Aids, National Fear, Literary Production
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Chapter 2 aids, National Fear, Literary Production Hospitals are now so filled with aids patients that there is often a waiting period of up to a month before admission, no matter how sick you are. And, once in, patients are now more and more being treated like lepers as hospital staffs become increasingly worried that aids is infectious…. Most hospital staffs are still so badly educated about aids that they don’t know much about it … aids patients are often treated like lepers. larry kramer, “1,112 and Counting” (1983) ... Felix: Aren’t you worried about contagion? I mean, I assume I am about to become a leper. larry kramer, The Normal Heart (1985: 53) ... You know the scorn with which people treat the aids victims – as though they were suffering from leprosy…. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how lonely these people get? Don’t we still pass for human beings deserv- ing love, attention and company … or have we degenerated so much as to drop the human status? carolyne adalla, Confessions of an aids Victim (1993: 51) ... God … Why do you dare take children and leave old wrecks like myself on this Earth? Are you the same God who with just a touch of the hand cured a man afflicted with leprosy? If so, your long record of experience should get rid of the [current aids] abomination of this world. siphiwo mahala, When a Man Cries (2007: 155) ∵ © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044�018�_005 Karen Laura Thornber - 9789004420182 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:52:28PM via free access <UN> 96 Chapter 2 Writing in the early years of the hiv/aids epidemic, American activist and dramatist Larry Kramer (1935–) warned the gay community that even in hospitals, people with aids were being treated “like lepers.”1 And he has the character Felix Turner, Ned Weeks’s lover in The Normal Heart (1985), assume that, having been diagnosed as hiv-positive, he will not just be treated like a person with leprosy but in fact will actually become a leper, or social outcast.2 Eight years later, Carolyne Adalla, one of Kenya’s first creative writers to engage with hiv/aids, has the protagonist of the epistolary novella Confessions of an aids Victim (1993) write her friend despairing that once word gets out about her condition, she will be abandoned, as though she had leprosy, as though she were no longer human.3 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, invoking leprosy as both a stigma and an opportunity for the heavens again to relieve human anguish, an aging congregant in the South African writer Siphiwo Ma- hala’s novel When a Man Cries (2007) pleads that the heavens grant the same mercy to those suffering with hiv/aids as Luke depicted Jesus Christ bestow- ing on a man “full with leprosy.”4 Kramer, Adalla, and Mahala are only three of the many writers whose char- acters equate hiv/aids and leprosy.5 Although these diseases are notably 1 As discussed below, hiv and aids are not synonymous, but the term hiv/aids generally is used to refer to the range of conditions caused by being infected with the human immuno- deficiency virus. 2 A decade later, Abraham Verghese (1955–) describes in My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1994) a 1983 encounter with a gay man suspected of having aids who complains that in the hospital he was “being treated like a leper. As if I have aids” (1994: 28). And Will Johnson, one of Verghese’s patients, explains to the doctor his utmost faith in Jesus Christ, who had “healed people with leprosy – the aids of His time. I knew that He’d know what I’d been going through all the way” (292). 3 Confessions of an aids Victim is Adalla’s only novel. Little is known of her life except that she was raised among the Luo in the Siaya District of Kenya and earned a degree from Egerton University in Nairobi (Krüger 2011: 109). Similarly, the first-person narrator of Zimbabwean former model, writer, and aids activist Tendayi Westerhof’s (1966–) autobiographical novel Unlucky in Love (2005) witnesses a visiting pastor declare, “aids was here even when Jesus walked on this earth. During Christ’s time he healed a man with a dreaded skin disease…. It’s the same today, with the aids we see among us. aids sufferers are sinners, they are paying for their sins! They must repent. Only then can they be forgiven!” (2005: 90). In so doing he echoes Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe (1924–2019), who claimed that aids was a message from God, calling on people to reform, and who believed homosexuality was a national threat (Attree 2010: 12). Furious, the narrator of Unlucky in Love walks out of church, but she recog- nizes that “this was the kind of stigma I would have to face, even in places where I should feel safe and nurtured” (91). Westerhof’s work has continent-wide appeal (Attree 2010: 195). 