Octavia McBride-Ahebees Poetry Featured in The Journal of the National Medical Association

Even some members of the medical establishment in the United States are hip to the urgency and creative mission of McBride-Ahebees poetry. The National Medical Association is one such member. Founded in 1895 to represent the interests and concerns of physicians of African descent and the patients they serve, the NMA has published its medical journal since 1909. McBride-Ahebees poetry is being featured in the April, May, June, July, August and September 2005 issues of The Journal of the National Medical Association.

(PRWEB) May 30, 2005 -- Even some members of the medical establishment in the United States are hip to the urgency and creative mission of McBride-Ahebees poetry. The National Medical Association is one such member. Founded in 1895 to represent the interests and concerns of physicians of African descent and the patients they serve, the NMA has published its medical journal since 1909. McBride-Ahebees poetry is being featured in the April, May, June, July, August and September 2005 issues of The Journal of the National Medical Association.

"Today I will not drink,
I will ignore the calls of water girls
carrying plastic sachets of used fluids
hoisted high on trays seesawing on the tops of their small heads.

And as their calls of water
drift down through the city
and I hear, in the sway
echoed by their flip-flops,
the weight of their birth canals,
narrow and loaded with the lust of old men
and children too big to pass into life,
I vow, today, to ignore my gluttonous organs
who profess thirst and threaten me
with bodily harm,
like a father or a husband,
if I do not water them".
- From Today

Hundreds of thousands of women throughout the developing world suffer from obstetric fistula. Until quite recently, this condition was largely ignored by health care providers, with the exception of a few incredible people.
    
Obstetric fistula occurs after a girl or woman experiences a prolonged and obstructed labor where the baby dies inside the females body and rots away. A few days later a hole is created between the vagina and the bladder or /and the rectum. These women become incontinent and are unable to control the urine that emanates from their bodies as well as their feces. Too often the victims of obstetric fistula are young, rural girls, whose bodies have not matured enough to deliver a baby vaginally and they live great distances from medical facilities. Women who suffered from this condition become pariahs in their communities and endure unimaginable health challenges.
    
Such themes are the heart of much of McBride-Ahebees poetry. Even some members of the medical establishment in the United States are hip to the urgency and creative mission of McBride-Ahebees poetry. The National Medical Association is one such member. Founded in 1895 to represent the interests and concerns of physicians of African descent and the patients they serve, the NMA has published its medical journal since 1909. McBride-Ahebees poetry is being featured in the April, May, June, July, August and September 2005 issues of The Journal of the National Medical Association. All journals can be accessed online( www.nmanet.org ). Her poetry can be found in the Art in Medicine section of the journal.
    
McBride-Ahebee is the author of Assuming Voices, an entrancing poetry collection illuminating, in small, personal vignettes, the lives of women who, too often , go unnoticed and rarely celebrated; African women, women in refugee camps, women who are victims of civil war, immigrant women attempting to find their place in newly adopted countries and women battling such health challenges as breast cancer and obstetric fistula under isolated and inhuman conditions.

McBride-Ahebee, a native of Philadelphia, PA, lived nine years in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa.
    
Its certainly affirming," said McBride-Ahebee, that an entity like National Medical Association also shares my passion for enlightening people about the existence of health issues like obstetric fistula. Too often, I feel like a lone voice, particularly when sharing my poetry with American audiences who, by and far, remain disconnected from and uninterested in anything or anyone that distracts them from themselves."
    
McBride-Ahebee discussed another poem close to her heart, The Water God, which will be featured in an upcoming issue of JNMA. She describes how a women, in the midst of a civil war, fleeing with her baby from those who seek her death, in the end must bury her murdered baby in a magnificent rain forest, with only some sleepy butterflies to serve as pallbearers.

"I gave our child
to the season of rain,
the sounds its watery toll awakened
was her requiem
and her ushers into the entry
of a gutted forest floor,
away from a war not at all civil,
were sleepy monarchs
inflamed with life
and so splendid in their silence".
From The Water God

As trite as it sounds," said McBride-Ahebee, the world is, indeed, small and we are all so close to one another via technology, yet in spirit and in action we remain fragmented and untouched by lives of each other. My poetry aims to remedy this and the opportunities provided by NMA and visionaries like the publisher of Assuming Voices, Lit Pot Press, furthers this aim."

McBride-Ahebee is available for readings and Assuming Voices is available through Lit Pot Press( www.litpotpress.com ).

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