South African literature in the time of AIDS

Abstract

The political response to the crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has been notoriously slow and chequered during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A sustained literary response, alert to the impact of the disease has been even slower, although this gathered pace by the mid-2000s in South Africa. This article investigates a number of these significant literary representations in relation to the understanding of HIV/AIDS in the South African public sphere. It focuses upon the ways in which representations of HIV/AIDS raise semiotic and political complexities, the problem of granting or denying sympathy, issues of literature’s attention to silences and differences, especially regarding those who have been culturally marginalized, and the ways in which HIV/AIDS is linked to changing representations of gender in South Africa. It seeks to demonstrate that, no longer constructing HIV/AIDS sufferers as dying subjects for whom nothing can be done, these literary narratives engineer a symbolic reorganization of subjectivity in the public sphere. Literary representations form part of a body of texts that are exhorting more transparency in public debate, demonstrating ways in which people can take greater responsibility for their health, and representing ordinary citizens as subjects with social, political, and psychological power and agency to alter their “life roles”. The article examines the ways in which this symbolic reorganization of subjectivity not only reflects but also projects a change in socio-medical power relations within South African society. Building a social responsibility, imagining new forms of citizenship, and creating new spaces for social justice, such literary narratives demonstrate a narrative transition from a depressed, debilitating doom to a new defiant defence; and in so doing, contribute to a transformative intervention in the public discourse of HIV/AIDS.

“Let us not equivocate: a tragedy of unprecedented proportions is unfolding in South Africa”. ¹ As Nelson Mandela made clear in his closing speech to the International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000, managing this national HIV/AIDS situation has become simply one of the largest issues in an already hard-pressed agenda for political change in South Africa. The political response to this crisis has been notoriously slow and chequered during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The cultural response has been even slower, and while cartoons, billboards, and graffiti responded quickly to the pandemic, the glimmers of a sustained literary consciousness that is alert to the impact of the disease only gathered pace during the mid-2000s in South Africa. This article investigates these significant literary representations in relation to the treatment and understanding of HIV/AIDS in the South African public sphere. It focuses upon the ways in which literary representations of HIV/AIDS raise semiotic and political complexities, the ways in which literary discourse can cause a transformative intervention within a terrain of struggle and contestation, and interrogates the ways in which literary representations challenge, refocus, and develop social relationships and conventional gender power structures and identities. Literary language and culture play a crucial role in contesting the marginalization of victims, renewing attention to silences and differences, and imagining new patterns for political change and innovative possibilities for social agency. The formation of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in 1998 and the success in gaining access to anti-retrovirals (ARVs) in the 1990s, have led to significant transformations in the politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. These two “events” have played a decisive role in affirming the presence of people living with HIV/AIDS, to the point where HIV/AIDS today is no longer understood as a death sentence but as a chronic manageable illness. ² No longer constructing HIV/AIDS sufferers as dying subjects for whom nothing can be done, these literary narratives increasingly engineer a symbolic reorganization of subjectivity in the public sphere. Literary representations form part of a growing body of texts that are exhorting more transparency in public debate, demonstrating ways in which people can take greater responsibility for their health, and representing ordinary citizens as subjects with social, political, and psychological power and agency to alter their “life roles”. This symbolic reorganization of subjectivity not only reflects but also projects a change in socio-medical power relations within a newly transformed democratic South African public sphere.

Developing a more “participatory democracy” through a transformation of the “public sphere”, has been the principal goal of post-apartheid government. Jürgen Habermas famously construed the “public sphere” as a discursive arena in which rational-critical debate about public issues is conducted by private persons willing to let arguments rather than social statuses determine decisions (Habermas, 1989). Craig Calhoun stresses that “The ideal of the public sphere calls for social integration to be based on […] communication rather than domination. ‘Communication’ in this context means not merely sharing what people already think or know but also a process of potential transformation in which reason is advanced by debate itself” (Calhoun, 1992: 29). Crucial for my argument is Habermas’ distinction between the political public sphere and the literary public sphere, the latter seen as an articulation of the values and world-understanding that intertwines with the political public sphere. The literary translates private experience into public discourse: personal experiences achieve public expression. This theoretical debate about the public sphere provides a key structural pillar for this article: that rational discursive interaction is the key arena for enabling political participation and transformation.

While Habermas’ theory has been very influential in discussions of the constitution of public discourse, it has not been without considerable controversy. One influential critic, Nancy Fraser, has argued that Habermas idealizes the liberal public sphere (Fraser, 1992). Indeed, with the radical changes in the public sphere in South Africa in the 2000s, what emerged was a clear example of Fraser’s proposition contra Habermas, namely that society is far more mixed and hybrid. Focusing upon the particular context of the role of South African intellectuals in the public sphere, Mark Sanders has argued that oppositional discourses are always conflicted and cannot avoid some degree of complicity with the dominant hegemonic ideology. As Sanders states, apartheid constantly “yields a figure of responsibility-in-complicity who, opposing apartheid or differing from it, makes a radical affirmation of foldedness with the other […] there is no responsibility without the troubling and enabling moment of complicity” (Sanders, 2002: 18). Troubling indeed, for in a book that moves “repeatedly from the center of the political sphere — or ‘public sphere’ — […] toward its margins” (Sanders, 2002: 201–2), such complicity inevitably calls into doubt the capacity of any discourse (and particularly aesthetic discourses, whose potential to intervene effectively within the public sphere has a long history of interrogation) to affect political transformation in, or to reshape, the public sphere. As both Fraser and Sanders argue, rather than society being composed of a single, comprehensive public sphere, it is better understood as a nexus of competing multiple publics, what Fraser terms “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser, 1992: 124). These “counterpublics” include other non-liberal and “irrational” voices, non-bourgeois groups like workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and women, all of whom have an effect on widening the sphere of public debate and promoting social justice in a civil society.

