptive figure of Father Damien obscures other features of the story of leprosy in Hawai'i, including the development of sulfone antibiotic treatment, which in the 1940s successfully rendered patients noninfectious. Instead of leading with this triumphant narrative of medical discovery, Botter turns away from the experiences of patients with leprosy to the romantic vision of Western self-sacrifice. In focusing on the white missionary as savior, dominant narratives of Moloka'i's history enact a recurring model which perpetually withholds health from the leprous body. Instead of stories introducing patients and assigning them the triumphant label "Cured!", narratives of leprosy in Hawai'i consistently look outside the body to find health. In this article, I read texts as diverse as legal acts, tourist brochures, and a contemporary novel, only to discover surprisingly similar denials of health for people with leprosy, even after antibiotics have eliminated the potential for contagion. Time and again, the threat of infection endures in discourse, persisting beyond the literal course of the disease. These narratives reject the possibility of a healthy leprous body in favor of alternate sites, locating cure in the policies of enforced segregation, in the good works of a Belgian missionary, or in the promise of a future generation. In Lois-Ann Yamanaka's 1997 novel, Blu's Hanging, disability (2) is the secret in the family history. After nearly half the novel and several cryptic references, Bertram Ogata finally explains the scars which haunt the narrative: "Ivah--this hard for me say 'cause been one secret for so long from you--me and your mama, us had leprosy. I like your promise that you neva call us lepers. Don't eva define us again by that disease" (141). While initially Bertram is able to locate his illness in the past tense, his plea against being called "leper" in the present demonstrates the enduring legacy and intense social component of the disease. Instead of seeing health within, Bertram places the hope and the burden of cure upon the bodies of his three children: Ivah, Maisie, and Blu. In turning outside his own body to find health, Bertram repeats the model of externalizing cure found in imperialist narratives of leprosy in Hawai'i. As disability remains the hidden story for much of the novel, it is similarly absent from critical analyses of Blu's Hanging. …