The Hippocratic Oath, Illness, and Metaphors of Politics in Margaret Ogola's I Swear by Apollo

Abstract

Abstract:This essay relates Margaret Atieno Ogola's I Swear by Apollo (2002) to Kenya's postcolonial context to signal the contribution of literary texts to the understanding of Kenya's sociopolitical and economic orientations. Particularly instructive are theoretical inspirations and epistemological insights from studies that locate literature on illness in medical humanities and narrative medicine, demonstrating the extent to which Ogola deploys illness and the Hippocratic Oath as emblems of sociopolitical convulsion. By focusing on how digressions act as bricks, not only for political-medical dialogue to help recontextualize medicine in literature, but also in converting medical signs into poetical elements, the article diagrams a reparative trajectory that can be taken in a politically apocalyptic scenario.