A Petit Mal: A Mother’s Healing Love Song: Excerpt

When her young son is diagnosed with epilepsy, award-winning Colombian-American artist and poet Ana María Caballero, is devastated and hopelessly confused. As the long journey of healing commences, Caballero eschews traditional medicine and instead turns to a group of alternative healers she’s worked with before, whom she affectionately refers to as her army of “witch doctors.”

A PETIT MAL (Black Spring Press Group; 2023) narrates a powerful emotional journey as Caballero braids the story of her son, who loves soccer and refers to his episodes as “Messis,” with previous trauma—her father was treated for a brain injury and never woke up. Caballero grapples with the endless stream of advice she receives from those around her, from trying out strange treatments in Ecuador to investigating the color of her son’s aura.

She catalogs her weariness with traditional medical systems, which put her son through countless tests and employ a terminology as inaccessible as it is ridiculous. First opinions, second opinions, third opinions—Caballero bares it all in her uniquely poetic voice, haunting readers with the sheer weight on her shoulders, while weaving in happier moments as she attempts to faithfully record experience. Her suspense-filled story flows through the wings of hospitals and doctor’s offices, where she takes multi-faceted stabs at the nature of emotion, of illness, of health, of faith, of loss, stabs that elicit fresh meaning by mixing the muscle and marrow of words.

Paired with incredibly sharp wit and even sharper writing, Caballero does not leave her reader wanting. A PETIT MAL illuminates the struggles countless families face when they must confront an often heartless healthcare system. But, told with her uniquely creative sense of humor, this story emerges as an example that even in times of great strife, love, laughter and art can provide solace.

Ana María Caballero

Author of A Petit Mal: A Mother’s Healing Live Story

I believe our minds work in fragmentation. Our daily lives have become so heavily interrupted, too. We’re bombarded by information coming at us from different directions. Everything is image, image, even on text-based apps like Twitter and news sites, image is what often summons the eye. I think readers relate to the fragment in an intuitive way. Readership has evolved.

As artists, we don’t need to, nor should, cater to this, but I do believe that purposeful engagement with contemporary readers enhances their connection with the story. The way things write themselves within me is very rhyme-heavy. There’s a lot of internal rhyme in my prose. Meter and musicality are present when I write. It’s something that I’ve recently allowed myself to embrace. I used to disregard my strange diction and try to dull it down, but now I lean into it. With this book, I went all out.

This is me, this is my style, my voice, this is what I’ve been working to find, this weirdness.

(From A Petit Mal: A Mother’s Healing Love Song by Ana María Caballero, published in 2023 by The Black Spring Press Group. Reprinted with permission.)

In terms of telling of story, eventually anything continual, disruptive or not, gets old. Story gets old. New becomes norm. Norm becomes dull. Dull as in perpetual chagrin.  Dull, even, this recurrent, repetitive shiver of boy. 

Even vastly great things manage to get so overused, so over-worn, they become done. Greatness wears off, gets tired, retires. But, so long as you consider the object apart from its myriad manifestations, infinite iterations, consider just the object, just the first incidence of mind behind object’s birth—its unmediated true form—the object remains great. Grand. Not dull, but pure. Blunt rock uncut: spasm of spring. 

Faithfully admiring great things after they get old is an invitation to rise above saturation, above reiteration, above the norm of compulsively new. For example: Andy Warhol silver screens (can’t tell them apart no more)1.  Or certain lines written by the studious hands of T.S. Eliot. You just can’t refer to them anymore because: seriously. Not again. Do something different to do it right. Supporting documentation is valid if not yet catalogued, roped as a volume, anthologized. 

O, to be a virgin, touched for the very first time. Like an Eliot virgin. He’s so fine, & he’s mine. Makes me strong, yeah, he makes me bold. I’d been had. I was sad and blue. But he makes me feel. Yeah. 

He makes me feel.

In terms of progress, I must refer to frequency. On the day I ran to ER with boy, frequency of seizures was eight. As I sit and write, frequency of seizures is four. Inclusive of night. Before we did not know how to count what happened at night. So, eight might actually have been more. 