Furthermore, the central areas of debate shift over time due to the changing foci and ideologies of these counterpublics. In the absence of attention to the mechanics of the struggles by which both the public sphere and its participants are made and remade, V. N. Volosinov can usefully supplement our understanding of this struggle over language in the transformation of the public sphere. His attention to communicative struggles at the level of the signifier brings a degree of detail to the larger abstract theories of Habermas (and Fraser’s caveats). In stressing the social nature of discourse, Volosinov argues that within any given sign-community, different classes struggle over the use of the same signs, with each ideological faction seeking to “pull” the sign in its direction. Consequently, Volosinov regards signs as “multi-accentual” and as the site of class battles, as dominant and subordinate social groupings seek to impose their definitions on signs:

The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgements which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual. (Volosinov, 1973: 23)

In trying to “uniaccentualize” signs, the dominant class aims to empty the social and historical sediments out of signs in order to give them the appearance of being “natural” and “given” to social processes. Yet Volosinov describes signs as possessing “two faces, like Janus” (Volosinov, 1973: 23), one looking to conservative stability and the other looking towards dynamic change.

In the 1990s and 2000s, one of the signifiers most under pressure from conflicting social groups has been “AIDS”. The above discussion of the theoretical discourses about the public sphere offers two key ideas that structure the focus and explorations of this article. The first is the notion that communicative action (and particularly the literary dimension) can be thought of as the primary model for social action; and secondly, that communicative action engages in a socio-linguistic struggle to establish critical social values through challenging the “ownership” of signifiers. My contention here is that despite the valid cautions made by Sanders, literary representation as communicative action does secure gains as well as losses, local victories here and minor retreats there, in its contestation of signification through which it imagines and enables new and invigorated forms of social agency. It is within this complex realm, therefore, that thinking of literary representations as the mediation of “subject-to-subject relations” can contribute enormously to our understanding of the impact of HIV/AIDS on communities and individuals, and can provide a much-needed basis for “humanizing” an epidemic that has reached such unimaginable proportions. Whereas there has been extensive literary activity in Western industrialized countries over the past decades that has effectively “normalized”, indeed, “domesticated”, the loss and mourning associated with HIV/AIDS through their repeated enactment in public and private realms, such a “genre” only emerges in a sustained manner in the 2000s in Africa. This lag in representation might be due to the manner of expression of the disease, which, transmitted almost exclusively through heterosexual intercourse, has substantially reduced the population of many countries and struck at the heart of the South African extended family support network. The general absence of HIV/AIDS as a major theme in South African writing may also be attributed to the deaths of members of the educated élites who might otherwise have served as creators. Nevertheless, widespread social, political, and medical activism concerning HIV/AIDS has developed during the 2000s in South Africa and there is now a plethora of material written by government agencies, world health bodies, and social research organizations that have been established specifically to investigate HIV/AIDS. In addition to those texts that produce what one may term the “socio-legal” discursive representation of HIV/AIDS within South Africa, ³ literary representation has reinforced this sociological discourse with its own politically committed activism that strives to support actual material change and overcome injustices in conditions of inequality. With HIV/AIDS part of everyday life for so many people, it is clearly also a matter of the literary, as people seek to give symbolic form to their personal experience. ⁴

Redefining the signifier

The South African public sphere has seen conflicting and divisive discourses about HIV/AIDS for many years. In When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of Aids in South Africa (2007), Didier Fassin has sought to contextualize the social catastrophe by exploring the epidemic not so much through medical facts, statistics, and case histories as through a history of how and why people think about HIV/AIDS. He seeks to understand the epidemic “phenomenologically”, as an experience that affects not just individuals but communities, and as a manifestation not just of the present but of the past; above all, “to understand it as an experience of the body” (Mantel, 2007: 6). Basing his discussion on vivid ethnographical data collected in the townships of Johannesburg, he demonstrates that the unprecedented epidemiological crisis in South Africa cannot be understood without reference to the social history of the country, and in particular, to institutionalized racial inequality as the fundamental principle of government during the past century. Within this context, Fassin argues that HIV/AIDS is the site of conflicting meanings that have torn apart medical and political strategies in South Africa since 1994: “This semantic war is far more than a confrontation between different explanatory models. It is a confrontation between worldviews, ways of relating to history and memory, definitions of morals and politics” (Fassin, 2007: 33). Within this public sphere, the run-away explosion of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has been dogged by myth, rumour, disinformation, and alarm — as Paula Treichler characterizes it, “an epidemic of signification”. ⁵ Cultural and ethnic anxieties, political and ideological impediments, have all interfered with practical treatment programmes; and President Thabo Mbkei’s controversial apparent self-distancing from the virus in the 2000s did not help to ameliorate the problem. The cultural and political logic of President Mbeki’s refusal to accept the international public health model of the virus and his pursuit of an alternative explanation of the epidemic is carefully considered by Didier Fassin. Fassin very persuasively suggests that Mbeki’s frustrations with what he perceived as the racist pathologization of Africa were understandable if not acceptable when one considers the history of health treatment projects in South Africa and their link to political projects, projects designed to put a “safe” distance between the masters and a pool of physically strong labourers. While Fassin’s account offers several nuanced arguments about the impact of HIV/AIDS on both the body politic and the individuated body, one of Fassin’s key arguments deals with the ways in which “the AIDS controversy appears more a discussion about the legacy of the past and the reactualization of political commitments than a battle merely between ideas and programs” (Fassin, 2007: xviii). Importantly for my perspective, in this respect Fassin conceives of the impact of AIDS as partly one of contesting signification, retrieving tainted histories, and rescuing vocabularies from debates in which words have become skewed and distorted by all sorts of vested interests. Indeed, he argues that “the problem of AIDS in South Africa, both in its most ethnographic reality and in its most anthropological meaning, can only be grasped as a problematization of the contemporary world involving relations between history and memory, power and knowledge, truth and suspicion, inequality and violence” (Fassin, 2007: xxi). He goes on to argue that “The history of AIDS in South Africa constitutes a web of meaning that extends well beyond the country borders and the disease itself. It recounts a political world order composed of both social configurations and symbolic arrangements, relations of knowledge and power, representations of the self and discourses on the other” (Fassin, 2007: 275).

