The Origins of Malaria by Ruth Padel

Signs and Humours: The Poetry of Medicine, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)

‘OK little one,’ God said to the anopheline mosquito.
‘The word is glucose.’ God looked round. Marvels
were still to come. He was getting there but the devil
was in the detail, deadline near. ‘What I’ve reserved
for you’s unnoticed sweetness. Bounty in small doses

where others never go. This place is garden. Horizontals
in these leaves hold dew, rain, snowmelt, sweat
of chlorophyll. Follow them. Be cyclical.
Lay eggs’ (a beat of silence as silver-stripe female
quivered in blue air) ‘in dabble of standing water.

Be good at finding it. I give you the gift
of piercing surface very gently. At first the kids
will be aquatic. Larvae, pupae sort of thing. Suddenly
they’ll hatch, grow wings: a cycle of becoming
I worked out specially for you. And in everything I give’

(God looked fondly at high-wire bentfeather legs
more delicate than any created being was likely to invent
or invent well – look at those touch-pads and spiracles!
He’d taken trouble, hadn’t He, in His miniaturist
phase?) ‘is the gift of not being noticed.

Never mind the browngold giants underneath
these trees. What I’m giving you looks small
but there’s one design feature I think you’ll like:
a mechanism to adjust: go on and on adapting all
the other gifts I’ve given. So, here. All yours.’

D’you want to stay inert discardings from the out-tray
all our lives? Model youselves on that mosquito.
Create a cycle inside hers which His not-noticing
design will never see. You won’t harm her. Make free
of her purloined haemoglobin! Assemble in

her salivary gland and replicate through fission.
Be genus plasmodium, one-celled sporozoa.
Look – I can penetrate brains: the power
two-legs has for naming comes from me. So
I pronounce you protozoa! Firstlife! Parasite!

This poem is from a collection of verse about diseases, hospitals and the science and afflictions of the body. I have used the first part of the poem and the last two verses of the fourth part. It describes an alternative origin for an insect that is disparaged; especially by me because I’m allergic to mosquitoes.

So, did some deity create them on purpose to be blood-sucking malaria-carriers? Well, no. Not even in this poem, because the mosquito mutates beyond its original God-given form as a result of a change in habitat. One might draw a parallel with our human condition; we are all a bundle of raw materials lumped together in the beginning, just as the mosquito was, but can adapt to better suit our environment. In our case, however, it is up to us whether such adaptation is benevolent or not.

Here, the mosquito begins life as a treasured construction; we witness God’s delight in His creation: imagine the minute workings that flex the joints, the speck of a head and the pinhead thorax. Ingenious!

God, having created the mosquito, gives it directions to a food source, plant glucose, which is plentiful in its “garden”, Eden. He also bestows various abilities, the most important being “a mechanism to adjust” and to “go on and on adapting to all/ the other gifts”. This is the dangerous bit where He gives the insect scope to become something that perhaps was never intended and that He will have no control over; the power to evolve in an undetermined direction without His interference.

In the second part of the poem, not shown here, “anopheles saw light change/ for ever” as their world was altered and “garden buzzed all day/ with angel paparazzi”. I imagine this to be the moment when Adam and Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge and were cast out of Eden in disgrace for hiding their nakedness. The mosquitoes follow “two-legs” to a “suddenly impure planet” where the female mosquito, adapting to her new habitat, develops a taste for our blood.

In the first two verses of the fourth part, we meet another of God’s creations, a “ribboned leafsnake” who, acting as if possessed by the Devil, “hectored the unused atoms,/ jealous sparks from God’s cooling anvil”; jealous, perhaps, for being unnoticed. The wily snake musters the unused atoms together and indicates “the gut/ of anopheles female” with his “bifurcated tongue” and cries “Now’s your chance!”, which is where we come in with the last two verses shown here. He scolds the atoms into action, directing them into the mosquito and telling them how they might inhabit her without harming her. Because God has given her the ability to adapt, the atoms will be able to use that facility to their own advantage once inside her. They will “make free/ of her purloined haemoglobin” to become malaria, which she will share with us.

The snake, puffed up with his own cleverness, announces that everyone will know the atoms in their new guise inside the mosquito as “Parasite”. And everyone knows how a parasite loves a free ride.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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