Daisy Hernández’s “The Kissing Bug” sits in the space between a memoir, the story of a struggling migrant family forced to grapple with a bizarre and devastating disease, and a careful exploration of both science and the socio-economic reality of the well-known Chagas disease as American trypanosomiasis.
Hernández, author of an earlier essay, “A Cup of Water Under My Bed,” was born into a Colombian migrant family. She spent her childhood in New Jersey in the 1980s, but lived between cultures and languages during her formative years. One of their aunts, Tía Dora, had become terminally ill and lived with them because the health services were better in the United States. As a child, Hernández knew little about her aunt’s condition and believed the woman was sick from eating an apple. Little was known about her condition and no one at home gave her details. As she grew up, Hernández learned a little more: her aunt suffered and died from Chagas disease, a rare disease transmitted by a parasite that lives in certain insects and affects the heart and digestive system. She learned that people got the disease after being bitten by what people called the kiss beetle. Still with questions, however, Hernández consulted doctors, epidemiologists, researchers, and patients with Chagas disease looking for answers. “The Kissing Bug” combines the results of Hernández ‘research with the history of her family and the author’s personal experiences.
The beauty of The Kissing Bug is that it is non-fiction that contains as much heart, tension, poetry and horror as some of the best contemporary novels. The heart comes from a look at Hernández’s family, especially the long struggle between their Tía Dora and Chagas. Tía Dora’s fights were often so harrowing – emergency hospitals, operations, loss of parts of her bowel, widening her esophagus until she could no longer eat – that the narrative turns into a horror story about a woman battling an invisible monster, the lives in their system. Horror stories are only effective when there is empathy, and the way Hernández presents her family to readers is so adorable that we mind.
Care was in short supply. Hernández does a great job of contextualizing Chagas disease both historically and within the socio-economic realities that enable it to thrive in developing countries. While more than three hundred thousand people are living with the disease in the Latinx community in the United States, many of them are from other countries or have contracted the disease elsewhere. The author always uses the science, her own story, and the realities of Chagas to shed light on the causes of such a devastating disease. Chagas disease, as readers learn from the beginning, is a disease that mainly affects poor brown people. Chagas was named after the Brazilian doctor who described it in 1909. The World Health Organization classifies Chagas as a “neglected tropical disease” along with leprosy, sleeping sickness and river blindness. These are, she writes, “afflictions that the world has largely ignored, affecting mostly poor people in countries outside the borders of the United States and Western Europe.”
While “The Kissing Bug” is a family story, memoir, history book, and academic text rolled into one, Hernández masterfully juggles each element, weaving events and parts of her investigation together without ever changing her voice or making the writing less personal. Her search for the beetle herself, her search for other families, her interviews with doctors and epidemiologists, and even the archival work she did to bring the kiss bug story from the 1500s to the present divide the space here beautifully and Hernández’s own fears, questions and trauma are often the focus.
“The Kissing Bug” is an important, well-researched, and up-to-date book that sheds light on the previously ignored story of an extremely harmful disease that has been marginalized because of the people affected. In this gripping tale, Hernández turns her Tía Dora not into a ghost who haunts the story, but into a person who makes Chagas more immediate and real, as well as a bittersweet memory that spurs the author on. As well as the science of Chagas disease, Hernández delves into the ways poverty and racism created a perfect storm for the disease to be widespread in certain communities – despite the fact that it is easily identified Treated and prevented can be fatal if diagnosed early. The way she presents these truths makes this a necessary read for anyone concerned about health crises around the world.
Gabino Iglesias is professor, editor, literary critic and author of “Zero Saints” and “Coyote Songs”.
The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease
Daisy Hernández
Tin House Books, 336 pages, $ 27.95