These are not merely the views of a leading French anthropologist 7,000 miles away at the élite Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. It is just such a matrix encompassing the far-reaching historical transformations of the effects of colonialism and modernity and their impact upon the ordinary experiences of the most personal, intimate suffering, that underpins the many angry, condemnatory denunciations found in the South African poet Kgafela oa Magogodi’s declamatory poems in Thy Condom Come (2000). Magogodi’s poems set out to re-inject a dose of “social and historical sediment” into discourse and to reclaim and redefine signifiers that have been hijacked or “uniaccentualized” by dominant social powers. The cover of the volume depicts a portrait of Magogodi beside a roughly drawn cross that mutates into an arrow, from which drapes a transparent-yellow condom. Deliberately echoing one of the foundational prayers of Christianity in its title, Thy Condom Come insistently juxtaposes the religious with the crudely sexual, blurring the registers of high moral purpose with the vulgarity of street slang. According to exegetical interpretations of “The Lord’s Prayer”, the line “Thy kingdom come” is usually interpreted as a reference to the belief that a Messianic figure would bring about a Kingdom of God. The coming of God’s Kingdom is traditionally seen as a divine gift for which one should pray, rather than a human achievement. This idea is frequently challenged by groups who believe that the Kingdom will come only through the labours of those faithful who work for a better world. Magogodi blackly substitutes the condom for the divine gift and the coming Messianic figure; and the parallel intimation that condoms are something for which one should pray and labour, indicates the wretchedness and fragility of the lives into which the “faithful” are born.

This conflict in linguistic register runs headlong through all the poems. As transcriptions of rap performances, Magogodi’s poems in both their form and content openly question the efficacy of the dominant aesthetic paradigms, the lines acting as darts thrown at readers seeking to pierce the veneer of a stable liberal-democratic consciousness. This is “in-your-face” poetry: “it is not sunday school material / it is kgafela poetic texture / causing blisters / in the eardrums of society” (Magogodi, 2000: 18). Preoccupied with politics, religion, birth, sexuality, death, and history, the poems nevertheless subvert conventional poetic images, metaphors, and signifiers with a bluntness that is intended to shock, riding roughshod over any lingering social and political taboos. The collection’s eponymous poem figures Joseph and God (now female) involved in extramarital sex and the Holy Ghost and the Archangel Gabriel as sexual partners (Magogodi, 2000: 54); whilst the much-touted “rainbow nation” is conceived of less as a triumph of racial cooperation and more as a catalogue of extreme violence (Magogodi, 2000: 46). The language hammers home a juxtaposition of coarse sexual allusion with images of brutal violence and social and political critique. Alluding to the notoriety of Hillbrow as a crime-ridden downtown suburb in Johannesburg, a place of prostitution, sexually-transmitted diseases, and xenophobia, the poem “Varara” (the word means AIDS) deals with people’s conflicting beliefs that “jesus will save them from varara” (Magogodi, 2000: 57), or that “horizons are so viagra varara / will not stop til thy condom come” (Magogodi, 2000: 57). The emphatic visibility of the necessity for sexual protection occurs as each page number sits in the ring of a condom at the bottom corner of the page. Pulling no punches and taking no prisoners, the poems skewer the contemporary environment in which AIDS sufferers manage their daily lives upon the spits of a complicated colonial and neo-colonial past that continues to haunt the present. One example, “The House of History”, refers to a whole nexus of Afrikaans events and loaded allusions that reinforce the power relationships of the apartheid hegemony in South Africa:

in

the house of history

once upon condom time

black chiefs were sodomised

& made houseboy presidents

for backroom republics

when days were venereal diseased

bullet was parliament

castration was law

prison was a circumciser’s blade […]

upon the teeth of time

the sterile god of blood river

died groaning between the thighs

of history’s menstruation

& the boer grumbled & cried

eie land eie volk eie tiekie draai

fly by night homelands

crumbled in time

like weak erections. (Magogodi, 2000: 7–8)

The poem depicts the past as a white masculine political pantomime based upon a brittle virility that has persistently undermined the black African power-base by the construction of illusory dreams enforced by physical and sexual violence. The sexual humiliation of senior black leaders and their transformation into puppet politicians who rule countries that are ephemeral fabricated illusions (“fly by night homelands” — apartheid’s policy of independent yet separate living areas), emerges as the product of a white political machinery of sexual and physical violence broadly designed to emasculate the black African leadership. The Afrikaner cultural hegemony is embedded in the line “eie land eie volk eie tiekie draai”, which echoes the nationalist political slogan “eie volk, eie taal, eie land” (“our own people, our own language, our own land”) from the apartheid period, itself resonating with lines from the old national anthem of the Transvaal, and chilling echoes of the Nazi chant of “ein volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”. The phrase also alludes to the reinforcement of the cultural apparatus of the Afrikaner. When the Afrikaners did their “volkspele” (directly translated “folkgames” but actually folkdances), one of the moves was a “tiekiedraai”, in which the assembled dancers of twenty or so men and women would stand in a circle to dance. Then one of the movements is holding hands with your partner with arms crossed over each other and as a couple turning around sometimes wildly, sometimes sedately in a small circle. The smallest coin in South Africa before decimalization was a “tickey”, or in Afrikaans a “tiekie”, which would imply that the turning around during the dance as described could be a small compact turning only involving the couple. Here again, South African history is a matrix of Christianity closely bound up with the evocation of sexual expiration, stereotypes of black Africans perpetuated by the white hegemony and ideologies of racial purity. ⁶ Yanking back signifiers that have been loaded with white ideological definition, Magogodi’s poetry is as much about recuperating signification and denaturalizing the lexicon of HIV/AIDS as it is about discovering a mode of subjectivity that can adjust to post-apartheid society. For Magogodi, coming to terms with HIV/AIDS is intricately intertwined with survival and adaptation in a post-apartheid society, demystifying signifiers and discourses that have underpinned an apparently “natural” status quo, as well as envisaging the need for new social relationships, new gender power relationships, a reorganization of domestic hierarchies, and a reconceptualization of domestic patterns of trust and loyalty.

