Handbook of Quality of Life in African Societies by Irma Eloff

Author:Irma Eloff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030153670
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Because nobody ever said AIDS.

An arresting chord is struck with the collective “we” that comments on the illness, death and disgust associated with HIV as experienced by Africans. These words register a direct alignment with AIDS as a disease that is embodied and lived, and more that this is a disease that expresses notable silences; even more, it is exceptionalised instead of normalised (see Cameron, 2007). The words are not empty nor abstract musings but rather reflective, as they call into question contemporary struggles about the silences surrounding AIDS that circumscribe lived realities in African contexts that compromise the quality of life experiences. An underlying feature of Maluleke’s words is a rejection of a romantic or sentimental attitude for the sake of the struggle for survival. Not only does Maluleke make a plea for perseverance in the fight against the disease, but also the lines in the text provide a lamentation about the loss of human life that call into question the centrality of the human cost. The human cost of silence is a central refrain in writing about HIV and AIDS, and is less about disease, and indeed more about directing us to the cost and consequences of silence. The text responds to some extent to large-scale denials, misconceptions and political neglect and discomfort that characterise the discourse surrounding the epidemic in many contexts that marginalise people living with HIV in African locations.

Taking the cure from the above examples relating to the discourses of suffering, blame, shame and stigma associated with HIV, this chapter focuses on a descriptive interpretation of a selection of narratives (some novels, and life writing informed by autobiographical and biographical accounts) from South Africa (I shall explain the uses of (auto)biography later). Along the lines of Plummer (1995: 168) I approach these stories (including the narratives in poems) as modes of life writing – as acts as well as texts, sociological as well as aesthetic phenomena in which “story tellings may come very close to the life as experienced”. Plummer takes up the ‘narrative turn’ from cultural studies within sociology and suggests that a sociology of stories asks different questions about the meaning of navigating disease and direct us to the role of the social and political (see also Plummer, 2001). In addition the social processes through which lives are constructed and consumed also speak back to earlier theoretical encounters with autobiography (explained briefly in a later section) that have returned to the “paradox of the referential aesthetic” (see Eakin, 1992). By ‘referential aesthetic’, I mean locating the speaking voice in a real world.

The chapter provides a brief explanation of a location of the texts aligned in relation to a developing critical analytical literature in the field. Thereafter it turns to an overview of some key texts focused on the representation of central meanings shaped by authors. The chapter also builds on the insight by Brophy (2004: 4) that “personal testimonies written in response to HIV and AIDS attempt to intervene in cultural memory by

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