Is this love, passion or plaque that I’m feeling?

I would rather have eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love.

Since the beginning of time, the human heart has been a symbol of love, truth, passion and emotion, and today is even more-so recognized as the universal embodiment of love that appears everywhere from Valentine’s Day cards and candy boxes to bumper stickers and in popular songs. Similarly, poets have continued to enshrine the heart as a symbol of human passion and have popularized many romantic metaphors that we now think of as clichés, such as the “wounded” heart and the “broken” heart. In much of African poetry and literature, the heart not only speaks of love but embodies emotions of hope, freedom from oppression and injustice. Symbolic meaning of the heart can also be found in religious texts, which historically have ascribed much mystical significance to the heart, either as metaphor or as an organ genuinely believed to have spiritual or divine attributes. In Egyptian mythology for example, the heart portion of the soul was weighed in a balance against the feather of Ma’at, symbolizing truth, in the judgment of the dead in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Hence, it could be fair to say that in many ways our earliest introduction to the heart has been through these numerous ‘localized’ constructs which have been allowed to shape our notions of the beating heart. But while the heart may be of such passionate and somewhat exaggerated significance in literary constructs, its importance in health issues related to heart disease is one that should not be overlooked.

Heart disease and diseases of the cardiovascular system (diseases and injuries of the heart, the blood vessels of the heart and the system of blood vessels (veins and arteries) throughout the body and within the brain) have been identified as the leading cause of death of over one-third of Canadians. While factors such as heredity, age and even ethnicity may play a role in the prevalence of these diseases, the majority of the cases relate to risk factors that we can control. These include smoking, heavy alcohol consumption, lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, high cholesterol (primarily from saturated and trans fatty foods), high blood pressure, over-consumption of sodium, stress, and diabetes.

In recent years, there has been rising concern about the disease’s prevalence within and among Canada’s rapidly increasing immigrant populations (the Black population representing the 3rd largest visible minority group after the Chinese and South Asians) with growing bodies of research suggesting that the disease is more prevalent among immigrants than among native born Canadians, and even more so among immigrants of South Asian and Black descent; and among immigrant women than their male counterparts. But in reality, for a number of us (African and Caribbean immigrants) having been brought up in cultures in which roundness of the hips, posterior and fullness in the waistline signal to others that we are enjoying great amounts of prosperity and success, the thought that we may be slowly killing ourselves in trying to walk around with excess layers of fat on our bodies may never even have occurred to us. As a young student at teachers’ college and living on campus several hundreds of miles away from my rural home, the opportunity to visit home was rare but whenever I did, my grandmother would make it her duty to inspect every inch of my body to see which parts were not as fat as she had last seen it; the comment was always the same, “hm!, lawd yuh get maaga…yuh nah tek care a yuhself” (interpreted: Lord, you have gotten skinny…you aren’t taking care of yourself). And with this, she would embark on a hard-pressed mission to fatten me up – on top of my already heavily set body.

However, while some of these perceptions and behaviour may be cultural, the fact of the matter is that being an immigrant also carries with it multiple challenges and barriers which work to impede our ability to adequately care for our bodies and reduce our risks of having cardiovascular diseases. Studies have shown that immigration to a foreign country is highly stressful for most immigrants and involves communication barriers, social isolation, financial insecurity, and conflict between retaining the traditional values and culture of our home countries and that of adapting to those in the new country, in this instance Canada. For many African and Caribbean families, male unemployment oftentimes leads to high degrees emasculation and feelings of worthlessness as the man (the provider) realizes that he is not in a position to financially support his family – this in itself can be highly stressful for all parties involved. Immigrant women on the other hand appear to be at more risk of cardiovascular related illnesses as many times, the burdens associated with living up to their domestic and caring/nurturing responsibilities along with those of trying to be better educated and gainfully employed do not leave much time for taking advantage of proper nutrition let alone physical activities. To further rub salt in the wound, research has also shown that our immigrant populations have been found to be underserved with respect to health services, access to care and care itself, for quite often language barrier between patient and service provider as well as a lack of cultural competency among service providers prevent a number of us from accessing better health care and even health literacy. All of these factors then, (alone or combined) do play a role in influencing our lifestyle with relation to cardiovascular diseases.

So where do we go from here? It is certainly not worth it to throw down arms and wait for the government to roll up its sleeves and take responsibility for the challenges that we face with relation to our health. But, out of love for ourselves and our families, we need to work together in our communities to come up with culturally suitable strategies for combating the disease’s risks. Now that we know what the risks are; now that we know what some of the barriers are, let’s start by making the change from within. Let us educate ourselves, organize ourselves and most of all help each other – after-all, most us were brought up in a tradition of helping, caring and sharing, so why stop now? We need to love our hearts – no one else will do it for us. Let’s all try to take a step at a time to treat our heart health right!

By Joy Walcott-Francis, PhD Student, Department of Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University