Confronting the culture of blame

In an extremely sensitive and illuminating study of Ingrid de Kok’s “Freight”, the last section of her volume Terrestrial Things (2002) that testifies to the shattering effects of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, Sarah Brophy and Susan Spearey acutely analyse the ways in which the poems “complicate myths of national recovery, query the relevance of the lyric for, and trace connections between the proliferating manifestations of anxiety in public space and discourse” (Brophy and Spearey, 2007: 313) [emphasis in original]. Arguing that de Kok’s poems eschew any easy comforting poetic forms that perpetuate the status quo of inequality and any enduring apartheid legacies, Brophy and Spearey demonstrate how de Kok uses the poetic medium to focus more attention on local investments that interrogate agency, belonging, and community, rather than on the grand impersonal monumentalizing tendencies of the national galleries and museums. Contrary to the easy politics of blame, Brophy and Spearey identify “De Kok’s endeavour to reconstitute intersubjective relations in ethical terms” (Brophy and Spearey, 2007: 317) as a significant new note in public discourse — a sense of “obligation” to treat and help victims, that grows out of an increasing social recognition that subjects depend on each other. Such a Levinasian sense of an ethics preceding subjectivity — a “response-ability” to another, of owing one’s being to another, a communal interdependence — underpins de Kok’s attack on social complacency and privileged spaces of immunity. Completely aware of her own implicated-ness in the circulation and struggle over signifiers (her “complicity” to echo Sanders), de Kok’s poems are not simply seeking to replace one public discourse with another. Rather, the aim is to cause the public sphere to recognize the complexity of the problems in its responses, instead of resorting to ready-made models, formulaic responses, or patterns of rhetoric and lexicons, that effectively trivialize, reinforce, and perpetuate cultures of blame, exclusionary practices, and disavowals of responsibility. Brophy and Spearey powerfully demonstrate the capabilities of literary representation and artistic discourse to affect the trajectory of consciousness within the public sphere, causing a redirection of cognitive, ethical, and emotional processes in de Kok’s attempt to ask readers to “re-imagine social relations in the process of responding to her act of witnessing” (Brophy and Spearey, 2007: 333).

Bringing to visibility the oblique processes that reinforce group prejudices, de Kok’s poems interrogate the linguistic and formal modes that actively reproduce social hierarchies. This acute and meticulous perspective afforded by poetry is complemented by the broader narrative framework of Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome To Our Hillbrow (2001), arguably the first and most celebrated novel to date in South Africa to deal with HIV/AIDS. Like de Kok, Mpe questions the construction of what lies inside/outside to collective identity; and like de Kok, Mpe is firmly fixed on challenging a culture of blame and battling exclusionary prejudices and stereotypical images of “victimhood”. The novel depicts the daily life of Refentše Morrow who has moved from the rural town of Tiragalong to the inner city suburb of Hillbrow in Johannesburg, charting his routine battles to secure the small pleasures of urban life. Refentše is dead at the outset of the novel, opening as it does “If you were still alive…” (Mpe, 2001: 1; 29). In a complex narrative form, the novel is a narration from the dead, of the dead, addressed to a reader in the position of dead. Refentše Morrow, who goes through many hardships due to living in the frenzy of Johannesburg society, has worked as a lecturer at Wits University and was in love with a woman named Lerato. He commits suicide when he accidentally discovers his best friend, Sammy, and Lerato having sex. The novel plots the intersection of a range of characters associated with Refentše’s life as they cross over, meet, or come to a dead end. By the narrative’s end, each of the principal protagonists and even those on the periphery, have either lost their sanity, died violent deaths, or — grappling with HIV/AIDS — committed suicide. In this portrait of tragedies, life journeys, and the rippling effects of suicides, accidents, ill-speaking, and illness, Mpe develops a trope of infection. In this regard, each of the novel’s different elements is tightly interconnected: for instance, after Refentše’s death, his mother, accused of bewitching her son, is “necklaced” with tyres and set aflame. Lerato, Refentše’s lover, commits suicide, partly because of a feeling of guilt over his death and partly because of false rumours spread by Refilwe, Refentše’s first love. These rumours feed on the infamous reputation of Hillbrowan women and xenophobic feelings about migrant foreigners.

HIV/AIDS looms large from the outset as readers are welcomed to the first pictures of Hillbrow:

One of the stories that you remember vividly was of a young man who died of a strange illness in 1990, when you were matriculating. The migrants said it could only have been AIDS. After all, was he not often seen roaming the whorehouses and dingy pubs of Hillbrow? […]

He died, poor chap; of what precisely, no one knew. But strange illnesses courted in Hillbrow, as Tiragalong knew only too well, could only translate into AIDS. This AIDS, according to popular understanding, was caused by foreign germs that travelled down from the central and western parts of Africa. More specifically, certain newspaper articles attributed the source of the virus that caused AIDS to a species called the Green Monkey, which people in some parts of West Africa were said to eat as meat, thereby contracting the disease. Migrants (who were Tiragalong’s authoritative grapevine on all important issues) deduced from such media reports that AIDS’s travel route into Johannesburg was through Makwerekwere; and Hillbrow was the sanctuary in which Makwerekwere basked. (Mpe, 2001: 3–4)

