World breastfeeding awareness: Nurturing health without words

Some months hold more significance than others, don’t they? When you think of August, the first thought that comes to mind is August 15. This day is one we cannot forget, and should not. August is also a month to honour breastfeeding. World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year in the first week of the month. 

Launched in 1992, this is one of the largest global health campaigns, supported by WHO and UNICEF. The goal is simple: to raise awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding. I was fascinated to learn about the myth of the goddess Hera, whose milk was said to make Hercules invincible. This milk spilt across the sky to create…yes, the Milky Way. Across the world, sacred mythology about breastfeeding is common. If we have Yashodha and Krishna, the Egyptians have Isis nursing her son, Horus, one of the most recognisable images in Egyptian art. The Celts believed that there existed supernatural women who could grant wisdom and heal wounds with their milk. Cultures deeply connected to the earth and nature, such as Native Americans and African tribes, also revere this act, associating breastmilk with fertile soil and rivers, and bestowing it with magical powers as well.

You might wonder why such a campaign is necessary today, and here’s why. During the 19th century, infant formulas were popular, and by the early 20th century, some cultures even frowned upon breastfeeding. The push for breastfeeding began around the 1960s, driven, to a large extent, by members of the medical profession.

In ‘Only She Who Has Breastfed’ by Vera Pavlova (translated by Steven Seymour), the poet says, “Only she who has breast-fed/knows how beautiful the ear is. Only they who have been breast-fed/know the beauty of the clavicle.” This immediately brings to mind an intimate setting, a quiet morning perhaps, a moment of communion between the mother and infant. “While breastfeeding may not seem the right choice for every parent, it is the best choice for every baby,” says Amy Spangler. Perhaps, but let’s also understand that in some cases, some women may choose not to breastfeed. In such situations, to mom-shame is an act of cowardice and gross insensitivity. In ‘The Republic of Motherhood,’ Liz Berry speaks of crossing, “the border into the Republic of Motherhood/and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.”

I recall a new mother, whose own mother would wake up every time the baby was breastfed: she would mix a nutritious drink for her daughter, the lactating mother. The act perhaps came naturally, but consider this. Aren’t some of us guilty of not thinking this way? We ask after the baby, but not always after the mother. In ‘Breast Milk,’ Katie Hartsock speaks of, among other things, her great-grandmother who nursed 10 children, “from one breast — the other side never made, maybe,/a country doctor thought,/because of  her childhood polio.” The poem ends with this remark, “In a short story by Maupassant,/a train is stopped far from anywhere/and one car holds two strangers,/a very hungry man and a nursemaid,/painfully engorged. And that’s all/you really need to know,/except, it occurs to me, she/must have been hungry too.”

It seems like the poet is speaking of her great-grandmother, too, in this instance.

I also read the joyous poem, ‘I Pump Milk Like a Boss,’ by Kendra DeColo. The poem is filled with fantastic sentences. “Do men lactate is a popular Google search, and I wonder what would happen if they could, our presidents/lifting their offspring to their breasts in the deep pockets/of night, listening to the dribble of milk/sipped from the pulpit of their bodies.”

And who better than the emperor of terse sentences, William Carlos Williams, to leave us wondering with his poem, For the Poem Paterson [1. Detail]: “Her milk don’t seem to . ./She’s always hungry but . ./She seems to gain all right,/ I don’t know.”

World in Verse is a monthly column on the best of new (and old) poetry. The writer is a poet, teacher, voice actor and speaker. She has published three collections of poetry. Send your thoughts to her at [e-mail]