{"id":3844,"date":"2024-04-03T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T09:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=3844"},"modified":"2025-04-09T08:49:15","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T07:49:15","slug":"an-orisha-in-bristol-henrietta-lacks-and-mojisola-adebayos-family-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2024\/04\/03\/an-orisha-in-bristol-henrietta-lacks-and-mojisola-adebayos-family-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"An Orisha in Bristol: Henrietta Lacks and Mojisola Adebayo\u2019s Family Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blog by Taylor Riley<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bristol, UK is a monument to the intertwining of histories of slavery and medicine. Smaller, literal monuments around the city tell its stories. There is the plinth that once held the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, which Black Lives Matter protestors toppled and drowned in the harbor in 2020. The bridge named for Pero Jones, enslaved by Bristol sugar merchant John Pretor Pinney, crosses the water to Queens Square, where merchants like Pinney once lived. And then there is the statue of Henrietta Lacks, a bronze figure posed in a broad stance, hands on hips and leaning forward, as if asking a question.<\/p>\n

\"Statue
Photo of the Henrietta Lacks\u2019s statue in Bristol (taken by the author).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lacks\u2019s statue stands in Royal Fort Gardens among several university science buildings. It was commissioned by the university and created by Helen Wilson-Roe. Members of Lacks\u2019s family came to its unveiling<\/a> in 2021. In 2023, Mojisola Adebayo\u2019s play Family Tree<\/em> ran at Bristol\u2019s Tobacco Factory for the last leg of its national tour. Directed by Matthew Xia, Family Tree<\/em> breathes new life into Lacks\u2019s story, exploring it through the lens of her immortality and bringing Lacks into dialogue with other untold medical narratives: the enslaved girls and women mutilated by J. Marion Sims in the US, and the National Health Service nurses of color who died of Covid-19 in the UK.<\/p>\n

Today, Lacks\u2019s cells (or HeLa cells) remain available to purchase, and in all likelihood, will proliferate for thousands of years. In addition to HeLa being the preeminent cell line used globally in medical research, Bristol researchers publish an average of one scientific paper a month on research using HeLa cells.2<\/sup><\/a> They have revolutionized cancer treatment, led to the creation of IVF, and been pivotal to vaccines from polio to Covid-19. They have also contributed to research generating millions of pounds for the university and the scholars who work there. A local ad for the play shows actor Aminata Francis, who plays Lacks, arm in arm with the statue, along with former Lord Mayor of Bristol, Cleo Lake. A comment on the post reads, \u201cI\u2019ve used her cell line …\u201d<\/p>\n

The play\u2019s venue also holds significance. A former Imperial Tobacco company building, the Tobacco Factory theatre is entrenched in histories of slavery, a fitting setting for a play about Lacks, a Virginia tobacco farmer descended from slaves. In 1786, Henry Overton Wills I and partners started a tobacco company<\/a>, and one of its subsidiaries\u2019 factories was located in the building that is now the theatre, hence its name. The University of Bristol\u2019s first chancellor, Henry Overton Wills III, used slave-produced tobacco from the US for the business until slavery was abolished there in 1865. This \u201callowed the family to become the great philanthropists for which they are now remembered.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

As the lights dim low in the theatre, Francis comes to the stage, not yet having \u201cbecome\u201d Lacks, reciting a spoken word poem that serves as the play\u2019s prologue. It mixes metaphors of land and body, human cells and prison cells. \u201cI am repeating myself,\u201d she says. She then transforms into Lacks with the words \u201cmyself is repeating,\u201d a change in syntax that signals the plays theme\u2014Lacks is embodied many times over. That process of repetition echoes throughout the play, reminding audiences of Lacks\u2019s unique mode of being. In the first scene, Lacks finds herself in limbo shortly after her death from cervical cancer, playfully and devastatingly cycling between past and present on the dark and ethereal set. She mourns her family, she ponders mobile phones, and she asks questions of the audience, repeating<\/em> herself to get answers. Later in the play, actor Mofetoluwa Akande becomes the orisha Oshun\u2014deity of oceans traversed throughout the slave trade, those encased in human bodies and within cell walls, and sexual fluids and blood. And as Lacks herself becomes the orisha HeLa, the family tree onstage\u2014beneath which she has toiled and mourned\u2014lights up. Its twisting trunk branches out and reveals its shape as a helix, a tree of DNA that lives forever.<\/p>\n

Orishas travelled with enslaved peoples across the Atlantic and took root in healing practices. Solimar Otero discusses how these Yoruba deities \u201cbecome active agents in the world through rituals, archives, and the creation of material culture.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> Lacks\u2019s transformation into an orisha is a call to witness and revere her material immortality, but also to understand the body as a representation that replicates through medical violence\u2014violence extending from that committed by Sims, to Lacks\u2019s treatment before and after her death at Johns Hopkins, to racialized health disparities, to the erasure of the medical knowledge of enslaved peoples that black anthropologists like Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Deren have written about.<\/p>\n

To return to the statue of Lacks, it is impossible to capture the essence of a deity in bronze, impossible for researchers to erase violence through good faith or gratitude. Bristol will soon house a new monument<\/a> to honor the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. Still, valorizations of slavery<\/a> remain here, like the memorials of slave traders and profiteers in Bristol Cathedral. Henrietta Lacks will never die, though the violence of the world she departed from must, if we are to fully realize her immortal legacy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> \u201cMore Than a Cell: The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks,\u201d Research, University of Bristol, accessed March 18, 2024, https:\/\/www.bristol.ac.uk\/research\/impact\/stories\/hela-cells\/<\/a>. Comment attributed to Harry Mellor, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Caine Tayo Lewin-Turner, \u201cBlood on the Bricks: More than Colston?\u201d Bristol Museums Collections (blog), accessed March 18, 2024, https:\/\/collections.bristolmuseums.org.uk\/stories\/transatlantic-traffic-enslaved-africans\/blood-on-the-bricks-more-than-colston<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 3.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Taylor Riley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in anthropology at University College London, working as part of a multinational project on biosocial birth cohort research. She is interested in intersecting oppressions within histories of medicine, feminist science, and technology studies, and queer and trans bodies and life courses.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blog by Taylor Riley Bristol, UK is a monument to the intertwining of histories of slavery and medicine. Smaller, literal monuments around the city tell its stories. There is the plinth that once held the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, which Black Lives Matter protestors toppled and drowned in the harbor in 2020. The […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15070],"tags":[15068],"class_list":["post-3844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-blog"],"yoast_head":"\nAn Orisha in Bristol: Henrietta Lacks and Mojisola Adebayo\u2019s Family Tree - Medical Humanities<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Taylor Riley considers the legacy of Henrietta Lacks in today's blog.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2024\/04\/03\/an-orisha-in-bristol-henrietta-lacks-and-mojisola-adebayos-family-tree\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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