Acknowledging a unifying and arbitrary vulnerability to HIV/AIDS becomes the condition of welcome to this Hillbrow. Merely existing as a desiring subject is to share in this vulnerability. In his study of African homosexuality wherein he focuses upon Mpe’s novel, Neville Hoad has argued that questions of origins and certainties of identity can offer no protection: “The novel’s representation of the AIDS pandemic reveals a world of shared vulnerability against which the integrity of national borders, and even the distinctness of individual bodies, can offer no protection” (Hoad, 2007: 108). It is clear that the virus respects neither national boundaries nor even the integrity of discrete individual bodies. The narrative consistently presents, then contests, prejudiced views of the Hillbrowans and the villagers and migrants from Tiralagong towards African internationals. HIV/AIDS haunts every action of the novel’s characters in Hillbrow and is inextricably bound up with the persistent xenophobia about migrants to Johannesburg, in ideologies of the invasion of the “foreign” into the “purity” of Johannesburg, “the belief in the evil of Makwerekwere and the AIDS they are said to bring” (Mpe, 2001: 122). (Makwerekwere is a term of contempt referring to a black African from another African country). At every turn, the novel seeks to demystify popular myths about the origin of HIV/AIDS, its action and its consequences, which cause confusion and sow suspicion about all sorts of “others”. The reaction by her townsfolk to Refilwe’s return from Oxford (having discovered that she is HIV-positive), is indicative of the persistence of damaging misinformation about HIV/AIDS:

They knew the moment they saw her, that the African Potato, a medicinal plant that looked like the bulb of a beetroot, would not be able to cure her. The African Potato was said by some to work much better than Virodene (which was then the latest pharmaceutical intervention for the treatment of AIDS) providing the disease was caught in the initial stages. It was also rumoured to be far more powerful than Viagra, for men whose performance in bed was less than sparkling. The African Potato was said to out-perform all other pharmaceutical inventions. But Refilwe’s family knew just by looking at her that she was beyond this or any other help. (Mpe, 2001: 118–19)

Echoing the vexed ideological medical debate in the 1990s about the causes and treatment of HIV/AIDS in South Africa from the President downwards, Welcome To Our Hillbrow presents the mixture of speculation, rumour, myth, and misinformation that governs the insidious effects on urban people’s lives in “the time of AIDS”. That mess of information is a subject upon which Mpe focuses. In the complex set of social interrelationships that circulate through the novel, Welcome To Our Hillbrow charts a trajectory of the fatal consequences of an open network of ignorant promiscuity, “thoughtfully contesting the recycling of stereotypes and the desire for radical closure that characterizes AIDS discourse” (Brophy, 2004: 4–5). Refusing the politics of blame for the spread of the disease, the novel suggests an explanation based on blind accident, contingency, and ill-luck; nevertheless, the novel seeks to reinstate people’s lives into a symbolic order that has been disrupted by medical diagnosis by inscribing meaning and re-asserting a degree of agency. As a counter-public discourse, the novel challenges the reader to redefine the public sphere as one that always includes the contagious; indeed, it is recognized that HIV/AIDS is constitutive of the public sphere.

Humanizing medical discourses

Individual or collective attacks on the recalcitrance of the national government in its treatment programme of HIV/AIDS are only part of the political critique embedded in these literary discourses. An equally important dimension is the role that the literary plays as a source of knowledge in relating experiences of ill health, disease, and death. A good deal of recent critical attention has been given to written accounts of disease and disability, or what Anne Hunsaker Hawkins has called “pathographies” in her analysis of the ways in which patients organize their narratives according to received myths and cultural structures (Hunsaker Hawkins, 1998). G. Thomas Couser has termed such illness narratives as “autopathographies”, which he regards as counterdiscursive to the cultural stigmatization and marginalization that often accompany illness or disability (Couser, 1997). It is argued that such pathographies play a crucial role in medical recuperation in the very act of their being written, of symbolically reorganizing the sufferer’s subjectivity. Both Hunsaker Hawkins and Couser focus upon the manner in which distressing, debilitating, and painful illnesses can be converted into aesthetic artefacts without trivializing or sensationalizing the experience that people read. Arguing that narratives give meaning and texture to what can otherwise be regarded as medical “case-studies”, Hunsaker Hawkins states that pathography “returns the voice of the patient to the world of medicine, a world where that voice is too rarely heard, and it does so in such a way as to assert the phenomenological, the subjective, and the experiential side of illness” (Hunsaker Hawkins, 1998: 12). Couser argues that such narratives are examples of seizing power: “Long the objects of others’ classification and examination, disabled people have only recently assumed the initiative in representing themselves; in disability autobiography particularly, disabled people counter their historical subjection by occupying the subject position” (Couser, 2005: 606). Stories generally chart the new identities that characters are forced to assume as a result of medical diagnosis. In what is now a generally widely-accepted argument, telling stories has an epistemological power that promotes physical well-being through the organization and explanatory power of narrative (for example, see Pennebaker, 2000: 11). The editors of Unfitting Stories remark on the manner in which AIDS narratives seek to reinstate people’s lives into the symbolic order that has been disrupted by the medical diagnosis, thereby inscribing meaning and re-asserting control over their lives. In this respect, they argue that narratives have an epistemological power (aesthetic stories shape things into a coherent experience of meaning to claim authority and knowledge) and an ontological power (therapeutic narratives have implications for changing identity and re-establishing self-coherence) (Raoul, Canam, Henderson and Paterson, 2007: 3–10).

Humanizing medical discourses, reclaiming agency and disseminating knowledge are precisely the bases upon which the stories and poems are gathered in Nobody Ever Said AIDS, edited by Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson, and Kylie Thomas (2004). ⁷ Reinforcing the socio-political power of the emergent literature of HIV/AIDS in Africa, this anthology offers individual stories and poems about the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa as a means of countering the mind-numbing statistics on infections and deaths. As Njabulo Ndebele’s foreword states, these are writers who have “begun to forge new and imaginative responses to the pandemic. Their words open the space for us as readers to understand, to mourn, and to grieve for the collective losses facing us in southern Africa today” (Ndebele, 2004: 9). The collection includes recognized names such as Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Achmat Dangor, and the recently deceased Phaswane Mpe, alongside writers who have never before had their work published. As the literature of the AIDS crisis in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s brought to the general public the subjective experience of HIV/AIDS and thus strengthened the socio-political will to combat the virus, so this literature of AIDS in Africa seeks to deepen awareness about the crisis, to engender compassion for the individuals who suffer from it, and ideally to help shape an effective collective response to alleviate the devastation being wreaked by this epidemic. Covering a variety of styles that reflect the range of cultural and class perspectives represented in the anthology, oral songs, poems, fiction, and non-fiction describe subjective experiences, present images to convey the denial and resulting despair of the early years of the epidemic, and also the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission with its careful attention to detail in describing an AIDS hospital.