4 I discuss this phenomenon in Chapter 1. 5 Another example is Malawian writer Stuart Mlumbe, whose short story “The Holocaust” (1990), on the early years of the hiv/aids epidemic in his country, notes that fear of hiv/aids Karen Laura Thornber - 9789004420182 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:52:28PM via free access <UN> Aids, National Fear, Literary Production 97 different biomedically, and although hiv/aids in humans dates back less than a century, not millennia, leprosy and hiv/aids are often linked as two of the most stigmatized in history. hiv/aids has been conceptualized as a new, even more lethal kind of leprosy: both conditions have been thought of as a form of divine retribution; the bodies of persons with hiv/aids, as is the case of per- sons with leprosy, have been seen as tainted with death; people with hiv/aids have been believed to be highly contagious and therefore have been reject- ed from society (Niehaus 2009: 311–312).6 In 1989, Susan Sontag commented, “Even the disease most fraught with meaning can become just an illness. It has happened with leprosy, though some ten million people in the world, easy to ignore since almost all live in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, have what is now called … Hansen’s disease. It is bound to happen with aids, when the illness is much better understood and, above all, treatable” (1989: 181). But de- spite Sontag’s optimism, three decades later, aids remains much more than “just an illness.”7 Even more so than leprosy and perhaps more than any other health condition in recent times, hiv/aids has made clear the devastating ef- fects of stigma – the stigma of a particular condition and the longstanding stigmas against high-risk groups that predate that particular condition – on everything from prevention and rates of infection to testing and diagnosis, to progression, to quality of life, survival, healing, and attaining wellbeing.8 Since the inception of hiv/aids, much global literature that grapples with the disease – understood broadly as everything from oral and written poet- ry and drama to the novel and short story to memoir and other life writing, literary nonfiction, and investigative journalism among other genres – has exposed and decried the stigmas both against hiv/aids and against people most vulnerable to contract the disease, often depicting the resulting social discrimination as increasing the physical and psychological suffering of indi- viduals, communities, nations, and ultimately humanity writ large. As shown in Chapter 1, much literature on leprosy depicts stigmas against the disease as initially was so penetrating that “the bargirls became as untouchable as lepers,” and this even without having (yet) contracted the virus. And there is Kenyan writer Margaret A. Ogola’s (1958–2011) novel I Swear by Apollo (2002), where the narrator comments, “There was also the terrible stigma. aids was the leprosy of modern times” (2002: 92). Similarly, in Indian writer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s short story “Hello, Darling,” the narrator remarks, “The dis- grace shrouding hiv in India provokes menacing acts of hatred, reserved, in another era, for lepers” (2008: 68). 6 As frequently was true of people with leprosy, people with aids were often viewed as “corps- es that live” (Niehaus 2007: 848). 7 So too of course does leprosy, as discussed in Chapter 1. 8 Samuel K. Cohn (2018) examines social responses to epidemics from antiquity through hiv/aids, arguing that they have been far less violent than is generally assumed. Karen Laura Thornber - 9789004420182 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:52:28PM via free access <UN> 98 Chapter 2 causing greater suffering than the disease itself, while literature that engages with hiv/aids tends to focus more on the relationship between stigmas and fear. In particular, this literature illuminates the devastating consequences when concern with reducing the prevalence and severity of the disease is dwarfed by fear of being stigmatized for having the disease; for one’s sexual- ity, profession, or lifestyle; or for supporting a stigmatized group. These texts argue that when efforts to ameliorate hiv/aids are thwarted by fears of the stigmas surrounding it, people refuse to advocate for change and to break the longstanding silences surrounding the disease, and people knowingly con- tinue to engage in behaviors that put themselves and their sexual partners immediately at risk, such as having unprotected sex and rejecting testing and treatment. Other literature on hiv/aids focuses more on how uncontrolled fear of the disease paradoxically leads society to devote more of its energies to fear- ing people with the disease (i.e., discriminating against people with the dis- ease) than to taking action against it (i.e., providing better education, devel- oping better techniques and facilities to treat the disease).