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THE DISEASED BODY AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING IN KENYAN HIV/AIDS FICTION
BY
JAPHETH PETER MUINDU
2014
THE DISEASED BODY AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING IN KENYAN HIV/AIDS FICTION
BY
JAPHETH PETER MUINDU
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE
DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, THEATRE AND FILM STUDIES
MOI UNIVERSITY
P.O.BOX 3900
ELDORET - KENYA
NOVEMBER 2014
This thesis is my original work and has not been presented for a degree in any other university.
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MUINDU, J. PETER DATE
SASS/D.PHIL/08/2006
DECLARATION BY SUPERVISORS
This thesis has been submitted with our approval as university supervisors.
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PROF. PETER T. SIMATEI DATE
DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, THEATRE & FILM
STUDIES
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
MOI UNIVERSITY
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PROF. CHRISTOPHER J. ODHIAMBO DATE DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, THEATRE & FILM
STUDIES
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
MOI UNIVERSITY
For my daughters, Patience and Prudence
I wish to record my special thanks to my thesis supervisors Prof. Peter Simatei and Prof. Christopher Odhiambo for their guidance, encouragement and understanding. Their discussions, suggestions, advice and constructive criticisms gave me fresh insights and points of departure that I appropriated in my study. I am thankful to them for their readiness to help and advise whenever I required assistance. My gratitude also to Prof. Peter Amuka, Prof. Tom Mboya, Prof. Mellitus Wanyama, Dr.B. Okong’o, Dr.H.Shigali, Dr. Busolo, Dr. Mbogo, Dr.Ndogo , Mr Tobias Otieno and Mr James Wachira, who gave me invaluable advice and encouraged me all along. My thanks to them are deep and sincere.
I am indebted to several friends, especially, Mrs Anne Jose, Mrs Benedicta Tabot, Fr. Martin Tanui, Mrs Anne Langat, Mr Alexander Rotich, Mrs Bilha Muthoni and Mr Eddie Ombagi, all of them my colleagues in the School of Education and Social Sciences, University of Kabianga, with whom I discussed various aspects of this research. I deeply value their moral support and concern.
I treasure the support from my parents, Muindu Matiti and Mwende Muindu, from my siblings, Ndanu, Kang’alikya, Nzomo, Michael, Nyumu, Mbutha and Kasyoki and from my cousins, Telesia Mumo, Geoffrey, Ngala and Kithusi. I am much indebted to my wife, Gladys, for her loving care. Without her constant support and encouragement, it would have been difficult to do this work. My warm thanks also to my children, Lester, Patience and Prudence, who were a constant source of inspiration to me.
Lastly, I am enormously grateful to many friends and relatives who supported me and gave me help, sometimes of a personal nature. I want to thank in particular Mrs Christine Seno for desiring the best in me, and my father in-law Mr Naftalis Kinara for encouragement. Thanks to Mr Mumo Mutambuki, Mr Kimanzi Mutambu, Mr Mutua Kalii, Mr Alex Chepkemboi, Mr Mutua Ng’ondu and Mr Joe Kilai. For their constant friendship and support, I am enormously grateful.
The study explores the representation of the diseased body and the quest for meaning in six selected Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels: Carolyne Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim (1993), Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague (2000), Joseph Situma’s The Mysterious Killer (2001), Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom (2004), Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera (2004) and Moraa Gitaa’s Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (2008). I analyze the selected texts as fictional spaces in which rhetorical struggle with AIDS apocalypse is staged, where AIDS propinquity with death is exposed and criticized and where the illness is re-visioned. My thesis is that the selected Kenyan HIV/AID novels provide spaces for the diseased subjects to pursue a quest for existential meaning to transcend the disruption and meaningless wrought on their lives by AIDS. The study seeks to map out the mediation of existential disruption by characters in the works under study, to explicate the quest for meaning by the diseased subjects in the selected fiction and to establish the relationship between illness and characterization in the selected novels. To this end, the study attempts to answer the following research questions: How are the diseased subjects negotiating the existential quandaries imposed on them by AIDS in the selected texts? What is the relationship between AIDS and characterization in the selected texts? What ontological issues are embodied in the texts under study? To explore the quest for existential meaning by characters in the selected texts and to explicate how these characters quest through chaos, the study utilizes the existentialist notions advanced by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and the Foucauldian postulations on the politics of and the care of the self. It also draws on the thoughts of liminal thinkers like de Certeau and Victor Turner. These paradigms have the self as a shared feature and are useful in focusing the study to the individuality of the diseased subjects and their relationship with themselves and the complex social world around them. This is a library based qualitative study in which data is collected and analyzed through existentialist and postmodernist models. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodology. Through a critical analysis of the selected texts, the study establishes that the texts deconstruct the cultural significations of the diseased body and demonstrate its regenerative potential. It also shows that the texts offer an alternative way of representing AIDS by subverting and countering the apocalyptic rhetoric that surrounds the pandemic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
iiiDECLARATION
viABSTRACT
11.1.1 Representation and the Body
91.1.2 Literary Aids and the Representation of the Diseased Body
131.2 Statement Of The Problem
52PLOTTING HIV/AIDS CRISIS IN KENYA
562.2 Novelistic Responses: An Overview
743.2 Existential Disruption and Meaninglessness
117CHAPTER FOUR
1194.2 From Limbo to Continuity
157CHAPTER FIVE
157LIMINALITY AND REGENERATION
1665.2 Altruism: Suffering as Heart-Opening
1765.3 Meaningful Relationships
187CHAPTER SIX
187CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
195REFERENCES
Dean (2013) posits that humans have since time immemorial engaged with artistic representations of our bodies where aspects of the body such as ontology and identity and the body as a locus of language production and language learning have been articulated. He observes that in aesthetic contexts,’ the image of the body is itself a historical matrix , marked and modeled in a crucible of social, cultural and psychosexual circumstance’ (Dean, 2013: 2). Dean underscores the need for anyone involved in analyzing corporeal representations to endeavour to establish how an artist represents the body and what it means to do so. For instance, does he do so to reclaim it? To fetishize it? To map, to equate, to sex, to dismember it?
He notes the age-old somaticized identifications in which our bodies, as a locus of language learning become our first texts, our most intimate maps from which we project onto the landscape, onto our understanding of the world and its manifestations. It is his view that whereas the body in antiquity was mainly utilized as a means for grasping man’s place in the cosmos, the modern body, and the body at the turn of the century was called upon to represent new ideas. He invokes Karl Toepfers seminal study of early twentieth-century German dance and performance aesthetics where Toepfers posits that bodies are modern because they create significant instabilities of perception, arguing that in those performances, movements and nudity destabilize long- held perceptions about the body.
Dean observes that such destabilization became the goal of most avant-garde movements and artists in Germany as well as elsewhere in Europe, the Americans and beyond, artists who desired to thwart easy readings and to force unexpected perspectives. These vanguardists, according to Dean, sought modes of more unfettered expression in life as in art as an effect of the First World War whose end
affected every walk of life. The freedom in manners and morals, especially sexual, was unprecedented. In order to understand the joy of young people and the daring behavior of those years, we must remember the strictness and prudery that throughout the nineteenth century imposed middle- class morality on the world. After the war women came out onto the street, bobbed their hair, raised the hems of their skirts, showed their bodies, and stuck out their tongues at bishops, judges, and teachers. Erotic liberation coincided with artistic revolution (Dean, 2013:4).
This revolutionary art was seized by the artists who articulated renderings of the body as both more organic and more artificial: more organic because of their focus on corporeal issues such as birth, origin, excess, and new sexualities and more artificial because of their love for technology and its world-shrinking inventions at the turn of the century that affected the body intrinsically.
Dean credits the vanguardists for challenging with relish the perception of the body in the Western episteme ‘as a soul cage, as an entity separate and independent from the mind, as the seat of our baser instincts’ (ibid). In Latin America, notes Dean, these vanguardists became inspired to address the panoply of visual and oral expression of ideas and knowledges about the body that appertain to indigenous African cosmologies. The excavation of these alternative somatic conceptualizations did extend and enrich the range of allegorical meanings and uses of the body beyond what the European artists could imagine, a gesture towards Jacques Derrida’s clarion call in 1974: ‘Let us space’(cited in Birrel, 2000:20) by which he meant “the rewriting of traditional philosophical concepts…, the discovery of past invisible subjects of cultural discourse, such as the history of woman, the history of sexuality, or the history of those other neglected areas of human sciences, which had been marginalized or ignored in the context of the great tradition”(Birrel, 2000:18). In modern narrative, the textual body engages in a perpetual interplay between the body as imagery within the work and the body as a conceit of the work, it begets what Peter Brooks calls ‘ a semiotization of the body… matched by a somatization of a story: a claim that the body must be a source and locus of meanings, and that stories cannot be told without making the body a prime vehicle of narrative significations’(Brooks, 1993: 6).
In Lawrence Scehlers view, this need for signification packages the body as a somatic center for semantic interchange, viewing it as always ‘that which is conceived of and constructed by the other …., for it is the locus at which the game of control is played out , the locus at which the substitution of sign for body occurs’(ibid). Scehler’s views are illustrative of the way the textual body interacts with the human body, a kind of textual-corporeality writing which expresses the rhythms of existence in spatiotemporal format. In Subutzky’s (2004) view what magnitude of corporeality to inscribe in a text is at the discretion of the writer who may for instance revisit a body over the time sequence of a text, or s/he may depict the aging of a character after appropriate narrative exigencies to imply the passage of time, or an illness, operation or accident may be relayed in ways that allow for comparison of the person’s before or after.
In his seminal Body Work, Peter Brooks argues:
The body is made a signifier, or the place on which messages are written. This is perhaps most of all true in narrative literature, where the body’s story, through the trials of desire and over time, often is very much part of the story of a character. The result is what we might call a narrative aesthetics of embodiment, where meaning and truth are made carnal (Brooks, 1993:21).
Dean further asserts that the body can serve as an allegory, microcosm and cosmos, region or nation, body politic, body of knowledge, history or chronicle, conflict, pain, love, gender, sex, ethnicity, class, and even spirituality. He further postulates that a particular body can be contrasted against others for symbolic effect, or an artist might opt to write characters seemingly lacking bodies, if no bodies are described, in which case the reader must assume (or not) bodies for these characters.
Josipovici (1982) defines his purpose as to examine the role which writing and books play within our bodies, how they are simultaneously familiar and yet forever mysterious to us, undertaking to explore the paradox therein. He further posits that the body moves into a particular prominence, “not only because it is a source of intense and constant pain and is approaching its own extinction, but also because the imminence of death confers a special authority on whatever is said in one’s last moment” (Josipovici, 1982:142).
Slatterry(1999) argues that ‘the body in its scarred, marked, diseased, tattooed, or otherwise afflicted state is not only an individual phenomenon but, in the hands of a poet, a cultural symptom, a place of suffering, as well as a way of seeing and ordering the experience of the one who is wounded’(Slatterry,1999:1). The body in its afflicted state has the potential to conduct the reader to the treasures of meaning it constructs through suffering, which coheres with the quest for meaning in illness undertaken in the current study.
Merleau-Ponty inserts embodied agency in emphasizing a perceptual experience in quest for meaning, contending that bodily experience compels us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning that is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness (as read in Taylor,1999:223). His view is that we do not understand ourselves first as pure egos, but with the bodies in which we locate our sensations, that is ‘by the time we are in a position to ascribe experiences to subjects at all, whether ourselves or others, we already understand them in primitive bodily terms’ (ibid). The body is thus not a mere thing, not a discrete object of outer perception but ‘a quasi-object that an essentially disembodied transcendental ego has or owns as the locus of its subjective sensations’, a noetic achievement of transcendental subjectivity (Taylor,C,1999:223-4). For Merleau-Ponty, we do not have our bodies; rather, we are our body, that is, we are in the world through our body insofar as we perceive the world with our body.
Farmer and Kleinman (1989) contend that a mortal disease forces questions of dread, of death, and of ultimate meaning to arise. For them suffering is different from pain, positing that ‘suffering is a culturally and personally distinctive form of affliction of the human spirit, a distress of the person and of his or her family and friends, while pain is only distress of the body’(Farmer & Kleinman,1989:138). They ‘rank AIDS with smallpox, plague, and leprosy in its capacity to menace and hurt, to burden and spoil human experience, and to elicit questions about the nature of life and its significance’ (Farmer& Kleinman,1989:139). Novelized AIDS narratives are worth of analysis for their potential to help the afflicted to give meaning to their suffering. This engagement with the quest for meaning in illness is a way of debunking AIDS myths and a fictional attempt to resist what Susan Sontag refers to as the ‘socially imposed rhetoric that accuses, discredits and injures the afflicted’(Sontag, 1989:89).
Waskul (2011) posits that the body is the empirical quintessence of the self and that because selfhood is symbolic, embodiment therefore represents the personification and materialization of otherwise invisible qualities of personhood. He further opines that the body and experiences of embodiment are central to our sense of being, who we think we are, and what others attribute to us. He poses two crucial questions: What happens when one’s body is humiliating? How do people manage selfhood in the light of grotesque physical appearances? These questions ignite an existentialist inquiry and are germane to this study on illness and quest for meaning. The study explores these questions in the experiences of the diseased subjects and their interpersonal relationships in the six texts selected for the study, it underscores the sense of the before, a nostalgia for lost splendor that pervades the collective consciousness in the age of AIDS.
Sawday (1995) argues that ‘the sense of fear or mystery at the prospect of our own interior demesne’ (Sawday, 1995:266) exerts powerful control over all our other endeavours’ and shapes our thinking about the world. He contends that the dissection of bodies in the renaissance epoch acted as a catalyst which brought the fact of our interior world more sharply into focus and transformed people’s understanding of themselves, their selfhood and of the relationship of their minds to their bodies and their feeling of location in the human society. Reviewing Sawday’s text in 1996, Martin Leach observes that ‘Sawday is essentially exploring the birth of a particularly modern fascination grounded within this new knowledge of our own interior world, a fascination which is still with us today, ‘a fear and horror… based on the knowledge of our own mortality’. In the case of HIV/AIDS, the liminality it engenders on the diseased compels the diseased subjects to reconstruct and enlarge their meaning of life in order to affirm it in the face of their own corporeal extinction.
The ability to transcend the limitations of illness to enlarge the meaning of life is best articulated by the anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) in his concept of liminality. In Turner’s estimation, liminality originally meant to describe the social position of individuals undergoing a role transformation after a rite of passage. It derives from the Latin ‘liminen’ which means ‘threshold’, hence its association with creativity, new perspectives and regeneration. The concept of liminality is appropriated in this study to situate an explication of the characters existential quest for being, thrust in-between and betwixt life and death by the debilitating reality of AIDS.
The concept of liminality provides a versatile means of analyzing a range ‘of phenomenon including the patients’ passage from health to illness and the ways in which he or she endeavours to give structure and meaning to that process, the impact of the illness and the description of the life-course disruption that serious illness or injury imposes on the patient and his other family’ (Duffy,2011).This points out the potentialities of positive change that may accompany a drastic physical or psychological event.
Cell (1967) suggests that meaning is not limited to passionate concern with the fulfillment of corporeal desires but an ultimate concern with ‘the meaning of life, with the self- realization of man, with the fulfillment of the task which life sets us’ (Cell, 1967:266), with what replenishes the soul and dismisses as banal desires and aims that do not contribute to the welfare of the soul. Meaning is an attitude of oneness not only with one’s fellow human beings but with all life and with the universe. This oneness does not deny the uniqueness and the individuality of the self but on the contrary it ‘comprises both the sharp and even painful awareness of one’s self as a separate and unique entity and the longing to break through the confines of …individual organization and to be one with all’(ibid).
Increased intellectual interest in the body at the level of lived experience has heightened awareness of bodies as vulnerable entities with the potential to sicken and suffer. Examining the body through artistic responses to the AIDS crisis gives a glimpse of the tensions and connections between the conceptual -theoretical body and the material-lived body for AIDS crisis underscores the embodied experience of reality and is therefore subversive of its constructions in discourses power relations. Corporeal representations of AIDS (disease) in literary fiction tends to problematize this social construction as texts engage in exposing inherent fallacies and stereotypes prevalent in social political and economic milieu of the texts through articulating the existential tensions concomitant with the illness.
Though the initial American AIDS plays and novels that broach AIDS assumed the apocalyptic trajectory with most of the AIDS victims ending in death, O’Connell (1998) observes that the genre still affirmed heterosexual harmony. He cites as an example John O’Connor’s Intimate Contact, an English drama presented on cable television in the United States, in which a husband contracts AIDS from a prostitute and the wife evolves from outrage to involvement in AIDS education to struggle against the disease that ravaged her wayward husband. This cautionary and didactic drama inscribes the terror of transmission of the disease through sexual contact as a reminder to heterosexual couples that there is good in the old monogamous ways, a theme that dramas and fiction in the American scene seem to seize from the late 1980s.
Literary AIDS: a term coined by Judith Laurence Pastore, in the introduction to Confronting AIDS Through Literature: Responsibilities of Representation. In Part 1: Literary AIDS: What are the Responsibilities?
She used the term ‘literary AIDS’ to refer to the emerging genre of literature about AIDS, the artistic works produced and fuelled by HIV/ AIDS
O’Connell observes that though some people still remained undaunted by the challenge posed by AIDS and the collective consciousness still remained unmoved by the epidemic in its early periods in America and elsewhere, its menace and the epiphany of mortality freed up information about tabooed subjects like the condom and death.