Treichler’s “epidemic of signification” is evident on every page, demonstrating the multiplicity of definitions of what constitutes the disease and the taboos regarding saying out loud the name of the disease. Eddie Vulani Maluleke’s eponymous poem “Nobody Ever Said AIDS” describes the ways in which a carefree lifestyle in the early 1990s gradually led to pervasive illness and death from numerous diseases like cancer, TB, and pneumonia; and yet in the face of this overwhelming evidence, “That was us / Whispering it at funerals / Because nobody ever said AIDS” (20). The ambiguity of “not speaking” here indicates both an historical shift in understanding, as well as a social strategy of euphemism. The general state of ignorance back in the 1990s (the phrase suggests that the disease was not widely understood or discussed then and the future consequences were not well-known) is balanced by a strong sense of social proscription in the present owing to social sensitivities and taboos (nobody spoke the word aloud at the funerals owing to the sensitivities of social stigma). Pitched in this ambiguity, the poem effectively suspends moral judgements and interrogates any politics of blame attached to what was a lifestyle accepted as that of youthful enjoyment and “natural” masculine behaviour. The poem is a stark and ironic demonstration of the lack of communicative action in the past and its consequent negative discursive impact upon the current public sphere. Whether “not speaking” be motivated by attempts to refrain from social offence, or by general ignorance, Corinne Squire remarks on the ways in which discussions about the disease perpetuate circuitous and euphemistic signification, how debate “continues to generate indirect descriptions — ‘the whittling disease’, ‘wearing the red scarf (ribbon)’, ‘playing the lotto’, ‘TKZ’” (Squire, 2007: 6). The difficulty of disclosure is further evident in the story “The Fire Next Time”, which deals with the silences, the “unspeakable”, and the enormity of bearing witness. Oblique reference, or not naming, is part of the taboo hovering over HIV/AIDS that this collection aims to challenge; but taken as a whole, the writings also confront the issue of the appropriate mode of representing the epidemic. The stories and poems reassert and redefine signifiers, reclaiming semiotic associations that have been ideologically and historically suppressed or distorted. Fictional modes shift between the naturalistic and allegorical, internally and externally focalized narratives, interior monologues and authorial omnipresence, and the overtly didactic and cautiously reserved narrative. Different signifiers, metaphors, and discourses structure the stories: in some instances, HIV/AIDS is referred to as a natural disaster, a “fire raging all over Africa” (57); or an unnatural tragedy, in which a “blighted harvest” occurs (82); elsewhere it is couched in apocalyptic Biblical terms, like God’s warning to Noah (“No more water, the fire next time”; 50), or the cataclysmic tones of Revelations, or the terms of the stigmata, crucifixion, and resurrection (142; 183); elsewhere in the terms of an African “call-to-arms” using the images of the great African political heroes and predatory animals (103); and elsewhere again, it is perceived in terms of a collapse of moral authority (64) or political ideals (148). Some of these metaphors clearly remove agency from humans for their actions by attributing the pandemic to a transcendent cause. However, as a collection of representations, these pieces can be understood as an emergent collective experiment in contesting and demystifying “uniaccentualizations” of signification, partly by portraying the local and more clandestine effects of HIV/AIDS. Like de Kok’s poems in Terrestrial Things, these poems and fictions seek to find the most efficacious representative mode in literary forms in order to seize back some political and social authority in experience and to remobilize subjects as ethical social actors in their own communicative actions.

Unlike most of the literature in the USA and UK on HIV/AIDS, few of these stories in Nobody Ever Said AIDS are centred on gay relationships. These stories are primarily centred on heterosexual transmission and mother-to-child transmission (MTCT). This is not to say that the volume draws a veil over the transmission of HIV between men. For example, Ashraf Jamal’s story “Milk Blue” opens up the significant history of queer struggle and activism in South Africa. Based upon a sexual relationship that has for decades been censored and driven underground, the story testifies to the way in which human loss and absence can ironically become a “gift” memorialized in a photograph exhibited to the world in galleries and billboards. The complicated history of male—male sexual practice is discussed repeatedly in Waiting to Happen (Walker, Reid and Cornell, 2004: 36–7; 66; 75) and it has seen successive high profile activist leaders and writers emerge in recent decades, such as Simon Nkoli, Edwin Cameron, and Adam Levin. Nevertheless, in this volume, the majority of the stories focus upon heterosexual transmission: the fears of wives and girlfriends, the cruel twists and fatal consequences of marital infidelities, the inevitability of contraction in a climate of persistent sexual promiscuity, the repetition of death and disease, the insecurity of wives who rely on husbands’ honesty and the Russian roulette of marital trust, and the effects of the disease on the lives of prostitutes. The fragile health security experienced by women is echoed in Corinne Squire’s characterization of the myriad ways in which HIV/AIDS impacts upon women in particular, as she argues that women’s position at the centre of the storm has effectively led to “the feminisation of AIDS” (Squire, 2007: 15). A typical example of the dormant lethal impact of HIV/AIDS occurs in Lesley Emanuel’s short story “Confetti” (73). Two AIDS community educators attend a local wedding, only to realize that the pregnant bride tested positive for HIV a few weeks beforehand, and that the confetti used at the wedding is made from shredded AIDS education pamphlets that were handed out at an instruction session a few days earlier. The frustrations at curbing the spread of the disease are heavily reinforced by the ironies of ignorance and denial among the community, of death lurking in new human beginnings, and the repeated reference to the babies at the wedding. Other stories highlight the precarious existence of the prostitute in the sexual economy. In Tonye Stuurman’s “Everybody’s Got It, Don’t They?”, one woman defiantly yet ironically seizes the financial independence that prostitution offers to herself and her family, in a stridently self-aware manner that depicts a woman taking charge of her circumstances. By contrast, Leila Hall’s “Girls in the Rear-view Mirror” portrays the prostitute who finally dies in misery and isolation after leaving her HIV-positive baby to the care of the truck-driver on his next return. These are stories that forge voices of varying tones from misery to triumph and the gamut of emotions in between; yet they are also stories that do not flinch from depicting the stark yet complex web of personal circumstances that humanize the affliction of the disease.

