Thirdsight and the Disambiguation of Health Communication: A Dialectics of Ama Ata Aidoo’s “The Message” and Ghana’s COVID-19 Situation

Abstract

In some earlier research, I developed a theory that I termed ‘thirdsight’. This theory is conceptualised as the simultaneous performance of ‘real-and-imagined modes of perception’ that cause that which is perceived to appear as existing or occurring in circumstances or conditions which are at once concrete and abstract. These dimensions of perception combine to actualise diverse beliefs of experiences that inform the reception of and/or reaction to reality. In this paper, I draw on this to discuss how information about health – conditions, or outcomes – can become convoluted in layers of ambiguity so that the real is as illusory as the imagined and the imagined assumes the tangibility of truth. For this examination, I carry out a comparative analysis between health-related narratives as they play out in two otherwise tangentially unrelated contexts, which are however complementary in the ways in which they reflect upon each other. The primary sources of my investigation are social media information and responses around the COVID-19 global pandemic in Ghana, and Ama Ata Aidoo’s fictional short story, ‘The Message’. My analysis, from a critical Medical Humanities perspective, reveals how an African literary text dialectically reflects society through the correlations drawn between literature and health, fiction and reality.