Belletristic writing on AIDS is a ‘high-minded, didactic and direct, though also comic’ one that ‘documents and articulates a major shift of consciousness which accompanies the disease” (O’Connell, 1998:490). Much of this initial writing is raw, unpolished, angry, contentious,’ (ibid), ostensibly to shout to the ignorance and the indifference surrounding the affected. Though in the early1980s belletristic writing on AIDS had not solidified into a distinct genre even in America, it was predictable that fiction on a horrific topic like AIDS would, of necessity, present simple character types that embody didactic positions and who insist that the AIDS infected be treated fairly.
O’Connell has categorized the immense body of literature produced by AIDS crisis as follows:
(i) divided between conflicting impulses: realistic and anti-romantic or satiric and fantastic;
(ii) more concerned with death than sex, though nostalgic for the lost days of wine and roses;
(iii) family-centered, whether that means reconciliation with the victim’s biological family, the affirmation of one’s elected family, or both: fellowship and family renewal in the face of death are the constant themes of these works;
(iv) antibourgeois; evil and indifferent men from the social establishment exploit the crisis;
(v) self-reflexive: these works raise questions about the nature, form and substance of gay male literature and asks members of the male homosexual community to question what it means to be gay;
(vi) committed to the proposition that most victims and their loved ones are ennobled through suffering;
(vii) intensely, bleakly humorous; thoughtful, inward, plaintive, eloquent; often artless or excessive
(viii) cautionary: AIDS affects us all; no man is an island
In general, literary AIDS seems to take the onus of incorporating the horrific facts of the crisis as a memento mori, masque of death and a plague and the didactic function of prodding us ‘to feel our way to new levels of understanding. These categories are not clear cut and in most cases do overlap. This study establishes how the sampled Kenyan AIDS novels fit into these categories and how Kenyan AIDS literary writers engage with the thresholds of understanding provided by the experience of AIDS.
Sontag (1988) laments the rise of apocalyptic thinking and the fantasies of doom that AIDS has inspired. She decries the fact that the illness has become one of the most meaning-laden of diseases, it has become, she posits, ‘one of the dystopian harbingers of the global village’ (Sontag,1997:92).The doomsday rubric in which AIDS has been conceptualized has distanced it from its biological reality to its image and projection. AIDS is a subject to the ‘dynamics of normativity’ which Michel Foucault believes ‘causes tragic effects on the otherised individual’ (Foucault, 1997:51).These dynamics of normativity conceive AIDS apocalyptically, a way of ‘metaphorizing’ illness condemned by Sontag because it aggravates the plight of the ill. Decrying this AIDS apocalypse, Michael Lynch regrets that ‘AIDS is so much ligatured with death, in our framing of it and to apocalypse that we cannot easily locate alternatives’ (Pastore, 1993:82). Like Sontag, Lynch urges a discourse about AIDS that is free from language of terror, panic, and apocalypse.
Though as yet there is no cure for AIDS, the use of immune boosting pharmaceuticals have over time come to challenge this ligaturing of AIDS with death and apocalypse. Freed from its cultural significations, AIDS is increasingly becoming potentially manageable like other terminal illnesses, for as Sontag predicted:
Even the disease most fraught with meaning can become just an illness….It is bound to happen with AIDS, when the illness is all treatable. For the time being, much in the way of individual experience and social policy depends on the struggle for rhetorical ownership of the illness: how it is possessed, assimilated in argument and in cliché (Sontag, 1988:97).
She further notes in the same context that ‘the age old-old, seemingly, inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging…’ (ibid).
Since the diagnosis of AIDS in 1984, biomedical, media and lay discourses in Kenya, like in other parts of the world, have hyped the rhetoric that presented a linear and a mortal trajectory of AIDS, collapsing the time between diagnosis and death such that sero-positive status was represented as a death-sentence. Apocalyptic AIDS narratives present AIDS diagnosis as a forward march to impending death and advance the view that AIDS means doom while counter-apocalyptic fiction resists this linearity and denies that AIDS has the last word. AIDS has become the site of apocalyptic rhetoric in Kenya as elsewhere and an array of apocalyptic narratives have been inscribed in mystified and phobic representations of AIDS in popular discourses. The focal point explored in this study is that the selected novels tend towards the counter-apocalyptic and engage with thresholds of understanding offered by illness and suffering.
This study attempts to analyze the subversion of AIDS apocalypse and the interaction between the (AIDS) diseased body and the characters’ reconstruction of existential meaning in the selected texts. It seeks to answer the questions: In what sense do Kenyan AIDS novels studied here invoke and subvert AIDS apocalyptic images? How do the diseased characters quest through chaos for meaning in illness? What is the impact of illness on these characters? Can a connection be made between liminality and regeneration of characters as represented in the novels? I advance the thesis that the selected Kenyan HIV/AID novels provide spaces for the diseased subjects to pursue a quest for existential meaning in a bid to transcend the disruption and meaninglessness wrought on their lives by AIDS.
The general objective of the study is to explore and critically analyze the artistic treatment of the quest for existential meaning by characters in the selected Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels. Specifically, I critically study these novels to:
(i)Explore the quest for meaning by the diseased subjects in the selected fiction
(ii) To establish the relationship between illness and characterization in the selected texts
(iii)Discuss the mediation of existential disruption by characters in the works under study
That illness and the quest for meaning are not opposed but intertwined and that the selected novels provide literary spaces in which AIDS can be philosophized on and re-visioned
The study is a qualitative critical analysis of six Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels through existentialist and Foucauldian prisms
How are the diseased subjects negotiating the existential quandaries imposed on them by AIDS in the selected texts?
What is the relationship between AIDS and characterization in the selected texts?
What ontological issues are embodied in the texts under study?
Contemporary Kenyan literary AIDS writers provide a fictional world in which the meaning of life with AIDS can be probed
Contemporary Kenyan HIV/AIDS novelists are informed by optimistic existentialism which aims at affirming life in the era of AIDS
Existentialist and poststructuralist inspired analysis of the texts will yield insights into existential issues surrounding the pandemic
1:8 Justification of the Study
The chief function of criticism is to stimulate and enlighten. The literary critic uses his or her interpretive skills to understand the writer’s community of values and philosophies and communicates the same to the writer’s varied audience. It is therefore essential for criticism and evaluation to grow alongside the growing number of AIDS novels in Kenya. This study is a modest contribution to existing literary criticism on literary AIDS in Kenya.
The reading and criticism of literary AIDS is an opportunity for rethinking and re-conceptualizing the disease which has the potential to bring about more active attempts to combat it. A study of AIDS fiction is justifiable because literary AIDS is usually edifying as it crusades for safe sex and dispels unwarranted fears about the disease.
Literary AIDS artists share the ferment hope that their literary representations of the disease will help fight inhuman vilification of the sick and that their depictions of suffering and dignity will generate enough compassion to eradicate misconceptions emanating from ignorance and bigotry. It is worth analyzing their works to gain insights from their artistic treatment of AIDS and tease out the alternative discourses about the pandemic as a biological illness that can be prevented and lived with. It demonstrates how the novelistic medium can be enlisted in the service of biomedicine.
Criticism on literary AIDS deepens the understanding of the illness as a disruptive event in the life of the afflicted. The texts’ narrative structures of experiences of love, grief and a feel for pathos shape the sensibilities of the reader and as Tracy D opined:
To care for the sick in a morally responsible manner, the doctor must delve into the patient’s experience, imagine the patient’s future, integrate thought and feeling and with the patient, co-author the next chapter in a life-story whose story line has been interrupted by illness or injury (cited in Carson, 1994:238).
Literary AIDS seems pertinent to this moral responsibility and it is hoped that the present study will contribute in a small way not only to the Kenyan AIDS imaginative literature but also to the medical humanities.
Recognizing the fact that preferred methods of coping with life threatening disease are shaped by both biography and culture and that there are set stages that HIV infected must go through, there can be no standard professional response. For a field beset by criticism of humanism, biomedicine will need the support of the humanities to effectively address the ‘stigma, spoiling of identity, shame, humiliation and outright rejection that has all too often been the ordeal of people with AIDS’ (Farmer & Kleimann, 1989:156).
Literary AIDS can play an important role in overcoming stereotypical AIDSphobia, creating alternative images of the pandemic and voicing new ways of understanding and addressing the spread and impact of the disease. Literary AIDS has a mission and responsibility to serve a humane cause because of its potential to provide access to both facts and feelings.
Creative writings on AIDS offer an interdisciplinary opportunity in which the role of literary fiction in health matters can be emphasized. The study is a modest contribution to the war of symbols, information, education and communication to be waged to initiate the necessary paradigm shift and change of mindsets in conceptualizing HIV/AIDS conflagration.
The current study is conceptualized within existential phenomenonology, Foucauldian post-structuralism and de Certeaua’s heterological thoughts. It appropriates Sartrean optimistic atheism which places man’s destiny within himself and emphasizes one’s immediate sense of oneself as the ultimate truth about the human reality.
Phenomenology can be traced from the philosophical foundations launched in the first half of the 20th century by phenomenological thinkers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean Paul Sartre among others. Phenomenology is the study of phenomena, of appearances of things, or things as they appear in the experiences, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. It concerns itself with conscious experience from the subjective or first person point of view. Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience, ranging from perception, thought , memory, imagination, emotion, desire and volition to bodily awareness , embodied action and social activity.
Phenomenology is a philosophy of facticity which investigates the world and human existence. It seeks to reflect on the conditions of possibility of experience and cognition. Existential phenomenology attempts to disclose the historical and practical contextuality of cognition. Rejecting interiority, phenomenology advocates a life -world, insisting that since man is in the world, he only knows himself by means of inhabiting the world. Simply put, phenomenology is concerned with the way we experience things and the meanings things have on our experience. The philosophy holds that the subject does not have a monopoly either on its self -understanding or on its understanding of the world, maintaining that there are aspects of the self and of the world that only become ‘accessible and available through the other’(Merleau-Ponty,1962:665).For phenomenologists, subjectivity is embodied in the social, historical and natural context, so that existence is not simply a question of how the subject apprehends itself, it is also a question of how others apprehend it. It investigates the domain of ignored obviousness that impedes the subject’s reflection on the world. Phenomenology is a perpetual meditation, a critical self reflection that does not take anything for granted. As Merleau-Ponty points out, ‘the fact that phenomenology remains unfinished, the fact that it is always under way, is not a defect or flaw that should be mended, but rather one of its essential features’. He further observes that ‘the subject realizes itself in its presence to the world and to others’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:515).Phenomenology is primordially concerned with the production of meaning. It defines meaning as ‘the individual signification of experience and interprets experience as a quest for meaning.
Human existence is the main tenet of existentialist philosophy. It tries to show what it means to exist by distinguishing between human beings as existing and other worldly beings that are not existing but only extant. The philosophy insists that only human beings can have an existence because they are historical beings. Man realizes his existence when he realizes that his present is a result of his past and it is a moment of free decision. Existentialism makes personal existence an individual’s responsibility and reminds man to take up responsibility toward his future because no one can take the place of another.
Both Christian and atheistic existentialism are united in their position that existence precedes essence. Sartrean atheistic existentialism posits that because God does not exist, man is the being who exits before he can be defined by a concept. Existentialist philosophy aim is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the responsibility of his existence rest entirely on him. For Sartre, existentialism regards the question of the existence of God as a non-issue since whether he exists or not does not ease man’s anguish and self-estrangement. Instead, existentialism is a doctrine of action that empowers human beings to exploit their freedom of choice to create themselves and find meaning in their life uninhibited by authority and convention. It empowers man to strive, as Albert Camus insisted, to be a saint without God.
Camus seems to be at one with Sartre in their analysis of the human condition. Like Sartre, Camus rejects Christian theodicy and is radical in his affirmation of ‘this -worldliness’. The starting point of his thought was his concern, which he broaches in The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula, but even at this point, he sounded a strong affirmation of life, the simple life of this world and this world alone, with its joys and cries and regarded ‘supernatural hopes as a betrayal of this common world of men and thus of humanity itself’ (cited in Cell, E, 1967:194) and Christianity in particular as an apologist for injustice. He treats the extreme situation of human existence but transcends the experiences of anguish, terror, guilt and the absurd in an affirmation of joy, declaring in The Plague that ‘there are more things to admire in men than to despise’, (cited in Cell, E, 1967:195).Camus presents a more optimistic image of modern human being who has attained the capacity for freedom, even freedom to get along without the intervention of God even in the face of mystery and anguish. In Caligula, Camus has Cherea, one of the characters say: ‘To lose one’s life is a little thing and I shall have the courage to do so if it is necessary; but to see the meaning of this life dissipated, to see our reason for existing disappear, that is what is unbearable’ (Camus, A, 2003:75), which underscores the necessity of questing through chaos undertaken by the ill individuals in the selected texts.
In the preface to The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus (1965: p.v) laid the groundwork for an ethical theory of value-nihilism, stating that “Within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.
In a letter to a German friend he wrote:
I continue to insist that this world has no meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate itself. And it has no justification but man; hence he must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life’ (Camus, 1960:28).
His other texts like Caligula and The Stranger further develop this theme of optimistic existentialism, advancing the view that the purpose of life is not to be happy but rather to die happy and that ‘If one expects to die happy, then one must begin a pilgrimage which ultimately ends in a happy death’( ibid).
Both existentialism and psychoanalysis are interested in the human being’s existential predicament. Their focus is human being’s ‘estranged existence, the characteristics and symptoms of this estrangement, and the conditions of existence in time and space. Therapeutic psychology hints to the relation between mental, bodily and psychosomatic disease while existentialism deals with the same boundary line between healthy and sick, inquiring into how a being has a structure that produces psychosomatic diseases. It is in attempting to respond to this question of corporeal amenability to disease that existentialists point to the ‘possible experience of meaninglessness, to the continuous experience of loneliness, to the widespread feeling of emptiness’ (Cell, E,1967: 283) which it derives from the anxiety engendered by the awareness of finitude and the estrangement of oneself from one’s world. ‘It also points to the danger of freedom and to the threat of non-being in all respects- from death to guilt’ (ibid).
Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist thinker, believes that human existence precedes his essence since there is no God to conceive it, that man is nothing else but what which he makes himself and that human beings should be responsible for their own actions and come to terms with the fact that life is what one makes it. For Sartre, individuals make decisions unaided by any religion or ethics but by their own feelings, their sense of what is right. He posits that no matter what happens, one must do whatever one can with utmost commitment. Though atheistic and agnostic, Sartrean existentialism is optimistic because, in placing the destiny of man within himself, it puts faith in human beings and insists that our destiny is not planned but it is ours to make. His brand of existentialism is a doctrine of empowerment and hope that affirms life, quite apart from its pessimistic associations. The empowerment inherent in existentialist thinking is attributed to the self-awareness that emanates from a crisis-traumatic experience, a decisive moment in which one’s freedom of choice cuts through a crushing crisis, giving impetus to existential consciousness. Optimistic existentialism thus views a disruption, an earth-shuttering experience or reversal as moments of epiphany that lead individuals into deeper insights and reveals to them the vast arrays of possibilities open to them. Disruption such as that follows the diagnosis of terminal illness disrupts the notion of the existence of absolute criteria for evaluating one’s choice, for, faced with an existential disruption, one realizes that there is nothing beyond or above oneself and one must be guided by one’s decision and resolve.
Optimistic existentialism as propounded by Sartre is therefore crucial in exploring the existential consciousness in the selected texts and the characters’ reaction to their impending mortality as they grapple with the debilitating reality of HIV and AIDS. The shuttering reality of being sero-positive calls for a decisive shift in personal philosophy which illuminates the analysis of the writers’ use of the pandemic in initiating characterization in the texts under study. Above all, the optimistic aspect of this paradigm is germane to the explication of the novels’ engagement with the apocalyptic character of AIDS pandemic and how HIV and AIDS apocalyptic rhetoric is subverted in the selected texts.
Sartre’s notion that existence precedes essence, that is there is no pre-established nature or essence that sets limits on what one can be or do is also applied in the study in examining the different reactions to illness by the characters in the selected novels as they exercise the freedom to re-invent themselves to transcend the disruption and the unmaking of their worlds by chronic illness. The existentialist notion of authenticity which refers to the individual coming to terms with being in the material world is enlisted in explicating the authentic or inauthentic existence of characters faced with the reality of AIDS. Sartre holds that the vertiginous experience of absolute freedom is necessary for authenticity which produces a genuine individual whose impetus for action in relation to his world emanates from within himself and not imposed externally. Erich Fromm (bib) considers authenticity as positive outcome of enlightened and informed motivation rather than a negative outcome of rejection of societal mores. I find such existentialist concepts viable in bringing out the conceptual coupling of apocalypse and renewal as espoused in the fiction under study.
Fredrick Nietzsche, the father of existentialist thought contends that the tragic hero affirms life in the face of its meaninglessness.He argues that the purpose of human life is to encourage the superman, the great individual who heroically constructs meaning in a paradoxically meaningless world through a creative will which gave him the will to power. This overman is responsible for creating new values that could replace the enslaving traditional morality. AIDS and the mortality it portends are existential issues and Nietzechan thoughts about the overman and the will to power are put to use in evaluating the potential of the diseased to transcend the apocalypse and the despondence caused by terminal illness and in analyzing the regenerative function of pain and suffering.
Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist formulation on knowledge production is also utilized in this study. Foucault holds that knowledge is discursive, is created in language and is a consequence of disciplinary power whose aim may not be the discovery of truth. He examines power not in terms of its properties but in its mode of operation, how it produces compliance and resistance. He contends that ‘power operates by disciplining individuals, rendering them visible and making their psychological and physical attributes salient (Cassel & Symon, 2004:203), so that it is through discourse that disciplinary power exerts its effects at the level of the individual. The regulatory effects of discourse ‘occur due to the production of normalizing judgements, i.e. discourses prescribe appropriate behaviors and attributes across a whole range of social domains’ (ibid). In Foucault’s estimation, disciplinary power never secures complete compliance because of the non-unitary nature of discourse which produces alternative versions of what counts as norms, enabling individuals to resist set norms. The anti-essentialist Foucault contests the idea that individuals possess innate characteristics and instead suggests that ‘discourses make positions that we take up in response to our own personal circumstances’ (Cassel & Symon, 2004:204), a positioning which affects how individuals perceive themselves, feel and act.
Foucauldian postulations on the function of discourse in assigning positions to individuals is useful in analyzing the alienation of the diseased subjects in the novels under study, individuals who are struggling to liberate themselves from discourse-produced stigma. These Foucauldian concepts come in handy in discussing the stereotypical phobia about HIV and AIDS as it manifests in the selected texts. Because of the contradictory nature of discourse, according to Fairclough (1992), in regard to Foucault, ‘there are always alternative positions available that the individual could take up or which other people could place that individual’. Conflated with optimistic existentialism, this concept of fluidity and instability of identities enables the researcher to tease out the alternative narratives about HIV and AIDS generated by the texts.
For Foucault, the subject is constituted in discourses that circulate in society and which govern and regulate the individual. The subject thus becomes the site of a discursive battle for the meaning of their construction within a given discourse. The subject is therefore unstable and subject to constructions and re-constructions which produce other subject positions that resist hegemonic meanings. Foucauldian lenses are utilized in exploring the construction of the HIV and AIDS dis/eased subjects by apocalyptic and stigmatizing discourses and their resolve to resist these constructions.
Foucault’s ideas on discourse are also conflated with his concept of the medical gaze to illuminate the critical analysis of the reification and objectification of the sick by the medical discourse which, despite its avowed empiricism, is not, according to Foucault, a science without philosophy. He coined the term ‘medical gaze’ to denote the dehumanizing medical separation of the patient’s body from the patient’s person or identity. His view is that the material and the intellectual structures that made possible the analysis of the body were mixed with power interests and that in entering the field of knowledge; the human body was inserted into the field of power where it could be targeted and manipulated by discourse.
The medical gaze is thus not a naïve empirical act of observing and analyzing the diseased organ but one which entirely depended on the accepted practices of a given episteme. The criterion that distinguishes the diseased organ from the healthy one is a thoroughly historical one that is trapped in and produced by discourse. The concept of the dehumanizing effect of the medical gaze is thus useful in bringing out the insensitivity of the medical discourse to the disrupted lives of the diseased in the selected fiction and the alienation it engenders. Similarly, I extend the idea of the medical gaze to analyze the selected fiction’s overarching tendency to empower the sick in which the diseased subjects return the medical gaze as a subversion of stigmatization.
I have also utilized Foucault’s politics of the self to illuminate the mapping of existential meaning in the novels under study. Care of the self, writes Batter, ‘is both a mindset and a practice, a constant throughout one’s life, in which the individual takes charge of his own identity and sense of self. This self-care occurs at the bodily, mental and spiritual level’ (Batters, 2011:4). Batters further explains that ‘When Foucault spoke of spirituality, he in no way referred to deities or religions. Instead, one’s ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ refers to an ethical, cosmic sense of self (ibid), a broadened understanding of spirituality germane to our concept of meaning as applied in this study. I find crucial Foucault’s discussion of the care of the self because it focuses the study to the individuality of the diseased subjects and their relationship with themselves and the complex social world around them.
Generally, the basic attitude of poststructuralism is skepticism about the claims of any kind of overall, totalizing explanations and the siding with those who didn’t fit into the larger stories; the subordinated and the marginalized, against those with the power to disseminate meta-narratives. The study applies Foucauldian poststructuralist postulate to interrogate emancipatory narratives in the novels that redeem the diseased subjects from oppressive social discourses and ascribe agency to them so as to present counter-hegemonic narratives from their own experiences.
The study also utilizes psychoanalytical literary theory to gain insight into existential issues that plague the diseased characters in the selected texts. In general psychoanalysis better helps us understand human behavior and can therefore be appropriated to study literary texts which focus on human behavior. Freud held that human beings are motivated and driven by desires, fears, needs and conflicts of which they are unaware of, asserting that ‘the unconscious is the structure of those painful expressions, emotions, those wounds, fears, guilty desires and unresolved conflict we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them’ (Tyson, 2007:44). Freud attributes positive qualities to repression as being able to give impetus to psychological rebirth that effects better experience in the individual out of a painful one.
Freud’s postulation of defenses that human beings create in order to repress what they cannot handle, such as denial, avoidance and fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment are useful insights in the analysis of disease induced alienation of characters in the selected texts. Similarly, his concepts on anxiety, overwhelming sense of loss with its attendant fears and trauma are useful in discussing the theme of existential vacuum experienced by characters as a result of existential disruption. Trauma is a consequence of unabated anxiety where repression collapses and the individual is confronted with what Jacques Lucan calls the ‘Real’, what is beyond all our meaning-making systems, that which lies outside the world created by the ideologies society uses to explain existence…, existence without the filters and buffers of our signifying or meaning-making system’(Tyson, 2006:32):
The Real is that experience we have, perhaps on a daily basis, even if it’s only for a moment, when we feel that there is no purpose or meaning to life, when we suspect that religion and any or all of the rules that govern society are hoaxes or mistakes or the results of chance. In other words, we experience the Real when we have a moment in which we see through ideology, when we realize that it is ideology- and not some set of timeless values or eternal truths- that has made the world as we know it (ibid)
The debilitating condition of AIDS compounded by the immersion of AIDS diseased subjects into the oppressive symbolic order of meaning-making engenders moments of epiphany in which the diseased characters are confronted with the Real and the concomitant loss of meaning, igniting a deeper quest for the meaning of their existence as diseased subjects.
The three theoretical paradigms appropriated for this study, to wit; existentialism, Foucauldian and de Certeau’s heterology are united in their concern of the human beings’ estrangement as existents, with only a variation of perspectives. There is a discernible closeness between existentialist term angst with de Certeau’s ‘epistemological advantage of alterity’ and Foucauldian concept of ‘limit- experience’ which offer insights into the quest for meaning in illness undertaken by this study.
Susan Sontag’s and Judith Laurence Pastore’s critical texts on AIDS are supportive throughout the study. In her text: AIDS and its Metaphors, Sontag decries the ominous and phobic reputation that AIDS assumes and laments that it aggravates the suffering of the infected. She observes that:
In recent years some of the onus of cancer has been lifted by the emergence of a disease whose charge of stigmatization, whose capacity to create spoiled identity is far greater….It seems that societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims, but is hard to be obsessed with more than one (Sontang, 1998:16).
The debilitating nature of this terrifying illness, its recalcitrance to treatment and its powerful association with death has provided a large-scale occasion of derogatory metaphorizing of illness and circulation of rhetoric of doom that robes the infected of time, hope and life, a rhetoric which, in my opinion, is subverted and uncovered by the illness narratives in the six novels studied in this dissertation. Sontag’s theorization of the illness is therefore crucial to the explication of AIDS stigma and nihilism manifested in the selected fiction.
On her part, Judith Laurence Pastore perceives literary AIDS as having the potential to offer valuable support to persons living with AIDS and their loved ones in their dramatization of survival strategies in their art. In her text: Confronting AIDS Through Literature: Responsibilities of Representation, she writes that:
Literature about AIDS does not make us feel better because someone else is in pain; rather, the imaginative depiction of other people exhibiting a nobility of spirit makes us imitate their endurance and strength of character (Pastore,1993:14)
Her views are crucial in analyzing the survival strategies adopted by characters in mediating the disruption wrought on their lives by the reality of AIDS.
For her, literary AIDS is a didactic literature that voices cultural values, especially when these values are threatened or when they need to be changed to accommodate new realities. She advocates a holistic approach to AIDS menace, maintaining that people have always reverted to the imaginative to deal with mysterious forces of nature, AIDS being one of them, she sees literary AIDS as a space to generate more compassion for the infected and to combat their inhumane vilification. The study applies her assertions to determine the place of the selected fiction in combating AIDS.
1.9 Scope and Limitation
The study focuses on six Kenyan novels which widely deal with AIDS and significantly address the question of questing for meaning in illness. These are: Carolyne Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim (1993), Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague (2000), Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom ( 2004), Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera ( 2004), Joseph Situma’s The Mysterious Killer (2001), and Moraa Gitaa’s Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (2008).These texts span the period between 1993 and 2008, a period during which HIV/AIDS occupied a central place in Kenya’s public discourse, and one over which the faces of AIDS has changed. Wamugunda’s Nice People, Margaret Ogola’s The River and the Source, Karanja Wa Kang’ethe’s Mission to Gehenna, Yusuf Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge, David Maillu’s Beni Kamba 009 in Operation DXT, his revised version of My Dear Bottle, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s Chira and Ketty Arucey’s Captives of Fate are left out of the study because they treat AIDS peripherally and also because the subject of inquiry in the study, namely, the characters’ quest for meaning in illness, is absent in them.
The study limits itself to the diseased body and the quest for meaning in the selected fiction. It is cognizant of the (dis/eased) body’s significance in shaping and constructing the self that is housed in it, especially the corporeal awareness of mortality that is bound to produce a more enlarged meaning of life in the face of terminal illness. Diseased corporeality as a perspective of engaging with the text offers a new source of ‘knowability’ about the discursive immersion of the diseased subjects into illness discourses. This perspective resonates with Helene Cixous’ assertion that ‘the reclaiming of embodiment offers new insights into the lived body’ (Cixous,1990:3201), particularly the opening up of ‘unseen’ dimensions of diseased corporeality.
This scope is limited in the sense that it does not cover other prose sub-genres that have addressed the topic of AIDS in Kenya. The ideal scope of the study would have been Kenyan prose fiction, but due to the limitation of the research schedule, this was not possible.
AIDS novels are part of a larger literary tradition about physical disease. Seminal literary texts on disease include Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1966) in which he perceives of the apocalypse as the sense of an ending which presents writers with the ultimate eschatological escape that alters and explains existence. He posits that being human implies a fundamental uncertainty and the end is shrouded in symbolic and physical mystery, an inevitable vulnerability that makes human beings project themselves with humility past this End.
In Disease and the Novel, Jeffrey Meyers describes a particular literary tradition that links physical debility with artistic creation, a tradition that views literature as a way of transcending mortality and celebrating human existence, despite the threat of death. This tradition which Meyers calls the Romantic tradition, perceives the artist as a pariah who renounces life in order to create it. The experience of disease and its inevitable alienation places humans in an existential dilemma which makes them conscious of their mortality.
Solzenhitzyn ( in Garmire, 1996:4), another writer on disease and literature, belongs to the realist tradition and earns his insight through actual experience, his own experience with cancer. This experience influenced his representation of disease in the novel. For him, disease does not figure as merely a speculative tool for a philosopher contemplating his doom; he eschews disease induced alienation to underscore relationships, interpersonal responsibilities and the process of living.
In his introduction to In a Dark Time, Joseph Dewey provides the attributes of apocalyptic thinking as:
a belief in the incessant linearity of history, an unashamed sense of the cosmic scale, a sobering belief that history is best understood as a cooperative structure of beginning, middle, and end; the strong possibility of fast approaching end ; a general dissatisfaction with the moral life of the present culture; a strong awareness of contemporary crisis that draws a definite line between good and evil; an inherently dramatic approach to history that is as riveting as any rushing toward a shuddering climax(Dewey, 1990:12).
Dewey was interested in the apocalyptic temper of the nuclear use in the Second World War whose apocalypse seems to have been replaced by the global threat of AIDS as a new site for apocalyptic rhetoric, a scenario that prompts Richard Dellamora to observe in Apocalyptic Overtures that ‘by 1990, an array of apocalyptic narratives had been inscribed in mystified, homophobic representations of AIDS in the mass media’ (cited ibid).
McGilchrist (1985) rejects disease in an individual as a worthwhile literary object because of its arbitrariness, allowing its literary use only as a plot mover or initiator of characterization. He sees as preposterous the use of disease as a justification or moralizing on ones affliction and contends that what should preoccupy the literary artist engaging with disease should be the diseased characters’ reactions to their condition and their interactions with the others. Other theorists such as Ronald Frankenberg (1990) and Kleinman (1988) take the opposite view and contend that disease is a worthwhile subject of literary productions because it is itself a message for our bodies which need to be read.
Frankenberg (1990) urges a paradigm shift from this oppressive biomedical view of disease to an appreciative perspective of the patient as ‘being-in-the-world’ and not as ‘being-in-the hospital-ward’, privileging literature of disease and the body and the fictionalization of suffering as a humility creator for us all. He further posits that in the industrial societies, epidemic of torture or AIDS is a corporeal alienation that is felt in the bones as becoming a corpse. For Frankenberg, to convert the literary heat produced by the literature of disease to sociological light requires a ‘comprehensive understanding of the cultural and social concomitants of the human urge to give meaning to the specificities of disease’ (Frankenberg, 1990:354), while on his part Kleinman sees sickness as a cultural performance of disease.
Gorman (1993) posits that physical illness in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice provides a means for expression and a means for allowing characters to meet and to develop relationships and that virtually in the entire Austin canon, the fire of disease is used as mechanism for the transformation of characters from baseness to altruism.
Henking, et al (1992) investigated the existential dilemma of gay people in the era of AIDS, probing their groping for meaning and spirituality and their possibility of developing ecclesiology around their ravaged conditions. In their work, People Living with AIDS are portrayed as prophets of an authentic spirituality. According to the sociologist Rose Weitz, a key problem for those facing the possibility and the reality of being diagnosed with AIDS is uncertainty and strategies to cope with this uncertainty so as to exercise personal control over their diseased lives. Weitz further argues that persons with HIV/AIDS cope with this condition by ‘developing narrative frameworks that make their situations comprehensible’ and that this struggle ‘requires an effort to grasp meaning in the face of apparent meaningless loss’( Weitz, R, 1991:77-78).This quest for meaning is seen to be a painful one especially when set in the milieu of a popular discourse of AIDS as a divine retribution. This retributive rhetoric about AIDS contributes to stereotypical phobia of the pandemic and the consequent stigmatization of the HIV infected.
Most AIDS writers castigate Christian fundamentalism for articulating and enhancing this apocalyptic interpretation of AIDS and endeavour to dismantle this condemnation and judgment model in favour of spiritual model that radiates love, understanding and compassion. Pearbody (1987) in The Screaming Room calls to question the claim of love as the essence of Christianity when the same love is denied those infected with AIDS while Dan Turner calls for the toppling of the judgment attitude by advocating the virtue of Christians’ example of caring for the sick. Dan Turner invokes connections between physicality and spirituality, asserting that ‘life at best is brief’ and that ‘a life threatening illness can only make it seem more precious’ (in Michael et al, 1992:9). For Turner, ‘one of the characteristics of the AIDS patient is a spiritual sense; a feeling that something exists beyond the self. This spiritual dimension is about connectedness… to feel like a part of the cosmos, to experience being part of the whole’ (Michael et al, 1992:10), for healing requires a shift from being a victim of circumstances to being a creator of experience.
Henking (1992) opines that, cultural identity, including the identity of the AIDS diseased person is:
a matter of becoming as well as being. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere hence histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation (as read in Michael et al, 1992:18-19).
Selzer (2001) asserts that contemporary narratives about AIDS, death and dying, portray AIDS in a way that debunks the myths surrounding the disease and its sufferers, sighting the example of Susan Sontag who in AIDS and its Metaphors criticizes the metaphors that stereotype and aggravate the plight of the diseased.
In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag also laments this obvious consequence of believing that all those who harbour the virus are approaching their End, an apocalyptic thinking that is constantly being challenged.
I argue in this dissertation, that though the Kenyan AIDS novels selected for this study invoke apocalyptic images in representing AIDS, many of them also seek to subvert this dangerously mythic power of apocalyptic thinking often by presenting characters negotiating the disruptive AIDS condition and questing through the chaos for meaning in illness.
The fast growing fiction on HIV/Aids in Kenya has not received commensurate critical attention. Roger Kurtz (1998) has commented on some Kenyan novels that have treated or alluded to the subject. In his Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel, Kurtz observes that Geteria Wamugunda’s Nice People contrasts the altruistic but philandering Munguti with a money-grabbing group of doctors who set up an HIV/AIDS clinic for the rich. He further points out that the text ‘raises various issues in medical ethics including the controversy over sex education in the schools and the AIDS pandemic (Kurtz, R, 1998:170).
