Colby Cosh: 'Death doulas' present the perfect 2020 problem

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I was reading a CBC News item about a new Aboriginal program that teaches young people the skills of a “death doula.” You might have heard that word, “doula,” used in the context of childbirth. Some of you have had one. The term was coined in the 1960s and has grown along with the natural birth movement: a doula is normally an experienced woman recruited to provide a new mother with advice, information and encouragement. Their role is something like that of a classic midwife, but they provide coaching rather than technical expertise.

It’s a pretty short conceptual leap from there to the “death doula,” a wise older person who knows a lot about grief, palliative care, funerals, maybe the law. It’s probably a fine idea. The natural birth movement, although easy to mock, has done a lot of good at the other end of the human lifespan. Doctors and lawyers have so much social authority that we have to invent new institutions, new forms of advocacy, to keep them in check, ask intelligent questions and promote common sense. Or hippie nonsense, for that matter: people devour absurd health ideas precisely because they sense that something has gone wrong with the ill-regulated power of medical professionals.

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But until lately I had always assumed that the term “doula” came from … well, some language or other. Could it be Spanish or Portuguese? An African word? This is where we run across a problem: “doula,” coined by the late anthropologist Dana Raphael (1926-2016), comes from the Homeric Greek word, “doule.” It’s the word for a female household slave. The Greek “doulos” specifically denoted someone born into slavery, and when the Greeks wanted to accuse Persians or other foreigners of having “slavish” habits of mind or conduct, that’s the root word they reached for.

This is, in other words, a perfect example of a 2020 problem. Raphael chose the term precisely because she was cross-culturally aware, having studied the childbirth practices of hundreds of nations. She probably didn’t want to borrow any one particular word signifying a helpful auntie from Quechua or Udmurt. That would, as we now say, be cultural appropriation.

If you have to borrow, borrow from the dead: the ancient Greeks aren’t around to object. But Raphael may have been kidding herself a little. In a 1981 journal article she wrote that, “The word ‘doula’ comes from an ancient Greek word referring to the woman who comes to the home when a child is born, cares for the older children, cooks the dinner, bounces the fretting baby and generally helps the new mother through the early postpartum period.” Even if you don’t know much about the classical age, or about the place of slavery in Hellenic civilization, you might well wonder if this happy helper materialized magically, or was hired for money, or …

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I’m not proposing to make trouble about “doula” meaning “slave” etymologically, but it strikes me as inevitable that someone will. On the Talk page of the Wikipedia entry for “doula,” a couple of people have worked themselves up into a state about the issue. And you can easily imagine the indignant version of this column that might appear in almost any other newspaper.

This is the very definition of an imaginary grievance, but will that prevent it from being exploited and turned into a subject for task forces, soul-searching and irascible lectures within professional associations? In the Aquarian world of natural childbirth, the social defences against this sort of troublemaking are especially meagre. If I were a doula I would be dreaming up something else to call myself, just in case. But, then, maybe we will rebuild our instinctive social defences against prigs, inquisitor and freelance schoolmarms in time.

National Post
Twitter.com/colbycosh

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