Women, HIV/AIDS, and new forms of citizenship

Clear consciousness of the impact of the disease on women’s lives means that many of the stories investigate the patriarchal cultural practices that cause women to experience a particularly precarious social existence. Sindiwe Magona’s novel Beauty’s Gift (2008) rams home this gendered vulnerability in an explicit polemical and didactic stance to the representation of AIDS: the novel is written to warn and educate through consciousness-raising. ⁸ Beauty’s Gift harnesses the tenor of health and preventative education to the vehicle of a narrative about contracting, experiencing, or negotiating the consequences of HIV/AIDS. The novel unashamedly puts education at the forefront of its rationale. Set in 2002 in Gugulethu, a sprawling township just outside Cape Town, the novel chronicles the impact on the lives of five women when one of their circle contracts AIDS from her husband’s philandering. Amanda, Beauty, Cordelia, Doris, Edith — A, B, C, D, E — have lived as the “best friends forever” or BFF, and find that their future relationships are thrown into turmoil and suspicion when the consequences of Beauty’s death causes them all to reassess their position in their marriages or partnerships. Beauty’s “wonderful gift” is her injunction to her friends on her deathbed: “‘Ukhule!’ she had said. ‘May you grow old!’” (Magona, 2008: 22). “Ukhule” is usually a blessing from an elder to a younger person and Magona suggests that it is Beauty’s confessional divulgence of her status to her friends that “gives them hope. She gives them ample warning, she makes them terribly aware of just how vulnerable they are, but she empowers them, this need not happen to you, look after yourself [sic]. Do not turn a blind eye, a blind eye kills. That’s the message of the book” (Attree, 2010: 63–4). Beauty’s “gift” to the women is the legitimation to take all precautions to ensure longevity, despite upsetting the social structures of marriage and the contestation of established gender power structures. Female empowerment occurs in the loyalty tests and trials that the women place on their male partners and, in turn, their reactions to having their patriarchal position questioned. Yet the main didactic thrust occurs in the message delivered by the respected community leader Mrs Mazwi, who delivers a speech at the funeral of a young teacher, an ex-AIDS victim. Her eulogy is candid and forthright, driving right at the heart of the matter and tackling taboo after taboo:

“I am particularly happy to see the youth. For, my children, let us not beat about the bush, this is your funeral. This is your disease. This is your time of judgement. But it is also your challenge, your call to higher duty!” […]

A hush fell as those present, some perhaps for the first time, contemplated the enormity of the catastrophe towards which they were hurtling headlong. […]

“However,” Mrs Mazwi continued, “we are, fortunately, not doomed to die. Don’t let sex kill you. Use condoms. Stay faithful. Test and test again. Testing gives you a tremendous advantage.” […]

“In our homes,” she went on when quiet was restored, “let us talk to the children about sex”. […]

“And where is the government?” she asked, having recovered herself. “Where is the government, with our children dying? […] why are our lips sealed now? How is it that we let this government, our government, get away with mass murder? A genocide of the poor? Why are we allowing the government to squander the resources of our country on arms when the real war facing us demands antiretrovirals?” (Magona, 2008: 84–6)

Set in 2002 but published in 2008, the novel challenges deep-rooted fatalism and urges a new empowerment for people, but women in particular (“Test and test again. Testing gives you a tremendous advantage”). This is a new, vociferous female voice that demands the public discussion of sexuality and its associated structures of legitimation. Beauty’s “gift” functions as a communicative act that enjoins a transformative intervention in the BFF’s lives; and Beauty’s Gift functions as a transformative intervention in the social construction and management of female lives. The novel’s demand in Mrs Mazwi’s words for more government responsibility in planning anti-retroviral therapy clearly engages with people’s mounting frustrations with the continual delays since the original approval of the Operational Plan for Comprehensive HIV and AIDS Care, Management and Treatment for South Africa in November 2003. South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang announced on 18 February, 2005 that her department had completed negotiations with drug companies to supply anti-retroviral drugs to state hospitals. This announcement came two days after a Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) march on Parliament to demand greater access to anti-retroviral treatment (ART) — and a full fifteen months after South Africa’s Cabinet approved a plan to provide comprehensive care — including ART for people living with HIV and AIDS. However, continual delays in implementation and a slow start to the procurement process caused many activists to question whether the South African government truly intended to go ahead with the ART rollout at that time. Nevertheless, several early initial projects were located in the Western Cape Province providing ART in Khayelitsha in May 2001, followed by a project in Gugulethu in September 2002; and both projects reported very positive results (Boulle et al., 2008: 657–736). Magona’s novel is clearly underpinned by the fact that these trials were active and it echoes the language of these and other pressure reports by organizations like the TAC, WHO, and UNAIDS, which urged the government to implement national rollout therapy programmes. It was only the adoption by Cabinet in 2007 of the HIV & AIDS and STI Strategic Plan for South Africa 2007–2011 (National Strategic Plan) that marked a significant turnaround in the South African government’s policy on HIV/AIDS (although treatment thresholds still remain below the World Health Organization recommendations in the report of February 2010). ⁹

It is not my intention to establish a direct political correlation between Beauty’s Gift and the adoption of the NSP in 2007; but it is my contention that together with a wide variety of other discourses, a novel like Beauty’s Gift can add an experiential dimension to the political debate that is not often evident in the (necessarily) more abstract and strategic discourses of quasi-political or health education pressure groups. Furthermore, the novel reinforces Deborah Posel’s argument that South African society has seen an unexpected politicization of sexuality in the 2000s. This new discursive construction of sexuality has emanated from parts of a public sphere that is increasingly concerned to detach discussions of sex from the titillating, the seamy, and the “naughty”, and renew them with health education campaigns that stress safety, “positive living”, self-esteem, and empowerment (Posel, 2005: 134). A changing perspective on female rights is discernible in increasing public attention to rape (Posel, 2005: 135), challenges to previously unquestioned aspects of masculine authority (Posel, 2005: 137-8), and the contestation of semiotic associations of the virus with specifically female promiscuity. Novels like Beauty’s Gift underpin Posel’s principal claim that public and literary discourses on HIV/AIDS have generated a demand for new forms of citizenship. However, in recognizing these new opportunities for transforming female agency, Posel is not unaware of the fragility that such newly-found subject positions have, as they seek to balance on the tightrope between liberation of self and nation on the one hand, and social conservatisms and anxieties centred on HIV/AIDS on the other hand.