On Adalla’s epistolary confessional, Kurtz has noted the treatment of gender issues and inter-tribal love relationship and has also discussed gender issues as broached by Margaret Ogolla’s The River and the Source, which for him is a text bent on ‘eulogizing its female members’ (Kurtz, R.1998:151) and further notes that the men in the texts are respected according to how well they treat women. Kurtz also highlighted the corruption, politicians’ greed and callousness, unemployment and urban squalor as epidemics afflicting the society of Karanja Wa Kang’ethe’s Mission to Gehenna. Similar maladies also abound in Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s Chira and Kurtz is quick to observe that ‘chira, the Luo term for ‘a wasting disease’ that is also used for AIDS, is the structuring metaphor for the Kenyan society’ (Kurtz, R, 1998: 186).
In Nyarloka’s Gift: The Writing of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, Kurtz observes that in Chira the writer challenges certain counterproductive Christian practices and describes the nature of contemporary Kenyan society in which hidden truths, obligations and networks of responsibility constitute unseen social viruses that occasionally break to the surface. Kurtz’s comments on these earlier AIDS texts are valuable bases for my analysis of the later novels, especially as they highlight the initial reactions to the pandemic which had the effect of constructing AIDS apocalypse.
Perhaps the existing detailed study of Kenyan HIV/AIDS fiction is Agnes Muriungi’s doctoral research entitled ‘Romance, Love and Gender in Times of Crisis: HIV/AIDS in Kenyan Popular Fiction’, an article of which appears in English Studies in Africa, Vol. 45, 2005). In this study, Muriungi faults Meja Mwangi for staging in The Last Plague the incompatibility of the healthy and diseased bodies instead of showing how the AIDS positives and negatives should come together in a concerted effort to ward off the pandemic, adding that Mwangi’s depiction of HIV/AIDS body as un-erotic perpetuates pejorative images of the syndrome and the infected. She also takes note of the fact that Mwangi captures the harrowing effect of AIDS and exaggerates certain situations as an attempt to shock people about its reality.
Muriungi also finds fault with Wamugunda’s failure to show in Nice People how both the healthy and the sick bodies can be reconciled in the same space. She is disturbed by Wamugunda’s insertion of ‘the diseased body in discourses within the society that disdain it’, perceiving it ‘as one that does not matter’, (Muriungi, A, 2005:168), thus creating negative unacceptable diseased selves. Her view is that Nice People marginalizes the sick instead of urging for their compassion in the crusade against AIDS.
In her article on ‘The Total/Real’ Man and the ‘Proper ‘Woman: Safe Sex, Risk and Gender’, she has observed that:
One particular emphasis in this novel is to dramatize how ideas of sex (and hence understandings of safe sex) are embedded on complex systems of socio-economic and cultural beliefs, values and ideas (English Studies in Africa, 2005. Vol. 45, pp 64)
Muriungi (2005) argues that people draw upon a complex set of culturally perceived notions of femininity and masculinity that circulate the risk factor involved in sexual and intimate relationships (ibid). She brings out the vulnerable position of the woman in a patriarchal structure where masculinity entails not using condoms as this reduces sexual pleasure, what Wilton calls ‘culturally agreed pleasure (of) unmediated penis/vagina contact (ibid). Patriarchal constructions therefore sanction man’s sexual adventures while demanding faithfulness from women.
In her study of naming and construction of AIDS in Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim, Muriungi posits that the novella presents the experience of having AIDS as a painful experience that threatens one’s physical and social identity. She highlights the effectiveness of the confessional as a literary ploy to negotiate cultural meanings and significations that cluster around AIDS in Kenya.
She notes that Catherine’ portrayal as a confessor-cum-victim in the text mitigates her culpability as the bringer of her own tragedy over which she is remorseful. Catherine’s decision to go public about her status fully aware of the public scum she was exposing herself to is a statement that in +66+some circumstances, declaring the status is the only sane thing to do. Testing positive means she has to re-invent herself and forge a new identity as a strategy of negotiating the inevitable disruption and by ‘presenting herself as both confessant and victim, Catherine makes possible the expression of subjectivity and voice denied by the dominant culture in her society while at the same time claiming the worthiness of those infected by HIV/AIDS’ (p. 2).
The study also underscores the subversive function of writing and confessing disease which is consoling and mollifying and transforms the pessimistic mindsets in the conventional response to AIDS. She points out that the text opens to two interpretations since it seems to collude in and reinforce dominant cultural metaphoric constructions of HIV/AIDS. She envisages a second reading in which the confessional structure gives the narrator authority to evoke the sick body in terms of embodied experience. She further posits that the confessional rhetoric is utilized to revise dominant discourses around HIV/AIDS. The gist of her observation is that writing and confession are coping strategies and tools for subverting the discourses that perpetuate continued marginalization and subjugation of the infected. This analysis illuminates my discussion of the disruption of the apocalyptic rhetoric in the text. Her discussion of incompatibility of the healthy and the diseased body is taken up and transcended by the current study which proposes a more positive reading of the diseased body in quest for meaning in illness.
The current study also benefits from the existing analysis of The Last Plague by J. Ngunjiri, whose synopsis of characters in the novel is useful to the study of the impact of illness on characterization in the selected texts and how this impact influences individual response to chronic infection. He notes the novelist’s success in blending humour and tragedy to present a restrained AIDS narrative that is true to the apocalyptic nature of the scourge, an observation which I utilize in analyzing the coping strategies adopted by characters in negotiating AIDS disruption.
In the character synopsis profiled in his reading of The Last Plague, Janet Juma is Crossroads’ Family Planning Officer who battles against conventions to install a condom bastion against the spread of the disease. Janet is beautiful and self-willed and desired by every man but has been cured of men since her abandonment by her husband ten years earlier. She now wages a single-handed struggle to redeem Crossroads from being ravaged by AIDS.
Broker is the delinquent husband who abandons Janet for ten years and disappears with a local whore to the coastal resort of Mombasa. He returns home dying of AIDS, but determined to resurrect his dying community if only to earn their affection before his end.
The absurdist portrayal of Musa, Uncle Mark and the beggar, the alienated inhabitants of Crossroads, is also highlighted as is the anachronistic cultural practices like polygamy and group circumcision which are inimical to the fight against the spread of the virus. This character synopsis and the castigation of repugnant cultural practices are relevant to the current study in its undertaking to explore apocalypse and transformation in the text just as the noted attack on retrogressive cultural practices relates closely to the revision of HIV/AIDS discourses and the search for alternative literary imaginations about the pandemic.
In their review of Kenyan AIDS novels in The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945, Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi are of the view that the AIDS motif has been used to inject sensation into literary texts, noting that the infection has been inscribed to negative characters as a form of punishment in the texts’ moral scheme. In Yusuf Dawwod’s Water Under the Bridge, the earliest Kenyan novel to allude to AIDS, Hugh, the protagonist becomes a lecher because he is old-fashioned and thought pregnancy was the only danger from sex. Gaterie Wa Mugunda’s Nice People (1992) portrays AIDS as a punishment for amorous behaviour. Margaret Ogola’s The River and the Source (1994) presents the physically beautiful but morally bankrupt Becky finally dying of AIDS but contrasts this portrayal with the writer’s sympathetic depiction of illness in her 2002 novel, I Swear by Apollo which is a sequel to The River and the Source. On The Last Plague, Mwangi and Gikandi posit that the text documents the near annihilation of a village tellingly named Crossroads which is at a crossroad between life and death as a result of a debilitating illness. They also review the works of new writers on AIDS such as Joseph Situma whose The Mysterious Killer is viewed as presenting the conflict between modern science and traditional medicine and the tragedy this unleashes in the era of AIDS. AIDS as a metaphor of morality is useful in the current study because it is this metaporizing of illness that immerse AIDS in stigmatizing discourses. In a break from these studies, I train my eye on the diseased subjects’ preoccupations with the enlargement of spirituality in negotiation of illness.
Evan Mwangi's discussion of reflexivity in Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera makes it easy for me to engage with the text. In his text Africa Writes Back to Self, he writes:
the novel is about the fight against HIV and the research for a local cure for AIDS that thematises its own self- reflexivity to distinguish productive self-knowledge from obsession with one’s self. It serves as another excellent case in point to show the social function that meta-fiction in African novels assigns itself….It launches its narrative by laughing at an act of unproductive self-expression in which the culprit is sentenced in mock judicial trial that introduces the meta-fictional impulses through which the novel handles the theme of AIDS in Africa’ (Mwangi, 2009: 61).
The study shares Mwangi’s notion of reflexivity in discussing the introspective and regenerative nature of illness as represented in the selected novels. His analysis however does broach the existential issues surrounding AIDS undertaken by the current study.
What emerges from the foregoing literature review is that the fast growing number of HIV/AIDS novels in Kenya has not received commensurate criticism. Whereas there are in-depth studies of the earliest fiction that allude to AIDS, the researchers’ literary focus was not on AIDS experience since even the engagement with the disease in these novels was peripheral. The pioneering studies on more recent texts that take AIDS as a theme like Confessions of an AIDS Victim and The Last Plague, as emerges from this review, has not sufficiently addressed the novels’ disruption of AIDS apocalyptic trajectory and the characters’ quest for meaning in illness. The contemporary fiction has attracted a number of critical reviews as the foregoing review attests to but there is a dearth of broad- based study of this fiction. The current study takes off from these seminal works and literary reviews to interrogate the subversion of AIDS- is- a -death sentence rhetoric commonly ignored in the extant critical appreciation of Kenyan literary AIDS.
The current study also benefits from Aldin Mutembei’s doctoral research on poetry and AIDS in Tanzania and also from his comparative analysis of US and Tanzanian AIDS plays. Comparing AIDS drama in the US and in Tanzania, Mutembei (2011) notes that in both countries the creative writings saw AIDS as much a social complex as it was a biomedical challenge, noting further that in those countries, literature seized the subject of AIDS when it was still paradoxical and shrouded in mystery, suspicions and uncertainties. He observes, following Paul Zendziuk, that:
The cultural representations of AIDS influence personal behavior and the direction of public policy, and thus significantly affects how and if people with HIV/AIDS live or die ( in Makokha, Kabaji et al, 2011: 416).
He decries the cultural construction of AIDS in which reactions to the pandemic centre on the cause of the death rather than on the act of dying. Mutembei’s study on both AIDS poetry and AIDS drama underscore the didactic role of the literary genres as health communication art and demonstrate their utility in combating AIDS in the US and in Tanzania. Cognizant of the fact that AIDS has been acknowledged as a literary genre in Kenya, the current study is an attempt to examine how Kenyan novelists have utilized anti-apocalyptic rubric to re-vision and revise apocalyptic perceptions of HIV/AIDS over the years.
In the forward to Louise Bourgault’s Playing for Life: Perfomance in Africa in the Age of AIDS, Gilbert Doho observes that the text synthesizes concepts of theatre for social change from performances and drama studies with concepts of edutainment from media studies and social marketing. He lauds Bourgault for responding to the call of AIDS as the agony of the present day, one that has decimated millions and orphaned millions, which cries out to academic fields for explanation. For him, the text summons all of us, the healthy and the sick, to join in the ultimate ritual battle against the deadly pandemic.
Mwita (2010) acknowledges the proliferation of theatre for AIDS education as an emerging genre in the realm of Theatre for Development. He studies the theatrical and cultural texts that are performed through ‘Magnet Theatre’ a Theatre for Development rubric which uses theatre based outreaches to mobilize low-income communities to forums that discuss AIDS and its manifestation in their localities. Mwita laments that despite the near universal awareness about AIDS in Kenya, there is minimal behavioral change, an intransigence he attributes to cultural taboos that sanction silence about sex, AIDS and AIDS related deaths. It is his view that ‘Magnet theatre can be conscripted against this intransigence where ‘the lucid power of theatricality can be used to provoke people to speak and disclose the inner fears of AIDS syndrome and in the process produce solutions based on the local knowledge and realities (Mwita, 2010). Mwita underscores the importance of popular theatre as a media that targets cultural stigma which scuttle efforts to bring about change in AIDS related risky behavior. Mwita’s study on theatre against AIDS interventions in Kenya indulges my problematization of novelistic interventions against AIDS in Kenya. It is my contention that, like the popular theatre he discourses on, the selected Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels are worth of critical appreciation as health communication art that broaches AIDS stigma and invokes apocalyptic imagination of the pandemic to deconstruct and deny it, thus positioning characters on the quest for existential meaning.
In her unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘Resisting Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS 1982-1992’, Lisa Garmire (1996) has examined the different literary strategies that American gay novelists adopt to address and resist the apocalyptic significations of time that dominated the AIDS rhetoric in America during the first decade of the pandemic. Garmire teases out the various literary strategies the writers adopt to address the apocalyptic thinking about AIDS, the options for the infected at the present and the alternative futures, and the mortal end imposed on them by medical diagnosis. While my approach is influenced by Garmire’s analysis, this study transcends her concept of AIDS apocalypse to explore how the diseased characters quest through chaos and AIDS apocalypse in the selected texts.
In a paper on ‘Literature, Morality and HIV/AIDS in Kenya’ Tom Odhiambo posits that popular fiction in Kenya has always been in the forefront in attempting to sensitize the Kenyan public about issues on sexuality and morality which are closely related to AIDS. He questions the honesty of Kenyans in continuing to predicate the spread of AIDS on (im)morality and calls for opening up and democratizing of the moral space in Kenya as a way of curbing the spread of the disease. These ideas are shared by Eunice Ivala and Lucy Kithome in a paper entitled ‘Can HIV/AIDS be Contained? The Role of the Mass Media as a Powerful Communication Strategy’. The two look at how the Kenyan print and electronic media are used in the fight against HIV/AIDS. They regret that despite the rigorous AIDS awareness campaigns mounted by the Ministry of Health, minimal behaviour change has been realized. They attribute this partly to the fact that the information imparted on the people has been paralyzing, confusing, and not empowering at all.
Kenyan researchers on literary AIDS have also focused on Popular Music and its communicative role in articulating AIDS issues. In her Masters thesis on ‘Music as Social Discourse: The Role of Popular Music in the Fight against HIV/AIDS Among the Youth in Nairobi’, Prisilla Nyawira studies the lyrics of Longombas’, ‘Vuta Pumzi’, Princes Jully’s ‘Dunia Mbaya Chunguzee’ and Circute and Jo-el’s ‘Juala’ among others and underscores the potentiality of the popular songs in creating awareness and promoting prevention of HIV/AIDS among the Kenyan urban populace. She appreciates popular music as a tool of engaging with the tabooed subjects of sex and AIDS. She notes that ‘the music constructs the polysemy of the sub-culture of the Nairobi youth and that they engage relevant social issues in order to speak to the young people about the problems they face in the light of the HIV/AIDS pandemic’(Nyawira,2008:139).
This is a library based qualitative study of six primary texts supported by secondary sources from which we draw to substantiate our propositions in the thesis. Data is collected and analyzed through existentialist and postmodernist models, paradigms that illuminate the analysis of the anti-apocalyptic temper in the novels and the characters’ quest for meaning. This is especially so because while existentialism is inherently optimistic and counters apocalyptic discourses, postmodernism seeks to explore alternative representational strategies by deconstructing hegemonic discourses. These paradigms are applied in the critical reading of the selected novels to contest the discursive construction of AIDS and to analyze the anti-apocalyptic portrayal of AIDS in the texts.
The texts are also read in the light of the critical illness narratives by Susan Sontag and Judith Laurence Pastore whose pronouncements on AIDS illuminate the study’s quest for alternative narratives about AIDS in the selected fiction. Other relevant critical essays are also used to guide the analysis of the novels.
The study also conflates Foucault’s concepts on discourse with Critical Discourse Analysis as a study methodology. As a method, Critical Discourse analysis is underpinned by a social constructivist epistemology which interrogates how and why individuals construct themselves and their worlds. Critical Discourse Analysis assumes `that these individual constructions are never monolithic but contestable. Foucault’s thoughts on discourse are used within Critical Discourse Analysis to understand the ephemeral constructedness of AIDS and the various ways in which the AIDS experiences structured in the selected novels deconstruct and re-construct the AIDS condition.
In the overall presentation and analysis of the data on the primary texts, we adopt a stylistic approach. I am alert to the way stylistic devices combine with thematic content to produce textual meaning in the selected novels. The findings are presented in thematic blocks that cut across the six texts selected for the study.
The study has three analytical chapters bracketed by this introduction, an overview of AIDS novels in Kenya, and a conclusion. Chapter one is an introductory chapter that gives the background to the study, its aims and objectives, statement of the problem, research premises, justification of the study, research questions and assumptions. Chapter two is an overview of the novelistic response to AIDS in Kenya while chapter three focuses on existential experiences of characters in the selected novels. Chapter four engages with the characters’ negotiation of disruption while chapter five addresses itself to suffering and regeneration. Chapter six ties up the study findings and recommends further reading.
CHAPTER TWO
To contextualize this study, I make a critical overview of AIDS novels in Kenya from 1989 when the first novel to allude to AIDS was written, to the latest substantive novel on AIDS, published in 2008. HIV/AIDS novels, especially the six texts studied here, are a subgenre of popular fiction. Lindfors (1991) looks at African popular fiction as ‘any work that seeks to communicate an African perspective to a large audience in a style that can be readily apprehended and appreciated’ (Lindfors, 1991:2).
Newell (2002) writes that:
popular fiction in Africa describes those types of narratives which never fail to generate debate amongst readers on moral and behavioural issues. In terms of their appeal, such narratives are popular in the sense of being in demand by African readers; in terms of their content, these texts are popular in the sense of containing ubiquitous character types and plots, reworked with each re-usage by authors (Newell, 2002:5).
