What’s blood got to do with it?
In his Massey Lectures, author Lawrence Hill explores how the essence of life unites and divides us
Lawrence Hill comes face to face with his own blood many times a day. He watches crimson drops appear as he pricks his fingertips to measure his glucose levels to control his diabetes.
As a child, he was transfixed by the jarring trail it once left, dripping to the pavement from a cut on his wrist.
As a young volunteer in Niger, the gift of blood from someone he’ll never know saved his life. In Mali, a mosquito infected his bloodstream with malaria.
Hill was born to a white mother and a black father, and now has his own blended family of five children. He has spent years pondering: what’s blood got to do with it.
So it makes sense that Blood: The Stuff of Life was his chosen subject for the 2013 CBC Massey Lectures.
“Blood really jolts us and electrifies us,” says Hill, 56. “Everybody has a story. And there are so many ways to talk about blood.”
Bloodletting to blood lust, blood as sacrifice to the gods, the key to restoring health or an instrument of evil by perpetrators of genocide.
“What I’ve tried to show is how blood unites us and divides us,” said the Hamilton author during a recent interview in Toronto.
It is a powerful life force that has inspired artists and philosophers. The five litres coursing through the average adult’s veins and arteries are constantly being replenished. Blood has 4,000 components and carries many secrets, from our DNA to our alcohol consumption.
“The magic of blood has the potential to turn toxic when it becomes a metaphor for racial, ethnic or family identity.”
LAWRENCE HILL
AUTHOR
Collectively, we donate 92 million units worldwide each year.
“The magic of blood has the potential to turn toxic, however, when it becomes a metaphor for racial, ethnic or family identity,” Hill writes.
The annual Massey Lectures — published in book form, delivered in five instalments across Canada and broadcast on the CBC Radio program Ideas — were launched in 1961 as a forum for leading thinkers to explore contemporary ideas. Lecturers have included literary critic Northrop Frye, author Margaret Atwood, theologian and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier and former politician and diplomat Stephen Lewis. Hill opens his lectures Oct. 15 in Montreal and his final one is in Toronto on Nov. 1.
His five essays in Blood are an engaging and provocative mix of science, anthropology, pop culture and social commentary. He saw the yearlong project as an opportunity to build on themes of race and identity he has explored in his non-fiction and novels, while also forging into new territory.
That new ground includes the politics of blood donation, from the segregation of blood used for transfusion in the United States during the Second World War, to current Canadian restrictions on gay male donors. Once banned from giving blood, they are now only permitted to donate after five years of celibacy.
As a runner who once had Olympic aspirations, Hill is mesmerized by the role of blood in transporting oxygen to an athlete’s muscles, and the complex blood doping schemes that disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong and other top competitors turned to in the name of boosting performance.
“Blood is key to supremacy in endurance sports and therefore it’s key to cheating,” he says.
He also delves into the way blood has been hijacked as a means of defining race and family, and in turn, the attitudes and laws that surround them.
“Antiquated notions of blood guide our social policies,” he says, whether it was internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War or federal legislation aimed at restricting the numbers with First Nations status — and the accompanying right to services.
He explores the arcane notion of the “one-drop rule,” a prevailing attitude that categorizes anyone with the slightest trace of African ancestry as black rather than white. The obsession with defining racial mix was central to slavery, segregation and South African apartheid. And it’s a debate that still swirls around U.S. President Barack Obama.
“We are controlled, I think subconsciously, by our ridiculous, antiquat- ed, antediluvian ideas,” says Hill. “We act as if a person’s race shows up in their blood. Blood figures in our notions of citizenship and family.” Racial identity was the subject of his 2001 book Blackberry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White and has been at the heart of his fiction, including The Book of Negroes. The bestselling 2007 novel is a sweeping story of slavery that reaches from Africa to America and is now in production as a television miniseries. While the scope of Blood is daunting, Hill packs his essays with fascinating details while tackling the bigger philosophical questions. He moves from the musings of Aristotle to the opinions of Gloria Steinem. Blood spills forth from the Old Testament, Shakespearean verse and Seinfeld scripts. Bloodthirsty masses fuelled Roman gladiators and death by guillotine during the French Revolution. They are also at the heart of the fictional modern-day phenomenon The Hunger Games. Blood even has a connection to the poetry he remembers from childhood. The playful rhythms of A.A. Milne’s “Disobedience,” enjoyed by many a child curled up in a mother’s lap, has the power to lull and captivate by mimicking the beat of blood pulsing through the veins. When read aloud, Hill notes in his book, “it feels as if you are swimming in your own bloodstream.” It’s one of the many personal experiences Hill weaves through Blood, from childhood stitches to his diabetes diagnosis a decade ago.
While the topic has been an enduring obsession, once he was immersed in the year-long project, “I was surprised at how many intimate intersections with blood I have had, and how much I had to say.”
Chances are it will provoke readers and listeners to reflect on their own experiences. But Hill also aims for something more.
“What I hope is at least it might shake us into a little bit of awareness of the absurdity of (certain) ideas that circulate around in the back of our minds unexamined.” Lawrence Hill will deliver his fifth and final Massey Lecture in Toronto on Nov. 1 at Koerner Hall in Toronto. The lectures will air on CBC Radio’s Ideas Nov. 11-15. For more information visit cbc.ca/ideas/ masseys