The Brooklyn Rail

A brightly colored bird with a fierce yellow eye and a sharp beak dipped in red (like blood) pierces the frame of a terraced scene (fig. 1). A female figure with closed eyes rests under a golden blanket, while another massages her outstretched leg. A white-haired man sits on the floor next to a small fire, across from a woman wearing a sheer golden head scarf. Behind them unfurls a landscape of lush-green trees and thistle-blue mountains. In this late-seventeenth-century image, made in Isfahan, the mythical simurgh arrives to assist with the delivery of the great hero, Rustam, as told in the early tenth-century epic poem, Shahnama (or the “Book of Kings”), written by the Persian poet Firdausi.

Firdausi describes Rustam’s mother, Rudaba, in great pain and at the edge of death, unable to deliver her red-haired, oversized, warrior baby. Her husband, Zal, calls upon his surrogate mother, the simurgh, for help. Described in the poem as the first successful cesarean ever performed, the bird with the scalpel-sharp beak instructs Zal and Rudaba’s attendants on how to safely remove the baby from its mother. Rudaba is anesthetized with wine, her abdomen cut, and Rustam is safely delivered; before taking flight, the simurgh heals Rudaba’s wounds with her feathers.

At the time Firdausi wrote the Shahnama, cesarean-sections were carried out primarily when a woman was already dead or dying, to save the baby or remove it for a separate burial.

Upon first glance it is not obvious that the image preludes such a dangerous procedure. The pastel page shimmers with gold; there is a simultaneous sense of celebration and calm. But the gold blanket that drapes over Rudaba’s figure flutters with anticipation: a bright, raw pink lining quivers like parted lips or fresh scars.

I underwent abdominal surgery while Europe went into full pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. I had been in bed for two months prior because of a painful bulge growing in my groin. I was not pregnant, but the doctors told me that if they did not operate to push these displaced guts back into place, future pregnancy would be fatal. Twenty-five years after an innocent childhood accident, a hernia emerged, dangerously constricting blood flow to my gut.

Anne Boyer points out in her essay on the COVID-19 pandemic that it is “a strange task … to come together in spirit and keep a distance in body at the same time.” The careful effort to be treated without touch made undergoing surgery during a time of social distancing an especially discomforting reality. When I fainted in the hospital bathroom, or when I needed help removing the surgical stockings, the nurses hesitated before touching me. Yet, quivering from nerves and cold on the operating table, after the needle was pierced into my hand, the anesthesiologist took my other hand in his and, ungloved, stroked his thumb gently across the skin of my wrist. I woke up from surgery weeping in delirium at the thought of that touch.

In the image of the simurgh’s arrival, each female figure is touched with a fresh-flesh pink. The woman who rubs Rudaba’s leg is colored in the same pink as the inner folds of the skirt worn by the woman next to the fire. That pink lines Rudaba’s blanket, anticipating her yet-to-come split flesh, the pinking of her skin, the healing seal of her scar. It is as if the pink dressing of Rudaba’s attendants (Zal is not touched by this color) indicates their own scarring (unseen)—a knowing of pinking flesh with which they offer comfort to their mistress.

Two days later, at home, I examined my operated-upon body in the mirror. Within my flesh (wounds unseen): cuts, tucks, seals, and plastic mesh implants hold my innards in place. Only visible were the dashed incisions on the skin, a row of tiny mouths slightly parted, held together shut by blue-purple threads. Bright, raw, pink. Soon, another set of lips became visible in the mirror: my labia had swelled to four times normal size and turned purple-black. But there was nothing about this in the information leaflet I was given upon my hospital discharge. The information only took the middle-aged male body into consideration. The next day, even more swollen, in even more pain, I pulled my pajamas down to reveal my unrecognizable genitalia and, through tears of panic, asked my red-haired lover-turned-carer what to do. Holding me close, but averting his gaze, he suggested I call my mother.

My mother, unable to come care for me due to the travel bans imposed by the global lockdown, called a friend, who called her neighbor, and soon I received a chorus of women’s voices offering insight on how to care for my scars; how to aid the strain of my first postoperative bowel movement; how to gently massage my groin to help my body reabsorb the internal bleeding that drained into my bruised labia. Through text messages and phone-calls these women used their own experience of being cesarean-cut to assist the healing of the cut made into my body, made to repair spilled guts (in order to be able to have a baby). I was touched by care from afar.

In images depicting the Shahnama’s mythical scene of the first cesarean to ever be performed, there is a lightness to the life-threatening event because Rudaba’s body is always surrounded by female hands (fig. 2): an idealised image of care, one that “traditionally and socially [identifies care] as women’s work” (María Puig de la Bellacasa). Ritual, celebration, attention, and touch are portrayed as integral to the medical procedure. But the simurgh’s arrival complicates this care: not only does she not touch Rudaba’s figure and is rendered with a frightening expression, but she enters the image from beyond the world of the scene. The giant bird does not fly in from the distant blue mountains, but swoops into the image from the gold margin of the page. The simurgh’s in-betweenness roots the historical practice of childbirth as being the domestic work of female midwifery in an other-worldly realm, in a care that is dependent, female, nurturing, and distant. Care is made ambivalent by the distant simurgh, or by a careful detail, easily missed, such as in this Persian image of the Birth of Rustam (fig. 3). At the center of the intricate interior, where Rudaba lays back onto the lap of a female figure, as Rustam is pulled out of her abdomen shaped like parted lips, there is a surprising, almost unseen, rupture: the branch of the small willow-like tree is snapped. A mirroring of Rudaba’s body, forever changed: both cut and healing, ruptured and full of life.