He further observes that;
popular texts have some of their characteristics determined and defined by the subject matter that they address, and that they have ‘the reflexibility and adaptability, heterogeneity and ability to generate debates among readers on moral and behavioral issues’ (Newell, 2000:154).
Tom Odhiambo (2004) surmises that ‘Popular fiction is that kind of literature that borrows its subject matter from the public on issues of contemporary importance to that public in a particular context’, further observing that ‘it organizes these themes into particular kinds of genres or texts; romance, thriller, adventure, mystery story, and rumours and broadcasts within the same audience with intention to entertain, educate, inform or instruct, performing these multiple roles as it seeks, at the same time, to be of immediate relevance to peoples’ worries, questions, experiences and lives’ (Odhiambo, 2004:33). In most cases, popular fiction reaches to social forces and dynamics and seeks either to amplify those forces or to find solutions to those problems, especially if they are as destructive as HIV/AIDS.
The term ‘popular fiction’ is used in opposition to mainstream literature where the two are generally regarded as binary opposites. Indeed, popular fiction has been so disparaged that it has come to imply what is not literature. This is because it deviates from the norms of the Great Traditions, the Western canon, the received literature or the established literature, defined by Tony Davies as ‘an ideologically constructed canon or corpus of texts operating in specific and determinate ways in and around the apparatus of education, in short, the canonized tradition’ (in Bennet, 1982:1).While high brow literature or the so called literature proper is regarded as original and complex, popular fiction is simple, sensuous and exiting. Excluded from the Western magnum corpus, popular fiction is thus viewed as a residue concept, ‘the residue that remains, in the words of Tony Bennet, ‘once the sphere of literature has been described and accounted for’ (Bennet, 1981:168).Popular fiction has been marginalized as lacking in literary aesthetics, the assumption being that it is casually written for pecuniary motives and for casual consumption. It has been criticized as devoid of the critical edge and the timeless quality characteristic of mainstream literature.
In the era of postmodernism and cultural studies, there is need to question the canon as a discriminating centre and rethink the popular as a margin since both categories have significant functions in the society. A ‘little tradition’ beneath the great tradition is necessary, since the dichotomy between the classic, the serious and the committed is waning as it increasingly becomes clear that there can be the serious in the popular, that there is value in the popular as well as in the established literature. As Radway (2010 ) remarks, popular fiction constitutes a ‘contested terrain , a field of cultural conflict where signs with wide appeal and resonance take a contradictory disguises and are spoken in contrary actions’ ( in Schneider- Mayersin, 2010:3).
Popular fiction falls within the field of popular culture, defined by Schneider- Mayersin (2010) as:
The beliefs and practices, and the objects through which they are organized, that are widely shared among a population. This includes folk beliefs, practices and objects generated in political and commercial centres. It includes elite cultural forms that have been popularized as well as popular forms that have been elevated to the museum tradition (ibid).
For Brown (2010), popular culture is:
The TV we watch, the movies we see, the fast food or the low food we eat, the clothes we wear, the music we sing and hear, the things we spend our money for, our attitude to life. It is the whole of society we live in, which may or may not be distributed by the mass media. It is virtually our whole world (Schneider- Mayersin,2010:4).
He further defines popular culture according to its modes of dissemination:
The elements which are too sophisticated for the mass media are generally called Elite culture, those distributed through these media that are something less than “ mass” – that is such things as smaller magazines and newspapers, the less widely distributed books, museums and less sophisticated galleries, so-called clothes line art exhibits and the like- are called in the narrow sense the term “popular”, these elements that are distributed through mass media are “mass” culture, and those which are or were at one time disseminated by oral and non-oral methods - a level lower than the mass media, are called folk (ibid).
With its extrapolation of the quotidian, its expression of daily life, popular fiction is a subsumed in popular culture which, like film and television, provides a fertile opportunity for constructing a society’s culture.
Newell ( 2002) is in agreement with this cultural role of popular fiction in his observation that popular fiction practitioners ‘ poach upon the so called ‘traditional’ and the elite discourses, adapt and innovate and operate outside of ‘official’ art forms ( Newell, 2002:4). Quite apart from its allegations of inferiority, popular fiction is worth of study because it comments ‘on many aspects of contemporary life, in the end informing (and in some cases perhaps, forming), the background of many popular values and beliefs’ (Swirski, 1999:12). It performs a social-aesthetic role and has the potential to pollinate culture with invaluable ideas. It preserves and perpetuates mass culture through popular mass readership, for as Janice Radway asserts, ‘if literature is to be treated as a document in the study of culture, it is first necessary to know something about who reads, why they do so, and how they go about it’( in Schneider- Mayersin ,2010:24).
The value inherent in popular fiction cannot be gainsaid. As Wanjala(1980 ) puts it; ‘the use of popular literature would be identified in its power to burn through the layers of falsehood which have come with urban values’ (Wanjala,1980:210). It saves the masses from the intellectual alienation of mainstream literature. Popular fiction takes literary ideas to the masses and ‘is meant to fulfill the spiritual enjoyment of all, it preaches values of equality and material wellbeing for all’ (Wanjala, 1980:214). As a subgenre of popular fiction, Kenyan AIDS novels play a didactic role and are a useful literary intervention against a life threatening illness.
Christopher Pawling (1984) notes that popular literature has an important place in literary studies and advises that ‘once we begin to examine[popular] literature as a ‘communicative practice with social and historical roots, we will then come to understand that popular literature intervenes in the life of society by organizing and interpreting experiences’(Pawling,1984:2).
Popular fiction interrogates and revises some of the subject matter that it borrows from the public. As a subgenre of popular fiction, Kenyan AIDS novels play a didactic role and are a useful literary intervention against a life threatening illness. HIV/AIDS novelists in Kenya have poached their subject matter from popular discourses on HIV/AIDS circulating in the society and have reworked, re-visioned and represented them. They have continued to depict the pandemic differently in tandem with the changing faces of the disease.
Novelistic response to HV/AIDS in Kenya can be categorized into novels that treat the theme centrally and those that treat it peripherally. Early popular takes on the topic only alluded to AIDS presumably because it was not as yet the burning topic in popular discourse. These artistic responses were initially slow in coming. As Muriungi (2005) informs us, early AIDS fiction in Kenya tended to treat the virus as a trope for the diseased Kenyan body politic, a social body afflicted with cancerous social-economic and political viruses. In their inclination to utilize AIDS as a metaphor for the morass in the social fabric, these writers gloss over the entirety of AIDS experience undergone by those afflicted. As the pandemic continued to spread and its impact felt all over the country, the virus assumed a central position in literary imagination with various Kenyan writers taking it up in their fiction.
Karanja Wa Kang’ethe’s Mission to Gehenna, published in 1989, was the first novelistic allusion to HIV/AIDS. The novel is set in Gehenna, the kingdom of Satan, which though extraterrestrial, has the semblance of Kenya. A visit to Gehenna by two friends, Kimuri and Keega, reveals the rot and oppression in this kingdom, which is afflicted with a host of social political ills and epidemic diseases, including AIDS. The writer deploys AIDS as a trope for the social economic and political viruses that plague the Gehennan (Kenyan) social body and eschews rendering the suffering endured by the infected.
Written in 1991, Yusuf Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge was the second novel to allude to HIV/AIDS in Kenya. As Roger Kurtz (1998) informs us, the novel traces the history of three families, one Asian, one African and the other European, through postcolonial Kenya. The text makes reference to AIDS as a new disease that is emerging in Nairobi and which claims the life of Hugh, the amorous lead character in the novel. This mere allusion to AIDS in the novel is unsurprising, for the writer, a Kenyan of Asian origin, is less concerned with AIDS but more with his pet topic of multiculturalism.
To follow Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge in 1992 was Wamugunda Geteria’s Nice People which associates the high prevalence of STDS and AIDS to factors such us gender, power inequalities, poverty, promiscuity and government apathy (Muriungi, 2005).
Roger Kurtz writes that:
The novel was inspired in part by an article from former Washington Post reporter Blaine Haren, which, in addition to outlining the serious nature of AIDS in East Africa, also suggests that part of the disease’s danger comes from the belief that ‘‘nice people’’ are not at risk (Kurtz, 1998:170)
The text debunks this hypocritical view that a category of ‘nice people’ is free from contaminating HIV/AIDS, ‘a holier than thou’ attitude viewed as responsible for rapid spread of the virus. It is a novelistic onslaught on the tendency among the healthy communities to ‘otherize’ the sick, leading to the immersion of AIDS diseased bodies into stigmatizing discourses. It powerfully portrays the rampant existence of STDS before the onset of HIV/AIDS. It is this rampant existence that impelled Dr Munguti, the protagonist in the novel, to set up a venereal clinic in Nairobi’s River Road. The novel stages this STDS prevalence as a powder magazine which exploded with the onset of HIV/AIDS. So many people get infected so much that a hospice has to be set up for the terminally ill. Promiscuity is palpable in the text and the amorous characters like Nduku and Mumbi die of AIDS related infections. One readily finds a link between STDS/AIDS and the endemic corruption in the outer society when unscrupulous medics set up an AIDS clinic for the opulent and begin to issue the bogus Canaanite certificates that declare the sick healthy to facilitate their sex exploits, a medical malpractice that seems to anticipate the corruption that is rife in the Kenyan AIDS subculture. The social stasis engendered by these afflictions is however transcended by the successful romantic relationship between Dr.Munguti and the naïve Sister Irine, whose plans for matrimony is hinted to at the close of the novel.
David Maillu’s Beni Kamba 009 in Operation DXT (1986) is a thriller in which the protagonist Benni Kamba, a special agent number 009 for National Integrity Service of Africa (NISA), protects his people from contamination by an AIDS-like virus engineered by foreigners. The allusion to AIDS in this novel is too remote to pass it as an AIDS novel. Written barely two years after the first HIV case in Kenya was diagnosed, AIDS, with its myriad myths of origin, including laboratory manufacture, seem to permeate the novel’s plotting. This milieu notwithstanding, the text remains a typical Maillu adventure narrative and is not a novel about AIDS at all.
David Maillu’s 1987 revised edition of his 1974 My Dear Bottle recasts images and discourses in circulation in contemporary Kenya in the light of the HIV/AIDS scourge and uses the revised text to sensitize people about AIDS. The main character in this revised version agonizes over his sexual escapades with prostitutes in this era of AIDS. In this revised version the author dramatizes the inner turmoil suffered by those who engage in irresponsible sexual behavior and who are haunted by fear of contracting AIDS. He seems to be correcting the unpopularity of this popular 1974 text, which was censored for its pornographic content at one point, a palpable obscenity that does not auger well in the era of AIDS.
Though essentially a chronicle of family history across three generations, Margaret Ogola’s The River and the Source also alludes to AIDS. One of its characters, Becky, contracts AIDS presumably because of her promiscuity. She is redeemed by the pragmatism with which she accepts her condition and not only reconciles with her sister Vera, but also saves all she could in her disrupted life for her children and secures her property in her written will, itself suggestive of redemptive positive living. Her narrative presents AIDS apocalyptic trajectory and renders it as a punishment for promiscuity. It is remarkable that Becky stoically takes up the challenge posed by terminal illness and turns to the legal opportunities available for the continuity of her life without her, and to secure the future of her children. Her experience, however, is rendered as a subplot in this feminist text that is not about AIDS but one that primarily deals with the emancipation of the woman from patriarchal hegemony.
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s Chira (1997), also addresses gender and AIDS in the context of the patriarchal society overseen by Ogola in The River and the Source. Macgoye, who is described by Kurtz as ‘an unusual and probably unique figure in the literature of Kenya and Africa’ (Kurtz, Roger, 2005: 4) was born as Marjorie Phyllis King on October 21, 1928 in Southampton, England. She came to Kenya in 1954 as a bookseller for the Church Missionary Society and in 1960 got married to Daniel Oludhe Macgoye, a Luo medical officer. Though naturalized rather than Kenyan native-born, she has lived in Kenya ever since and ‘her marriage into a Luo family gives her special insight into that community’s experience and sensibility’ (2005:5). As Roger Kurtz observes, ‘her novels and poems are written and set in Kenya, they draw on her Kenyan experiences, and they explore specifically Kenyan ( usually Luo) sensibilities and experiences’ (2005:9). Besides Chira, her other novels include Murder in Majego, and its sequel Victoria and Murder in Majego, The Present Moment, Homing In, Coming to Birth and Kishinev. Famous for her poem ‘A Freedom Song’ in Poems from East Africa, Macgoye has written many other poems published in different anthologies and also in her own anthology, Make it Sing and Other Poems. Most of these works broach urban problems and the plight of women. It follows that she had to fictionalize AIDS to depict the challenges it poses to urban life and to women.
Chira derives its title from the Luo term ‘chira’ which ‘denotes both a taboo and consequences of violating that taboo’ or ‘any unexplained tragedy or illness’ (Kurtz 2005: 189). It was ‘the first Kenyan novel to treat AIDS in a serious and extended manner’ (ibid).The novel plot presents the deaths from AIDS of two relations of Gabriel Otieno, a young Nairobi office worker, and several other deaths of minor characters. It stages the conflict between traditional medical practices and modern medicine, the impulse is to debunk the myth that AIDS is not a biological illness but a ‘chira’ that can only be averted by traditional rituals. At the close of the novel, Otieno comes to a moral discernment and faces the reality of AIDS test, realizing that ‘This is the world we live in. We have to face it until something new is discovered’ (p.174).This moral discernment on the part of Otieno notwithstanding, Chira is, as Marie Kruger contends:
not primarily a novel about HIV-infected characters, instead, the narrative explores the contradictions and dilemmas faced by those likely to contract the disease, who are often torn between shunning the infected and expressing sympathy for their plight. The stories of the “real victims”, of those suffering from full-blown AIDS, appear scattered throughout the novel, but they remain iconic signs of horror and despair for the living rather than shaded portrayals of individual experience (Kruger, 2004:117).
The many AIDS related deaths in the novel, these signs of horror and despair, paint a gloomy and apocalyptic picture of the pandemic which feeds to the AIDS apocalyptic rhetoric in circulation in the society at the time of the novel’s publication. The glaring lack of AIDS narratives and the experiences of diseased individuals in the novel limit its ability to engage with existential issues surrounding the scourge, and the quest for meaning in illness undertaken by the current study. Indeed the novel veers into its metaphoric deployment of AIDS as a trope for a diseased body politic when, as Kruger opines, ‘the story of Gabriel and Hellen is suspended and a “grand narrative”, recounting the rise and fall of an Assistant Minister, is inserted into the many “ordinary stories” of personal distress’( Kruger, 2004:122).
Ketty Arucey’s Captives of Fate, published in 2007, is the latest in this category of peripheral plotting of AIDS. It reads like a campus AIDS novel in which the writer fictionalizes the threat AIDS poses in a university milieu. The novel tells of the string of boyfriends, including lecturers, who have intimate affairs with Ann, a university student and the lead character in the novel, and depicts the anxiety and fears implied by these affairs in the era of AIDS crisis. It dramatizes the aghast generated by sex in the era of AIDS and implicates all of us as captives of AIDS fate, given the precarious times of the deadly disease. In the words of the publishers’ blurb, ‘Hidden between the line, and yet hammering constantly at the readers conscience are issues pertaining to gender violence and the plight of women in Africa in these frightening days of the AIDS pandemic’. It also tells of Henry who opts to commit suicide through a contrived accident immediately he learns that he is HIV positive, a suicidal escape that attests to the nihilistic self-destructiveness that AIDS impacts on the afflicted.
Unlike other Kenyan writers of his repute like Marjorie, Imbuga and Mwangi, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has not engaged in any serious novelization of AIDS, only alluding to it in his longest novel, The Wizard of the Crow(2008) which, though it features characters with AIDS, is foremost a political novel. AIDS is peripheral in this long novel presumably because of Ngugi’s proclivity for Marxist themes that tend more to the political.
The 2000s saw serious novelistic interventions against AIDS in Kenya with the publication of Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague. Carolyine Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim however stands out as the first novel to render AIDS fictionally, almost a decade after the first AIDS case was diagnosed in Kenya. Published in 1993, Confessions is the first Kenyan novel to treat AIDS theme centrally. This epistolary text that echoes Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter reminisces the painful experience of Catherine Njeri whose ambition to travel abroad for further studies is disrupted by her HIV positive status. She dwells on creating another self around herself as she comes to terms with this reality. Catherine utilizes the epistolary form to pour out her frustrations to Marylin, her bosom friend and confidant and a significant other. As Kurtz observes, Catherine’s ‘retrospective insights include treatises on the symptoms and causes of AIDS, sex education in Kenyan families and schools, gender issues, the immaturity of university students, and intertribal love relationships’(Kurtz, R, 1998:163). For Marie Kruger,
her confessions reveal how dominant social discourses on gender and AIDS control women through their bodies: the sign of gender and the mark of AIDS map social, moral, physical inferiority onto the female body, an inferiority that precludes social agency and requires male control’(Kruger, 2004:111).
