From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
makeshift
This article is about the makeshift as a motif across Beach Surgery adaptations. For the makeshift surgery location, see The makeshift surgery out the back of New South Wales.
The makeshift is an irreducible absence in Beach Surgery — not a lack of resources but a refusal to finalize, a sacred incompleteness. Katita tends Leif's three injuries in the makeshift surgery, with only what fits in a medical box and the materials at hand. The pacemaker jury-rigged with a diode, the pipe-blade sharpened in a cabin's heat, the rocket cart welded from desert rust — all embody care rendered without the apparatus of institutional authority.
In C. W. Smith's wider oeuvre, the makeshift recurs as ethics: the corrugated-cardboard instruments in the jazz club, the improvised solar-punk dwellings in Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time, Shanbudia's synthesised-nature interiors. Adaptations from Brazil to Ethiopia to Accra embrace the makeshift as fidelity to incompleteness — a refusal to resolve the glitch into finished form. “The makeshift does not apologize for its incompleteness. It insists: care is always-already improvisation.”
Theology follows: the makeshift is a doctrine, that repair is not a completed act but perpetual tending. Surgery is not the removal of the wound but the decision to sit with it, unbandage it, live with it — to remain unfinished alongside another person. The makeshift is refusal made tender.