Life amongst the corpses
2002-08-21 11:44
London - Juanita Carberry, at the age of 77, is preparing for a new "life"
on stage - as a corpse in a travelling exhibition of corpses.
Carberry, a Kenyan who attended school in Pietermaritzburg, is the oldest person in Britain to bequeath her body to controversial Professor Gunther von Hagens.
Von Hagens (57), an Eastern German, is the owner of a travelling exhibition of corpses which has been seen by more than 8 million people around the world.
His exhibition, Body Worlds, comprising 26 corpses and 180 body
parts, is currently touring Britain as the most controversial exhibition in years. More than 250 000 people have already visited the show since it opened in the Atlantis Gallery in London in March.
Carberry, a former merchant navy sailor, is one of 20 people in Britain who were so impressed by his gallery of corpses that they bequeathed their
bodies to him. She has signed a from authorising her body to be shipped to a factory in China after her death.
Here Von Hagens will prepare her body for display using a process he calls
"plastination".
He strips the body of all fat and fluids and forces liquid plastic in the
remaining tissue and cells. She is "resurrected" months later as an
odourless, malleable corpse preserved for ever.
"Why do people find it repugnant? The exhibition is educational.
"I saw a child looking at one of the corpses in admiration," she said.
"I won't mind if people are able to identify my corpse. They are likely to
do so since I have seven tattoos. But does it really matter? Once you are
dead, you are worth no more than a dead cat."
Carberry moved to London in the 1990s following a lifetime spent in Kenya
and on the sea.
She says she "hates" England but realised she could not survive into old age on her own in Kenya after losing her sight in one eye.
She was married twice but has no children. Her mother, a pilot, died when she was three years old. Her father, John, was an Irish lord. He farmed a coffee farm outside Nairobi where he abused her before she ran away.
He had been a central figure in the decadent Happy Valley clique on which
the book and film, White Mischief was based.
Carberry is the author of Child of Happy Valley recording the
decadence behind the glamourous set in former colonial Kenya. She gained fame in the 1940s when she testified in court during the trial of
Sir Henry (Jock) Delves Broughton who was acquitted of the notorious murder of Earl Errol, his wife?s lover.
Carberry says she has no concerns over the "role" she is to be allocated in Von Hagens's exhibition. "He can do with my corpse as he pleases - it's only a shell. I've done what I wanted to do in life."