This ‘otherization’ of the diseased body is a function of stigmatizing discourses which the text lashes out at through Catherine’s introspective insights. It tells of her frustrations as an AIDS patient, not her despair, and portrays her determination to go on with life despite the reality of her infection. She is still asymptomatic by the close of the novel; her narrative undermines the AIDS apocalyptic discourse that characterized reaction to AIDS, especially in the 1990s when the epidemic was still a mystery.
AIDS is the central theme of Meja Mwagi’s The Last Plague. One of Kenya’s literary icons, Meja Mwangi was born in 1948 at Nanyuki, Kenya. He studied up to A-level at Kenyatta College and formally trained in writing at the University of Leeds. His career as a journalist and film director accounts for the journalistic and photographic style in most of his texts. He has written prolifically and his novels include Kill Me Quick (1973), The Taste of Death (1975) Carcass for Hounds (1974),Going Down River Road (1976), The Cockroach Dance (1979), Bushtrackers (1979),Bread of Sorrow( 1987), Weapon of Hunger (1989), The Return of Shaka (1989), Striving for the Wind (1989) and The Last Plague (2000). His literary preoccupation has been with social issues such us injustice, oppression and poverty with most of his fiction set in the city. Critical opinion shows that since 1980, Meja Mwangi has shifted his thematic concern with life in Kenyan urban settings to more universal themes; a vibrant new element that has won him international accolades. Besides receiving the Jomo Kenyatta Prize, he has also been awarded the German Youth Book Prize and the Adolf Grimme Prize.
AIDS added to the various problems that plagued Kenyan urban spaces such as crime, prostitution, unemployment and urban squalor, themes that dominate most of Meja Mwangi’s novels. It is not surprising that Mwangi also joins the others before him and fictionalized AIDS experience in his novel, The Last Plague (2000), a well crafted novel that makes an incision into Crossroads, an AIDS besieged fictional town in the countryside where the novel is set. The title of the novel announces the apocalypse in which AIDS is framed by alluding to the biblical plague described in Deuteronomy 28:59-61 where a long list of plagues, pestilence, slavery, disease and death would be unleashed to those who do not heed God’s commandments. Besides framing AIDS apocalyptically, this biblical allusion also packages AIDS as a divine curse, a label seized at and exploited by evangelicals who encourage the inflicting inculpation of AIDS patients.
The Last Plague frames the raw horrors of the pandemic in an apocalyptic vision where the illness threatens to wipe the inhabitants of Crossroads but where the diseased character clings on the hope of living beyond the apocalypse to participate in resurrecting Crossroads. It tells of the fears, anxieties, alienation and travails of Ben Broker as he grapples with the meaning of AIDS and tries to come to terms with his diseased condition. A liminal character perpetually confronting his own mortality, Broker’s character transformation is elevated in an AIDS novel that at once signals doom and boon, a novel that cautions against AIDS and gives hope to the infected, one that invokes AIDS apocalypse in order to deny it. Broker, for instance, ‘immerses himself in the community’s fight against HIV/AIDS in order to ascribe his physical and social identity in a cultural space that threatens to silence and exclude him’(Muriungi,2004:218) and refuses the nihilism that AIDS imposes on him, in effect deconstructing the cultural significations of AIDS that compound the plight of the afflicted.
Joseph Situma follows with the publication of The Mysterious Killer in 2001.A philosophy lecturer at the university of Nairobi, Situma was born in 1965 in Western Kenya. The Mysterious Killer, his first novel in the Africawide Advanced Classic Series, is set in the fictional Busaki city, which has the semblance of Nairobi. The novel represents a social milieu whose range include naïve peasants, commercial sex workers, university students, tycoons and priests. It shifts readers back and forth from the countryside of Randi to Busaki city with its urban promiscuity which is typified by the amorous activities that take place in Cloud 9. It also chronicles the unstoppable spread of the virus among the risk groups in the urban setting where ‘nice people’ like the priests, are not impervious to the virus. In the novel, suicide is offered as an escape from the humiliating AIDS diseased body while hedonism as a negotiating strategy is experimented with but negated by the writer. Though most of the characters in the novel die of AIDS related conditions, they are given ample time to live more meaningfully in their diseased condition. On the whole, the discourse in the novel urges more empathy for the sero-positive and cautions all of the arbitrariness of AIDS.
The year 2004 saw the publication of two Kenyan AIDS novels; Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom and Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera. Before his demise in 2003, Mutahi had indicated a shift from his pet theme of politics to social topical issues by fictionalizing AIDS in his novel, The House of Doom, published posthumously. Born in 1945 in Munugaini village, Nyeri District,Wahome Mutahi made a remarkable contribution to what has come to be referred to as Kenya’s prison literature. His political novels include, Three Days on the Cross, The Jail Bags, Doomsday, and The Miracle Merchant, the latter co-authored with Wahome Wa Karego. His plays, written in Kikuyu, his patois, include Mugathe Mugobothi, Mugathe Ndotomo, Igoti ria Muingi, Ngoma cia Arume and Makariria Kioro, which treat political malfeasance in Kenya.
The title of The House of Doom implies doom to those who are afflicted with HIV, whose bodies are subject to discipline by normativity discourses, and whose places of abode are to be shunned as ‘the houses of doom’. The text recounts the story of Bloggs Mbela Mwandime, an investigative journalist with Chronicle who is returning home from Ottawa where he had gone to cover a conference on the depletion of the Ozone layer. While he is being taxied from the airport to his estate, he meets a young girl, Jenifa Dianga, who has been critically hit by a speeding matatu. He helps take her to hospital where he donates blood to save her life. Time passes and when Mbela begins experiencing poor health and consults a doctor, his life is shuttered by the shocking diagnosis that he has contracted HIV/AIDS. The novel’s tensions revolve around the chaos thrust on Mbela’s life by this debilitating reality and the ordeal he undergoes in living in his diseased body.
Francis Davis Imbuga, Kenya’s renowned playwright who passed on in 2013, also plotted AIDS in his 2004 novel, Miracle of Remera. Imbuga was born in 1947 in Maragoli, Western Kenya. His literary virtuosity has been in drama where he is famed for his plays such as Betrayal in the City, Game of Silence, The Married Bachelor, Man of Kafira, The Successor and Aminata, which mainly broach political issues. Miracle of Remera was his second attempt at the novel genre, and significantly, also, one which marks a radical shift in his engagement with political themes to the social topic of AIDS.
Quite apart from the many other AIDS novels whose titles are apocalyptic, the title of Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera evokes optimism in suggesting a possibility of discovery of the elusive cure of AIDS in the backwaters of Remera, a fictional village where his novel is set. The novel constructs AIDS narratives involving young adults and dramatizes the lives of Ezra Maiyo and his school mates from their primary school days through secondary schools up to the university, to demonstrate the vulnerability of the youth in the face of the scourge.
The protagonist’s stoicism in the face of this debilitating sickness is valorized by the writer and it deconstructs the general evasiveness of talking about AIDS prevalent in the society. The sero-positive Ezra Maiyo negotiates his disruption by intellectualizing the illness and making it a subject of academic research, which leads him to experiment with curative herbs, thus emphasizing plurality of approaches in combating the illness that demotes the elevated posturing of conventional medicine with its associated ‘othering’ discourses. He is cured of AIDS and the narrative closure negates the hyped AIDS apocalypse.
The latest substantive AIDS themed novel in Kenya is Moraa Gitaa’s Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, published in 2008. After a long stay in Mombasa where she was born and bred, Moraa Gitaa now lives in Nairobi where she has established Moraa Gitaa Foundation. The foundation also incorporates a social organization arm which aims at sensitizing people about HIV/AIDS and sourcing for support of AIDS orphans and destitute young women affected by the endemic living in informal settlements in Nairobi, besides being a vocational training centre for the same vulnerable groups. The Deputy Chair of International PEN Kenya Chapter Women Writers Committee, Moraa is also working on other titles such as ‘Indecent Proposal’, ‘Shark Attack’, ‘To Serenity via Perdition’, ‘Diplomatic Immunity’ and ‘From Shifting Sands to Deeper Dimensions’ and an inspirational text she tentatively calls ‘The Deepest Cut’. Her future works also include ‘Devil in the Detail’ and a short story anthology she has entitled ‘Katsanga Kenye’. She is pro-children/youth and pro-women and reflects this inclination in most of her writings.
The port city of Mombasa, where she grew up, forms the setting of Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold. She says in her interview with Faith Oneya, conducted in Mombasa in 2011, that her passion is to give the human face to the stereotyped and marginalized people though literature. Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, her first novel, was inspired by her experience with AIDS when one of her best friends in Mombasa got infected in the late 90’s. In 2000, this friend met a German man in Malindi who was HIV negative and they fell in love. She disclosed to her how hard it was to disclose her HIV status to him. They had safe sex for months but eventually she told him and they still got married, though unfortunately she passed on after a couple of months. Their love was an inspiration for Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold. She also confides in Oneya that she got interested in AIDS genre to reverse the common view held by most people around that time that blamed men for spreading the HIV disease, so that in Crcucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, it was the lady Lavina who is HIV positive while the leading male character, Giorgio Santini, is HIV negative. (http://literarychronicles.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/interview-with-moraa-gitaa-the-author-of-rucible-for-silver-and-furnace-for-gold/).
Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold narrates the tribulations of Lavina Kate, on a sabbatical at the coast, who contemplates suicide to escape from her diseased body but is saved by the affluent Italian investor Giorgio Santini who cushions her with love and compassion, an antidote against the ennui and hopelessness engendered by the reality of being sero-positive. The novel conscripts romance as a panacea to AIDS stigma as Lavina is urged by Giorgio towards positive living in her condition. There is also in the novel, the embracing of the new technology to enable Persons Living with AIDS to live fulfilled lives where love, sex and procreation are possible and tenable.
As it has emerged from this overview, AIDS crisis has fuelled a considerable number of novels in Kenya with both budding and experienced writers seizing it up as a subject worth of novelization. This study is worthwhile for it seeks to fulfill the absence of critical readings commensurate with these novels and underscores the importance of these novelistic interventions against AIDS in Kenya. The selected novels’ depiction of the nihilism and disruptiveness of AIDS is the subject of the next chapter.
Becker (1997) defines biographical disruption as any unexpected event in the seductively predictable flow of daily life such as the death of a life partner, a life threatening illness, a marital breakdown or the loss of a valued job.
In their text, Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, Kuller and Koltus (2007) view the disease subject as representing the impact of disease on the existential life-project of the subject, where the disease-subject represents the lived body suffering existential disruption and the possible limitations imposed by disease. They hold that this limited situation compels the disease subject to calibrate a new life story, a new character or a way of being-in- the world. They further perceive the disease subject as immersed in a reassessment of values, relationships and life plans as they adjust to the existential dilemma occasioned by disruptive disease and its demand for existential reorientation.
Differentiating between the subject of disease and the disease subject, Kleinman (1988) widens the concept of disease and looks at the subject of disease as the witness of bodily dysfunctions and at the disease subject as the witness of existential disruption. For him, ‘disease is not merely observed dysfunction, it is also anguish in view of the unknown, vulnerability in the wake of permanent sequelae; perhaps the shudder of death’s proximity’ (Kleinman,1988:47).The disease subject is alert to the inevitable collapse of his or her life-world and is impelled to grope for new existential pathways. Scientific descriptions of disease excludes this dimension of ‘being-in-the-world’ of the disease subject, an area that philosophy and literature ‘have been called upon to shape sympathy, develop empathy, and understand meaning’, (ibid) for they keenly engage with people suffering morbid episodes trying to reorganize their lives in the quest for new existential meaning of their future. The need for this existential readjustment is all the more obvious when disease becomes chronic and sequelae set in. Literature in particular is proficient in creating characters and narrating the vagaries and crisis disease subjects undergo and can aesthetically depict the existential quandaries that burden them. The disease subject is the ‘institutionalized body constructed and contained by the hegemony of the (medical) institution even when such a figure may not, ultimately be hospitalized’ (Markotic, 2003:178).
Though over time HIV disease has come to be conceptualized as a chronic illness, Machado (2012) posits that the trauma of first diagnosis, the lingering prospect of physical deterioration, self blame and shame, isolation and problems with disclosure of the HIV status remain constants in the lives of those infected with HIV. These profound difficulties are best understood in existentialist paradigms that conceive man as a being operating within structures of his existence. Existentialist framework also illuminates the appreciation of ontological aspects of life such as freedom, guilt, the question of choice and the inevitability of death, which coincide with the experience of living with AIDS.
Machado (2012) further proposes that certain existential dimensions are inherent in the human condition and that confronting them engenders a variety of reactions raging from anxiety and despair to creativity and hope. In this chapter, I apply existentialist concepts to examine the existential dimensions of AIDS as manifested in the experiences of individual characters in the novels selected for the study, whose existence is weighed down by the reality of infection, a scenario best captured by Yingling (1991) who laments that ‘AIDS shares more , finally with genocide than with plague…. It is the power of others to inflict dying that continues to shape the history of AIDS’ (Yingling, 1991:296).
Chronic illness brings a certain weight on the existence of the infected who become apprehensive of their mortality as their world collapses in the face of chronicity, accentuating the individual’s vulnerable existence. As Machado observes, AIDS brings to the fore a fundamental yet overlooked fact of life that every human being exists in body. The many ways in which the HIV disease affects the body also influence the individual’s perception of himself since the body is usually tied to one’s subjective experiences of identity. This is especially so because the HIV contraction is an embodied experience which is mainly contracted through bodily fluids during sexual intercourse. Isolation, embodiedness and anxiety are therefore existential givens that confront and are confronted by those living with HIV and AIDS.
May (1972) defines anxiety as ‘ the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality’ (May, 1972:28) and that it is ‘the experience of the threat of the immanent non- being… the subjective state of the individual becoming aware that his existence can become destroyed , that he can lose himself and his world, that he can become nothing’(ibid). Differentiating fear from anxiety, May holds that whereas fear merely threatens one’s existence, anxiety strikes at the core ‘of the psychological structure on which the perception of one’s self as distinct from the world of objects occur’(May,1972:62). This insightful definition of anxiety highlights the way in which HIV/AIDS threatens the existence of the infected persons, since, as Bengental (1987) cautions, ‘anxiety cannot be denied or rationalized away, it can only be confronted steadfastly as possible, and then incorporated in one’s being’( cited in May, 1972:67).
According to Camus (1960), people whose lives are detached and disconnected are prone to suffer from tensions and conflict, isolation and emptiness and the fear of death, a perspective endorsed by Paul Tillich who held that:
We are only in the world through a community of men. And we discover our souls only through the mirror of those who look at us. There is no depth of life without the depth of the communal life.’ (cited in Naylor et al, 1994:56).
Immersed in Foucauldian dividing techniques where the AIDS diseased are divided from themselves and from others, their diseased bodies, as Nicole Markotic observes ‘assert their individuality through ultimate demise’ (Markotic,, 2003:176) and, as I endeavour to demonstrate in what follows, the diseased subjects experience acute existential disruption and meaninglessness.
In Carolyne Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim, Catherine Njeri’s life is unmade after she learns of her AIDS diagnosis while processing travel documents for further studies, the devastating news of her HIV status scuttles her bigger picture as a woman cut out for great things. She laments her amorous past as the cause of her present predicament. The epistolary novel presents her progression from youthful naiveté to sexual maturity, AIDS diagnosis and the pain and uncertainties summoned by living with the condition. She grapples with the meaning of AIDS as she puzzles out who might have infected her.
The text configures AIDS as an underground train that transports its passengers to their graves. This apocalyptic metaphor is apt in its articulation of the capricious and insidious nature of HIV. Unprotected sex in times of AIDS is imaged as an inferno into which people are thrust by lascivious lifestyles, pointing out the vulnerable positions of the married as passive recipients of the virus who must die for the sins of their spouses. It also points out the disturbing scenario of AIDS orphanage portended by this human tragedy. Catherine’s present poses an existential dilemma, threatened as it is by a past of sexual encounters. The past, which has sexual excess, symbolizes the time of infection and it threatens the present with the progression of one’s HIV disease, whether viscerally visible or imagined and dreaded for the asymptomatic like Njeri.
The novel documents the estranging aspects of AIDS and stages a criticism of the crippling stigma and discrimination associated with the syndrome. This appears to be the tormenting aspect of HIV. Catherine does not progress from HIV to AIDS in the space of the novel but her alienation as a diseased body is powerfully depicted. Constrained by the scorn of the society, she feels like a person facing a death penalty, one whose future has been irretrievably shattered and death looms in the dark. She confesses:
I am not happy at all, every minute I remember I am on the victims list and that I face a death penalty….with the AIDS infection….You hit a dead end as you do not have much of future left. You cannot carry on with your dreams. They are still shattered and death looms in the dark. It hurts your pride, takes away your confidences and leaves you with no faith to go by. As if these were not enough you have to bear the scorn of the society, as it shows little sympathy with the patients. Little wonder many such patients opt for a suicidal outlet. These are my confessions (p.82).
The epistolary form enables the writer to construct narratives of memory which predated AIDS infection. The past, not the individual, is blamed as a source of infection, thus mitigating and lessening the inculpation of the ill. The epistolary form also allows the writer to experiment with testimonial writing. The narrative, for instance, constructs a memory project by inscribing the sad story of the Kamba girl who commits suicide and by recounting the events of her life that led to her suicide. Cynthia recounts the sad story to Njeri:
Jane was working in Kisumu up to the time she died. Now you know how Kisumu life is - as hot as weather. Jane liked Kisumu life so much. She was the type who believed in having a good life and to this end she had a chain of menfriends….I guess sooner or later she discovered that she had contracted AIDS. This did not however slow her down and she continued with her wild lifestyle. When the AIDS symptoms set in, she locked herself up in a house and committed suicide. She was discovered three days later… (p.57).