Conclusion: Transforming the public sphere

Many of these literary texts upon which I have focused demonstrate a major shift in the development of HIV/AIDS in South Africa as they chart a movement from “othering” to “owning” HIV/AIDS, a process of inclusion and absorption of the problem rather than ghettoizing it. The narratives show people taking control over the representation of the disease and its effects, rather than being wholly subjected to the widespread stigmatization of victims. This is partly a result of the growing public consciousness that HIV/AIDS is more than just a set of statistics — it is about people’s deaths, suffering, and daily losses. Literature combines mourning with calls for militancy: not mere agitprop, the writing is unembarrassed by the depiction of the personal and the intimate effects of HIV/AIDS and urges a more transparent discussion of the daily impact of the epidemic on individual lives and relations, the social challenges surrounding sexual discipline and freedom, and the ethical relations and obligations of a post-apartheid society that ostensibly constructs itself as a whole “community” (difficult and problematic though that vision has become in practice). This shift in public consciousness and the ways in which HIV/AIDS is represented is due in large part to the existence and increasing visibility of social activist movements like the TAC in South Africa, which protests against denialism and seeks to build bridges to cross the chasms of silence on HIV/AIDS. Developing new subjectivities and new social positions from which to understand the pandemic, literary representation challenges the down playing of personal testimony and other forms of witnessing that suggests a discomfort with emotion, where the expression of personal grief might mitigate or weaken the fight against HIV/AIDS. I have argued that these HIV/AIDS narratives provide an important symbolic reorganization of subjectivity, especially gendered subjectivity (see Susser, 2009), ultimately serving to construct people with the disease as more than passive victims, but as active subjects in their own right. Such newly endowed agency ensures that representations of people with the disease need no longer repress the perspective of the “sick other”. Consequently, part of the real significance of these literary narratives lies less in their status as texts and more as interventions in the public sphere. However, it is not just a newly endowed subject-with-agency that emerges from these texts. Many of these narratives also reorganize the gendered nature of that subjectivity, re-orientating our understanding of the hitherto predominantly masculinist mechanics of the machinery of representing HIV/AIDS, inserting the female voice into the public sphere.

Another shift is that narratives are now also analysing the “history” of AIDS in South Africa, identifying reasons for the failure of public HIV/AIDS policies in South Africa and charting social and political shifts in the epidemic. A great deal of the literature to date also charts the anxieties about the future, the legacy of the pandemic on the hopes for social and political freedom. As the country has been swamped with the problem of managing the disease and its social impact, the literary and cultural representations have partly sought to counter-balance the public sphere from being distracted by HIV/AIDS from the vision and aspirations for a more prosperous and equitable future in post-apartheid South Africa. As we have seen, debate about HIV/AIDS is bound up with the politicization of sexuality in South Africa and is also enmeshed with the politics of “nation-building”. This is an argument put forward most emphatically by Deborah Posel, who concludes that:

Sexuality has been brought into discourse in a range of ways, the aggregate effects of which have excited intense anxiety, controversy and confrontation: in the liberalization of sexual expression and display; in the allocation and claims to new sexual rights and the conditions of citizenship implicated within these; in the ways in which an aesthetic of sexual freedom rendered in various genres of popular culture embodies more wide-ranging declarations of emancipation, along with aspirations to power and status; in the confession of multiple anxieties about the dangers of “bad” sexuality and the social, political and psychic menace attached to it; and in the vexed and fragile project of nation-building. (Posel, 2005: 149)

Posel regards the politicization of sexuality centred upon the crisis of HIV/AIDS as opening up the South African public sphere to debates about “some of its deeper cleavages and uncertainties” that go well beyond the subject of sex (Posel, 2005: 150). Her list of “discursive interruptions” amounts to an insistence that recognition of inequality rather than difference, and of embodied history rather than culture, are the keys to overcoming indifference in the face of the overwhelming effects of the horrendous statistics about HIV/AIDS in South Africa. However, the literary interventions ensure that these material conditions are not merely turned into abstract socio-political statistics and medical case-studies, but that they shape the political and cultural consciousness of the public sphere itself. If Mark Sanders is correct in judging every literary communicative action to be a “responsibility-in-complicity” that effectively disables or at least compromises political agency, by the same movement, I think that “foldedness with the other” allows for a new imagination of obligation and community. Building a social responsibility based on indebtedness to another, imagining new forms of citizenship, and creating new spaces for social justice, such literary narratives demonstrate a narrative transition from a depressed, debilitating fatalism to a new defiant defence. Herein lies the ethical force of much of this literature on HIV/AIDS: in allowing the multifarious, the plural, the local, and the particular to stream through the discourse, literary communicative action paves the way for authoritative and hegemonic forces in the public sphere to be relativized by compassion for humanized voices hitherto suppressed, marginalized, or forgotten. Building on the conviction that redefining and accentuating signifiers offers some degree of political agency, during the past ten to twenty years literary representations of HIV/AIDS have been instrumental in shaping an horizon of possibilities that encourage social transformation. These literary texts have developed a language of transfiguration in the aesthetic sphere that has nourished the politics of transfiguration in the public sphere.