Four today means two during day and two during night. At night boy sleeps with us in little side bed. When seizure hits boy sits up. Talks. Says shouts screams wails a random thing. Then sleeps. 

Because of reduction of frequency I can say “progress.” Say it & mean it. It is not lie, innocuous lie, used in place of having to say, to respond, to remark: to elaborate.  

“Progress” is word I stamp upon envelope of now. 

In terms of making the best of it, at least boy’s seizures are laughter. They are not crying seizures. They are laughing seizures. They are not funny, but they are laughter. I do not consider out loud how laughter of boy has become portent of hazard.2 

I fasten centrifugal, outwardly twirling thoughts to how seizure of boy is laughter of boy. At least & despite.  How unprovoked laughter of boy is better than unprovoked wild flailing of boy on floor with manually inserted substance up the butt because passageway of throat may be shut.  All options of seizure placed on scale of measurable quantities of bad. Bad is worse than what we have. What we have is not that bad. Not too bad. Only petit bad. We are grateful for seizures we have. 

In terms of only happy story, friend whose now two-year-old baby Anaya has cancer, baby whose cancer is in fact stage four neuroblastoma, friend and baby who were in hospital where husband & I, too, were with boy. This friend. This baby. After radiation treatment in New Jersey, receive good news. 

Anaya’s new scans after radioactive beam directed, focused, somehow inserted, are clear. As in EEG clear. As in Holter monitor clear. As in absence of mass malformed within folds of brain where electrical signal is sovereign. Good news: sparkling, carbonated, animated, remarkable news. 

This story parallel to mine, to ours. A tandem of medical clinical days-to-days. Analogous story of unwell child. 

Only happy can only be only if this baby well. Anaya well. Boy well. Do I write to command, to affirm, to announce single story of well. 

In terms of less is more, no one beats DNA. Not one, no single living or inanimate thing. Beats as in surpasses: infinite simple iterations populate bio-diverse, bio-logical life. Four organic molecules: adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine. Each molecule represented by one letter: ATCG. Adenine goes with thymine; cytosine with guanine. A &. T vs. C & G. Over and over & over again, infinite times. So generous, this combination of:

ATCG

4ever

Inner logic of life: ATCG manifests as all forms of terrestrial, aquatic, aerial existence. All its predispositions. Its sundry conditions. 

Four letters to determine your type. Four letters to spell out your story. Here you go: type.  

In terms of more or less, virus is, more or less, alive. Virus defined as a strand of DNA and/or RNA that needs other, a host, to replicate. Science does not agree if virus is a thing that counts as living. The question is not if virus is dead. The question is if virus is alive. It cannot self-reproduce. It requires host, an alternate version of itself, to reproduce. Not alternate as in male vs. female. Rather, an altogether otherworldly host. 

Yet, in terms of definitions, just how different is virus from myself.  I, a strand of DNA, with supporting strand of RNA, who, too, cannot self-replicate. To create child, male seed is required. I who swells as host. 

In terms of what is less, what is more, a jellyfish and a human are on equal living terms. All of us equally alive. Here, no meta internet forum dispute. 

In terms of more is more, I must mention Freud. Sum of what I’ve read is, I am certain, the being within, the monologue, the metaphysicality of who I am. Books read in past serve as backstory to story I presently write, as undercurrent to current, as stream of thoughts of mind. 

1 (David Bowie, it was David Bowie who couldn’t tell them apart no more.)

2 (I only consider deep within how laughter of boy is now sullied laughter: contamination of outward manifestation of joy of boy.)

BUY HERE

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Ana María Caballero is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil from romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She’s the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Arts Writer Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant. Recognized as a leading voice in contemporary digital poetry, she’s been nominated for a MAXXI BVLGARI Prize in the Digital Sector, shortlisted for a Lumen Prize and been a finalist for the both Vassar Miller and Academy of American Poetry Prizes. Her work has been widely published and exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and public spaces. 

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Category: On Writing