Njeri’s memory of Jane, the Kamba girl, serves a memorializing function and as Timothy Murphy cogently argues, ‘testimony is witness in front of an indifferent world about the worth and merit of a person...’, and that ‘one writes, for the world unconvinced, that someone was here and that death notwithstanding, a presence remains’(Murphy, 1993: 317). Testimony and memory serve more personal needs for Njeri who is helped in the mourning process by remembering in writing the loved ones who have died. The process of memorialization in the face of a callous larger society also functions to disturb and dismantle AIDSphobia and combats the peril posed by the slogan that silence equals death. Analyzing the same in 2005, Muriungi attributes this AIDSphobia to cultural practices and ideologies that engender the marginalization of women. Thus AIDSphobia, the irrational fear of AIDS and its marginalizing tendencies continue to ligature AIDS with apocalyptic discourses and exacerbates the plight of the diseased.
Meja Mwangi’ The Last Plague is packed with apocalyptic images that create the atmosphere of nihilism and existential ennui in the text. The writer presents a pessimistic view of Crossroads with its solitary inhabitants living in fear of the disease and the perpetual desire to leave Crossroads. Uncle Mark observes that:
there at the old bus stop, a group of distraught travellers stood huddled together, their luggage scattered about them in ragged piles. Bundles of misery and packed up squalor. Debris from their incomplete circles of existence. Tatters of half dreamed dreams. Leftovers from their lived and unlived lives. They would never come back again. They had had it with Crossroads too and their luggage said it all. Crossroads was dying any old any fool could see that…(p.4)
In this foreboding of imminent disaster or final doom, the writer uses AIDS in a society riddled with ignorance and poverty to show the risk to which human life is exposed. For example, the old couple who carried the coffin said;
…Thomas was our last child…Aids ate them all up…Uncle Mark had too observed that;…the ruthless monster jolted the society and wrecked economies and threatened to completely annihilate Crossroads-to wipe out her treasured tradition and culture…(ibid).
The plague announced by the novel’s title is palpably exhibited:
…dying was not new to Crossroads. Crossroads had died many times before. She had died and risen and died and risen and died again many times after that, so many times so that she had become good at dying…at this time it was for real, any old fool could see that. This was the one death that even tenacious old Crossroads could not arise from. Only a miracle could raise her from this death, the kind of miracle that moved mountains and turned cold hearted monsters in angels and altered the path of life. A miracle as was unthinkable among the heathens of Crossroads…and waited for Crossroads to finally give up the ghost… (p.6).
Human beings were not the only ones that died in Crossroads but animals and infrastructure too:
…most of the lodgings and the shops and the bars had long closed down, moved elsewhere or simply died in anticipation of death, the post office, the last hope of the new deliverance had died and was entombed in rusty, old iron sheets and weathered chipboards… (p.7)
Pastor Batholomeo’s church had a surging roof and the petrol station was long vandalized. Kata Kataa reveals to Frank Fundi that Crossroads had not had an animal doctor and their animals were dying. Such is the existential ennui engendered by the AIDS pandemic, prompting Alina Rikanya to observe that Crossroads
seems to become a crossroad with the underworld- the villagers are slowly dying of AIDS. The leitmotif of the novel is a chain of funeral processions, descending slowly over the hills, passing by a collapsing church, ruined houses, a decayed petrol station… ( Rikanya, 2004: 53)
Mutahi’s The House of Doom displays a chaos narrative in its configuration of the diseased body. Mbela is devastated by the AIDS diagnosis and imagines life never getting better as his body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment. The concomitant emotional battering and stigmatizing calumnies from his friends and foes are fundamental to his chaos. Mbela is painfully conscious of his limited options and is resigned to the inevitability of life’s vicissitudes.
The chaotic body is also typified as nomadic and incapable of relationships. Unable to find recognition and support for its sickness, it is boxed into a corner where it can neither love itself nor others. Rendered monadic by pain and suffering, the chaotic body has erected a wall around itself that refuses to be assisted or comforted. Mbela opts to warehouse himself in his house in Mbembe, an estate which has become ‘the house of doom’, where he can brood and try to come to terms with his tragedy. He locks himself from the outside world which marginalizes the sick and constructs them as deserving of their predicaments. This hypocritical world is represented in the text by indifferent neighbours who make his alienation acute by sniggering at him. Their children are cautioned against going anywhere near the house of doom in case they contract the dreadful disease. The house inhabited by the dying man is to be shunned:
The House of Doom stood out as a landmark Not even many spectacular landmarks in the city were known like the The House of Doom. People who knew its tenants well would stand at a safe distance and point at The House of Doom saying, ‘there stands a lonely house…The house is as eerily silent as the grave….There lies the living Dead (pp.50-53).
Mbela’s sense of loss and the concomitant existential sickness evokes Albert Camus postulation that:
although life may be meaningful, meaning often eludes those who find themselves unable to connect with either their own inner self, other people, or some source of grounding. …. The inability to overcome one’s separation becomes a spiritual, an intellectual and an emotional obstacle to one’s search for meaning (p.51)
The overarching tendency in the text is to debunk these stereotypes since in the case of Mbela, the infliction was ironically a result of his benignity and not irresponsible sex, a serial philanderer though he may be. The text withholds information on how Mbela got infected in order not to idealize him. He has had his fun with countless women in Mbembe and is at a loss who among them might have infected him. This unexplained source of suffering is in line with the construction of the chaotic body that is prone to suffering for the mere fact of being a body and it is an artistic way of castigating the misconceptions by the healthy. Mbela can be likened to the Biblical Job who is perplexed by the reason for his affliction which he searches in vain. Like Job, the lack of the explanation for the genesis of Mbela’s troubles and chaos intensifies his tragedy and hints to a bleak future that has been shuttered by illness.
The monadic body is so hammered out of repair that it has become hostile to any intrusion. Mbela is cold to Wambui, the only Mbembean who has the heart and courage to enter the house of doom. Thus, the chaotic body is configured as refusing to be comforted. It is cynical of consolation presumably because the indifferent society of the novel is incapable of genuine empathy and largely because the chaotic body dismisses consolation as futile. It is beyond repair and beyond comfort, it cries to be accepted as it is because it considers itself beyond remission. Here, the chaotic body is deployed as a subversion to modernist medicine which is content with fixing and managing the incontinent body by warehousing the sick in hospital wards. It is therefore significant that Mbela refuses this medical colonization of his body in favour of a more private space to make meaning of his unmade world. As I shall point out later in this work, the retreat to oneself in the event of debilitating illness is paradoxically a source of regeneration.
Mbela sees his diseased body not as his, it feels meaningless and unreal and he is satirical of the devastated image of himself when he looks himself in the mirror, an image he likens to a ghost dressed in a suit or worse still, a skeleton in a tie. His chaos is the extreme dissociation from what he knows is his body but cannot experience it as being his. His wish to commit suicide is a desire to come face to face with his own dissolution and terminate his meaningless life in this absurd world. His body also feels so degraded by AIDS and the concomitant mistreatment that survival depends on his dissolution. In the portrayal of Mbela, the text shows that it is more difficult to manage stigma than physical pain, because the society refuses to reduce AIDS to a biological problem located in the individual’s body. On the contrary, while the body is diseased, with the virus located in it, it is the society that creates ‘AIDS’ through stigmatizing discourses.
It is this determination to obliterate himself from a world that has rejected him which impels him to contemplate committing suicide at the railway line where he hopes his chaotic body will be crashed to pulp by the night train. He prefers this obliteration to natural death in which his body will be mistreated when he dies from AIDS, as he had dreamt earlier about a drunken undertaker undertaking to bury his neglected body and ending up urinating on it before hurling it into a shallow grave, this after stealing the clothes on it. Earlier, he sardonically personifies his coffin as complaining of being loaded with mere bones, a hyperbolic description of an emaciated AIDS diseased body and a desperate attempt to laugh himself out of his chaos.
Thus, in The House of Doom, the body with AIDS is fashioned grotesquely ; a Bakhtinian strategy the writer utilizes to present the body that is dismembered by capitalist economy. Mutahi uses the body’s physiognomy as a template to critique the greedy capitalism which is manifested in Hela Tele’s voracious materialism and Prof Abubakar’s cunning ways. While the later will not hesitate to eliminate anybody who stands on his way to avarice, the former exploits AIDS sufferers by claiming to have a diablerie cure of AIDS. The writer uses Mbela’s fragmented body to uncrown their social standing and to deconstruct this superstitious and spiritual tyranny perpetuated in the interest of materialism. These three characters, the goons that are at Hela Tele’s beck and call and the rapists who raped Wambui three times can be seen as elliptical of the Nyakan postcolonial state whose callousness is typified by the hardened harlots, Kavesta and Susie.
The writer therefore uses the biological metaphor of illness as a canvass to organize his ideas about the larger social body which is equally afflicted with endemic social-economic viruses. Highlighted in the text is the crippling poverty that drive Mbela’s father to insanity, his absurdist depiction in a tie fashioned from banana leaves itself an indictment of the alienating capitalistic system. The rot and decadence in the body politic is also exemplified by rampant prostitution in Noirabi and in the port city of Kwamnazi where commercial sex workers target the moneyed American tourists. Kavesta’s sad story and tragic end as a victim of poverty further implicates the postcolonial state in this dislocation of the social fabric, lending credence to the acknowledged fact that ‘the epidemic is a social phenomenon, subject to structural, economic, political and other global forces that can influence its spread’ (Richard, 2003:250).Through the doings and the pseudo-evangelism of Pastor Absalom, who is pilloried at as a miracle merchant bent on self-aggrandizement under the guise of evangelism, the novel castigates Christian representation of AIDS as a divine curse to which evangelicals constantly allude in their sermons to fraudulently win converts. This representation is akin to the disciplinary aim of ‘applying pressure to keep good Christians within the bounds of the church-sanctioned morality and to convert those whose commitment to Christianity is weak’ (ibid).
HIV/AIDS as a social phenomenon that is discursively produced is also broached by Francis Imbuga who also engages with its disruptiveness in Miracle of Remera, a revealing and insightful text that recounts the tribulations of young adults as they negotiate the challenges posed in their lives by the reality of AIDS. The novel is set in the fictional country of Remera whose tranquility has been disrupted by HIV/AIDS; the deadly disease which decimates most of its inhabitants. The protagonist in the novel is Ezra Maiyo, a talented young man who is determined to make the best out of his life.
In a humorous tone characteristic of Imbuga, the writer takes the reader through the primary and secondary school life of Maiyo and his cousins, Kefa, Yuda and Bindu and their friends in primary and secondary schools and in the university, against the challenges of growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS. A comrades’ party in the countryside brings Maiyo back after a long stay away since his primary school days where he meets his girlfriend of youth, Brenda who had gone to stay at the coast with his Aunt. Circumstances force her to start fending for herself after her Aunt’s husband was convicted and she was forced out of school. She gets a job as a receptionist in one of the hotels at the coast where fate drives her to the unfortunate encounter with an Ethiopian teenager who lures her to his hotel room, drugs her and deflowers her, infecting her with HIV. She however soldiers on with life with a resolve to make it in life despite all odds. Matters are complicated for her when she and Maiyo meet after the comrades’ party after which they both spend a night and consummate their love without protection. Maiyo’s drunken stupor could not allow Brenda to caution him against unprotected sex, besides, at this moment, Brenda is unaware of her status.
Years later, Maiyo learns to his shock that he is sero- positive after donating blood at Avenue Hospital. Almost the same time Brenda is diagnosed sero-positive following a mandatory testing when she was joining permanent employment as teacher. The rest of the plot relates Maiyo’s struggle with this shuttering reality as he tries to live a normal life as HIV/AIDS patient in the university, an existential disruption that compels him to withdraw to himself and experiment with herbal medicine in a bid to negotiate his condition. He is encouraged through his ordeal by the concern and compassion of the newly found girlfriend, Daisy, who takes him to hospital after he unwittingly poisons himself with herbal concoctions. Curiously, Maiyo finally tests negative and the novel ends in an optimistic note where the two are not only headed for marriage but where alternative medicine seems to hold promise for the cure of the dreaded virus.
The overarching tendency in the novel is to mitigate the tragedy of AIDS. In the first instance, the characterization of Maiyo and Brenda, the infected two characters subverts the apocalyptic theodicy which emphasize that bad things happen to bad people. Maiyo contracts the virus in a moment of recklessness after a booze at the party and not because he was amoral, while Brenda is a victim of rape by a foreigner. Maiyo is portrayed as an intellectual, passionate, philanthropic and disciplined. Brenda is a caring, cautious lady who has learnt a lot from life as an orphan. The text does not hint to other boyfriends who might have infected Brenda and we are informed that Maiyo and Daisy, her campus girlfriend, availed themselves of the good opportunity to use a condom when they made love.
That they contract HIV is the writer’s statement on its arbitrariness, a rejection of AIDS as a metaphor for sin and immorality. From the outset and through characterization therefore, the novel resists the doom associated with HIV infection, AIDS apocalyptic understanding that emanate from ignorance of its nature as a virus. There is similar disruption of AIDS apocalypticism in the novel’s depiction of stereotypical phobia of the AIDS condition as it manifests in naïve villagers’ perception of AIDS deceased body of Teacher Manoa. His body is wrapped tight with a yellow plastic paper to tame its contagion. The involvement of the provincial administration, represented by the ignorant Sub-headman in dissuading mourners from coming near the corpse, is satirized by the writer.
In effect, the writer is unmasking the stereotypical fear of AIDS constructed by apocalyptic discourses in the mid 1980s when the virus was constructed as a death sentence. This phobia is dismantled by the daring and dramatic acts of Karengi and Maiyo who went against conventional wisdom of the folk and tore open the plastic bag and took snaps of the coffin. Their dramatic actions de-stigmatize the AIDS deceased body, paving way for a dignified send off for Manoa as a human being who has met his death, no matter the cause of his demise. As Maiyo observes, ‘even if Mwalimu died of the big One, that is no reason to prevent people from viewing the body’(p.65).
The AIDS diseased and deceased body has become an occasion for rumours and stories that construct it as undignified, like the bodies of those who commit suicide; AIDS deceased bodies are abominable and ignominious and should not be viewed. This perception, a function of stigma, feeds into the popular discourses about AIDS that used to do the rounds, especially in the late 1980s when the illness was shrouded in mystery, a scenario best captured by Conrad (1987) who posits that there is nothing inherent about the condition that makes it stigmatizing and that it is the social response to the condition that stigmatizes it.
It emerges however that this phobia has been intensified by an avaricious mortuary official who, without compassion, cashes in on the panic generated by AIDS to hoodwink unsuspecting mourners into buying the plastic bag believing it was a ministerial edict to check the spread of the pandemic. Clearly, in this society, AIDS is conceptualized in an atmosphere of ignorance which indicts the officials of Rural AIDS Awareness progmamme for diverting money meant for this noble venture to line their own pockets. Their callousness, together with the indifference of the mortuary attendant, point to the avarice in the wider body politic which cares very little to mitigate the impact of AIDS in the society. This ignorance is satirized in the comical way in which the headman and his ilk are portrayed, contrasted with the antics of Almasa, the village clown notorious for heavy drinking who ironically is more sensible in combating the phobia to give last respects to the departed Manoa:
Without wasting more time, Almasa signaled his two friends to follow him. The three staggered towards the veranda, mumbling some unintelligible words to the amusement of some mourners. Even the women who had been wailing stopped wailing and laughed briefly at the sight of the drunken trio.
When Almasa and his friends reached the veranda, they bowed their heads and viewed Manoa’s remains for a dignified minute, before staggering away (p.85)
The novel intervenes in creating more awareness of AIDS in combating irrational fear which engenders stigma and stereotypes of AIDS and HIV infected. Earlier on in the novel, Maiyo had delivered a much revealing speech on the occasion of AIDS awareness day in his school, where he debunked the myth that AIDS is witchcraft, clarifying that AIDS is spread like any other sexually transmitted disease: ‘you cannot catch AIDS by sharing the same utensils, the same bathroom or the same toilet with an infected person…, AIDS cannot be transmitted by people coughing or sneezing into each other’s face’ (p.32).
Through Maiyo’s speech, Imbuga is inviting all of us to up the battle against the AIDS pandemic lest it decimates all. He advocates an all-out- war against it and envisages victory out of this concerted effort to crusade against its spread. It is significant that one of the judges in the event is Dr Keyonzo, a medical doctor who has utilized his artistic flair to enlighten people about AIDS through his novel, I Wish I Knew. The presence of Professor Kingi, a professor of Literature and currently the Permanent Secretary in the ministry of Health, to grace this AIDS awareness event foregrounds the dissident view that people in liberal arts can make an important contribution in combating the pandemic.
When we first meet Lavina Kante, the protagonist in Moraa Gitaa’s Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, she is undergoing a personal crisis after the shuttering realization that she is HIV positive. On her sabbatical leave at the coast, she attempts suicide by swimming into the deep sea to escape the nothingness that her life has become. She is engaged in self flagellation as she swims deeper, hoping that in this retributive physical effort she would find respite from a problem to which there seemed no escape apart from death (p.2). She had left Mombasa where she was well known to escape the inevitable calumnies when her sero-positive status became an open secret.
She is an emotional cripple, ‘a damsel in distress’ who has become cynical about love because of her past betrayals and the consequent suffering. She considers life as perdition, notwithstanding her social standing and personal achievements as a sculptress and a medical school graduate, all of which come to naught in the face of her positive HIV status. Her existential ennui is exacerbated by the sharp dilemma in craving for a child and the sad realization that this is impossible in her current condition.
The text broaches the dilemma involved in disclosing one’s HIV status at the risk of rejection as it dramatizes Lavina’s fears and hesitation in getting intimate with men. She tries to reconcile with the hard reality that her body is rendered unfit for love because it is already marked by disease. Her consciousness of the danger inherent in love and sex in the time of AIDS is born out of suffering as a sero-positive. The sex panic generated by AIDS poses a dilemma for all, and we ask with her: How were people in her situation expected to deal with their sexual urges? ...when was the right time to tell someone? Was there ever a right time? (p.87). This dilemma is intensified by the anguish and the confusion emanating from the clash between moral promptings and the negative consequences of disclosure and underscores the existential isolation of the HIV infected. Falling in love in the era of AIDS plunges the individuals concerned in a catch 22 position. In a reflective mood couched in biblical allusions of testing through suffering, Lavina muses about the absurdity that has become love and sex in these minefields of AIDS.
The many aquatic accidents in which she gets involved and her perpetual fear of death constitute images of foreboding and apocalypse that characterize the novelization of AIDS as a human tragedy. The text utilizes apocalyptic rubric to underscore the point that though physical death is to be anticipated in chronic illness, in the case of AIDS, it is intensified by the phobic fear of the pandemic which engenders social death of the characters before their condition develops to full blown AIDS:
She started thinking of her three beautiful nieces; they would miss her if she died. She had thought the condition she had was going to be the death for her! Now she was, staring at death in a helicopter crash! ….instead of listening to his gently soothing and calming voice, Lavina was busy mentally picturing another scene. Scorched earth, crumbled metal, desperate screams, raging fire, smoldering ashes and bodies scarred beyond recognition, and wails of shock, grief, sadness and despair of the faces of gathered crowd and relatives of the victims… (p. 71-72).
This leitmotif of death which dominates Lavina’s psyche speaks of her social death before the dreaded corporeal extinction by AIDS.
The stigmatizing discourse attendant to HIV/AIDS already weighed down on Lavina who suffers rejection from her father and is subject to vilification by the insensitive Kamundes of the society. She is forced to wear a social mask as a façade to hide the pain that was tearing in her inside. As I shall argue later in this study, the writer invokes these AIDS apocalyptic tropes only to resist them in addressing himself to AIDS experience as an epiphany that transforms the ill individual to spirituality.
In what follows, I explicate how the selected novels engage with the issues of stigma and social death which zone off and alienate the diseased subjects. In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag insists that illness is not a metaphor, and stresses that the most truthful way of being ill and of regarding illness is one that is purified of and resistant to metaphorical thinking. She acknowledges the attractiveness to metaphorical thinking that accompanies times of crisis, and notes that ‘there is a natural inclination to confront mystery with metaphor as though words could tame’ (Sontag, 1979: 3).She laments that the diseased have been separated for special metaphoric attention such as being invested with sinfulness, their diseases being interpreted as punishment or used as barometers of the social, moral and political health of the body politic. This metaphoric burden, initially the onus of tuberculosis and cancer, Sontag decries, has been shifted to AIDS, prompting literary responses the world over as writers sought rhetorical powers to meet the challenge posed by the crisis and its attendant ominous myths and metaphors.
Varas-Diaz et al (2003) posits that the body is the vehicle for interaction with the world and others and that it is through it that people experience the HIV epidemic, further asserting that in social interactions where bodies are embedded, the consequences of infection are evidenced in stigmatization. The process of stigma construction and reception ‘culminate in an erasure of the bodies, lives and identities of people living with HIV/AIDS (Subotzky, Anya, 2004:2).
AIDS is directly related to death and sex, two aspects fundamental to the questions of human existence which also constitute two of the greatest social taboos. It is this link between death and sex that engenders ‘deep rooted fears around disease and dying on the one hand and social disgrace and deviance on the other’ (Marais, 2000:52). The association of AIDS with notions of sex and death intensifies its complex association with ‘sickness, contagion, loss and bodily death on the one hand and sexuality, pleasure and survival on the other( ibid), all experienced through and intimately connected with the human body which is trapped at the centre of discourses surrounding the epidemic. HIV positive bodies are therefore seen as ‘invasive agents who threaten the social order and place public health at risk (Sontag 1988, as read in Subutzky, A, 2004:6).Through their association with a state of decay, diseased bodies become sites of social unease, representative of ‘the contamination of life by death’(Kresteva, 1982: 149) and a site of death and contagion, an instance of prejudice, an entity suspended between health and sickness, as something that succumbs as it faces the epidemic (Varas- Diaz et al , 2003, cited in Subutzky, 2004:6).
These anxieties surrounding AIDS diseased bodies intensify stereotypical phobia of the disease and its apocalyptic reverberations which is reacted to through denial expressed through AIDS related stigma as individuals and collectivities locate the disease ‘beyond a series of perimeters in order to retain and defend spaces in which normality and the known reign’(Marais 2000:56), leading to projection as a global tendency to externalize blame and responsibility for HIV onto the stigmatized other (Gilman 1995, Sabatier 1988). AIDS stigma reflects prevailing prejudice in which codes of sanctions are ‘slotted neatly into moralistic narratives of deviance, accountability and just punishment’ (Marais, 2000:9).
Notions of visibility and corporeality are central to the phenomena of AIDS stigma, defined by Anya Subutzky (2004) as recognition of difference that is evaluated negatively and which resides in the body. This visual dimension of the diseased body makes it a target of surveillance and regulation through regimes of discipline and punishment, as Foucault would put it, as attempts are made to either zone off the diseased bodies or discipline them into health. This is especially so because HIV positive bodies are read as ‘unfathomable and out of control’ and are seen to ‘inaugurate a crisis in those systems of power concerned with the regulation of bodies’ (Thomas, 2001: 64).
The crisis inaugurated by AIDS and the regimes of representation which make the lives and bodies of some visible leads to discursive erasure of HIV positive bodies. This stigma becomes internalized in the form of bodily shame and guilt with its intimate association of identity and bodily perceptions. The body is understood as a ‘socially constructed entity through which people develop discourses, (Various –Diaz et al) ‘and bodies come to be seen as visual signifiers of our selves, constantly on display, where they are interpreted and decoded by ourselves and others’ (ibid).
Ana-MariaSchweitzer et al define stigma as an act of identifying, labeling or attributing undesirable qualities targeted towards those who are perceived as being shamefully different and deviant from the social ideal (https://www.google.co.ke/#q=ana-aria+schweitzer+on+stigma). They further view it as an attribute that discredits and sets the targeted apart from the normalized social order. They distinguish stigma from discrimination where stigma is the attitude and discrimination the act, the action or treatment based on the stigma directed towards the stigmatized and may involve sanction, harassment, scapegoating and violence on the target group. A broader definition of stigma sees the concept in relation to notions of power, domination and control exerted over the devalued group and which creates social inequality and results in social exclusion of persons or groups.
In Culture, Health and Illness, Helman (2000) opines that social death may precede physical death by a remarkable period where individuals are still alive physically but less alive socially, both in the eyes of the family and the wider society. For him, those confined to institutions such as prisons, old age homes, hospices for the terminally ill, have undergone a form of social death before their biological demise. He notes that the diagnosis of serious disease such as AIDS may lead to social death of the individual and may engender a nocebo effect, aggravating the individual’s health. In the case of terminal illness, patients leave their normal life behind and enter a state of limbo characterized by a sense of vulnerability and danger. HIV/AIDS is a disease traditionally laden with guilt, prejudice and blame. It is not surprising that popular novelistic representations of the pandemic contain elements of bias, stereotypes, misconceptions and/or falsehoods. HIV disease foregrounds ‘the body as a commoditized or polluted entity’, which taints the social standing of the individuals and their relationships (Yankah, 2012:196).
HIV/AIDS stigma compounds the existential dilemma of the diseased subjects and it is an impediment to prevention and treatment, indeed stigma is the single most factor in producing and exerting negative psychosocial effect of HIV and AIDS. People with HIV and AIDS are stigmatized and discriminated against for a variety of reasons which include the capriciousness and intransigence of the illness and its association with a death sentence. AIDSphobia emanates from ignorance and misconceptions of the syndrome where conflicted discursives produce polarizing knowledge about the disease, while transmission is associated with transgressions of societal mores. Eradication of and protection against stigma is crucial in confronting AIDS and buttressing the psychosocial well- being of the patients.
Goffman(1963) writes that the Greeks:
originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut out or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor - a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided; especially in public places (Goffman, 1963:11).
For Goffman, stigma, in its modern usage, applies more to the disgrace associated with bodily signs; it is the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance through socially constructed criteria of categorization. In life and in the selected fiction, HIV diagnosis engenders immediate social death even to sero-positive but asymptomatic individuals, ‘the worried well’ whose life expectancy is often better than that of persons with cancer and cardiovascular disorder. It appears that being referred to as sufferer or as case has a sense of diminishment, with affected individuals preferring to be referred to as persons with AIDS, persons with that condition and not that condition themselves.
Adalla’s Confession of an AIDS Victim re-enacts the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS in the sad story of the Kamba girl called Jane who, driven to prostitution in Kisumu, indulges in a promiscuous lifestyle and contracts HIV. She opts for suicide to escape the inevitable stigma which inculpates the commercial sex workers in the spread of the virus. There is perversity and moral degeneration and an indictment of malignant tribalism as a social ill as Catherine laments her victimhood which she blames on her parents’ rejection of her boyfriend Brian simply because he was a non-Kikuyu. Despite the fact that Brian is himself a serial philanderer, he inculpates and stigmatizes Catherine in reactions that frame AIDS apocalyptically. In what sounds as the most eloquent indictment of stigma in the text, Catherine relives her past to assuage her suffering but is categorical that what she feared most was not death but stigma and devaluation. We ask with her:
does one’s possession of HIV alter all other facts so that one is considered outcast from one’s community of dear friends and relatives? Do we still pass for human beings deserving love, attention and company for as long as we live? Or are we degenerated so much as to drop the human status? (p.51)
Her question is an eloquent articulation of stigma and social death suffered by the AIDS diseased subjects who are continuously harassed by the hegemonic bio-power in the society, a situation well pointed out by C. Nzioka who observed that ‘part of the process of making up illness is to emphasize differences, where anyone who has overt physical and social attributes which are different is socially constructed as more susceptible to illness. In the process, the different are seen as enemies’ (Nzioka, 1996:571).
Catherine further decries this ostracism and social death when she writes:
you cannot carry on with your dreams. They are still shattered and death looms in the dark. It hurts your pride, takes away your confidences and leaves you with no faith to go by. As if these were not enough, you have to bear the scorn of the society, as it shows little sympathy with the patients. Little wonder many such patients’ opt for a suicidal outlet. These then are my confessions (p.82).
Just when Crossroadians expected to see an opulent robust man because he had gone away to seek his fortune in Pwani, Broker, in Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague emerges as ‘emaciated old creature of indeterminable age, with a shiny, bony forehead, thinning brown hair, large ears and eyes that were about to disappear back into their cavernous sockets’ (p.164), a cadaver like frightful physical appearance. He has experienced solitude after being abandoned by friends due to his repulsive clinical condition. All his women, the object of his debauchery and hedonism, fled from him as soon as they learned that he was ill with AIDS. While he has embraced a stoic philosophy to face the inevitability of death as one diagnosed with terminal illness, it is the fact of social death implied by its clinical syndrome that he finds insurmountable.
Social death becomes even more acute for Broker when he fails to win Janet’s acceptance and he slips into a brooding mood whenever he finds acceptance by Janet not forthcoming, he is anguished and feels empty, to the extent that he does not care losing all he has. He also suffers his own vicissitudes of embodiment when his former teacher and other friends failed to recognize him because of his emaciation which he attempts to mitigate by laughter. His diseased body has become a site for gossip and many are the occasions he is rumoured dead before his death.
Believing he has contracted HIV following a false positive diagnosis carried out as a travel prerequisite, Frank Fundi in the same text suffers the vicissitudes of embodying death and the agony of indecisiveness to disclose his status, postponing the moment until an opportune chance shows. Like Broker, he is an object of stigmatizing discourses, and like Broker he had been presumed dead from AIDS and buried in a mass grave for the poor and destitute of Harare. It is not surprising therefore that people fled in terror when he showed up at home. His case exemplifies the dis/ease caused by AIDS associated stigmatization since he suffers acute alienation even when, unknown to him, he was medically fit. The agony of AIDS he experiences and the fact that he was forced to abandon his plans for further studies abroad indicts the medical profession for their unscrupulousness in AIDS testing. As Clatts and Mutcher (1989:108) have remarked of the pandemic, ‘to say someone has AIDS is to say much more than that person is experiencing the progressive exposure of fragile vital organs to the ravages of common infections. It is to say that he or she is a certain type of person, socially and morally defined’. This is so in the society of the novel where to say that someone has AIDS is to say that they are promiscuous, for as an illness that displays signs on the body, HIV disease is an embodied and public sign of some wrongdoing on the part of the sick person. AIDS is part of a compelling and overwhelming menace, a sort of death sentence which further attenuates the ill individual.
Frank acknowledges the support and encouragement from Janet who constantly mitigates his alienation by nagging him back to positive perspective and making him comprehend the disease not as a divine punishment but as an arbitrary one that ‘does not know priest from prostitute’( p.405).The kindred humanity that ties Broker and Fundi as fellow AIDS patients becomes for the writer a way of asking for mutual support for people living with AIDS as a way to negotiate the reality of the debilitating illness.
In Mutahi’s The House of Doom, Mbela tries to come to terms with his rage about the pandemic, the text expresses a great deal of rage about the bigotry and AIDS stigma directed towards People Living with AIDS expressed by the hypocritical society. The rage he feels against AIDS and against the indifferent society sometimes dissipates into a chaotic state of non-feeling and disconnected reality, a social death before the physical one. Mbela is already written off by his relations and rumoured dead by his neighbours and ‘Although he had not died yet, he had died many times in his dreams. The dreams featured him dead’. (p 193).It is also noteworthy that the mystery surrounding this house of the doomed attracts many people who come to have a glimpse of it, but even these have to watch the gothic architecture from a safe distance.
The city people are depicted as indifferent and hypocritical. They are quick to associate Mbela’s illness with his past amorous behaviour and are shown as incapable of empathy. Their hypocrisy is pilloried at by the writer who marvels with Mbela and ourselves, why some people think suffering and disease are for other categories of people. It is clear that Mutahi is attacking the ‘holier- than- thou’ attitude adopted by many a people in viewing AIDS illness which has the end result of perpetuating stereotypes and myths about the disease, hence driving the diseased to self-isolation. Nelson Mandela held that it is this stigma and marginalization that destroys and kills the sick person (news.bbc.co.uk./2/hi/health/2123957.stm accessed on 26/4/2014).That the diseased body is trapped in degrading discourses is seen in the conversation among Mbela’s workmates at Chronicle House where his AIDS marked body becomes a subject of calumnies:
‘I hear that he died and was buried secretly last week’, somebody would start his working day by telling his colleagues.
‘Who would bury him? Would anybody except the City Council undertakers bury him?’
‘I hear he was dead for a week before anybody knew that he had expired’
‘They must have burned his body now that it was so rotten. I don’t think the government could allow that he be buried .Only burning his body would make sure that the dead and rotting man would not spread viruses around.’
‘I hear he was moving around with a beautiful woman before he died. I hear the woman too had the disease and since she knew she was going to die also, they shared romantic moments’
‘I doubt whether anybody will move into the house where the fellow was living. It is a haunted place. No wonder the neighbors called it The House of Doom’ (p.135-136)
This kind of gossip is a clear indication that in Nyak, AIDS is conceptualized in an atmosphere of ignorance, which in itself breeds a fertile ground for stigmatizing the disease. The indifferent Ngorio, the editor of ‘Chronicle’, fires Mbela from his job ostensibly because of gross misconduct, so as to rid the workplace of Mbela’s contagious diseased body. The editor represents many other bosses in the society who encourage discrimination in the workplace, denying human dignity to the sick, a scenario decried by Goffman who writes:
By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption, we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often un-thinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class (Goffman, 1963:14).
The reactions of and the antics by Mbela’s fellow journalists at Chronicle office and at his press conference are a satire on their hypocrisy. The source of this stigmatization is the focus not on the illness but on the mode of transmission, which estimates Sontag’s observation that ‘many diseases that are said to be linked to sexual fault such as syphilis tend to ‘inspire fears of easy contagion and bizarre fantasies of transmission by non-venereal means in public places’ (Sontag, 1988:28).
AIDS stigma is so palpable in this text that it violates kinship relationship, impelling the diseased individuals to redefine their sense of home. Mbela has been rejected by his family and seeks an alternative one in Wambui, a supportive significant other who shares ‘with him the feeling that he is human and essentially normal’ (Goffman, 1963:30) in spite of his sero-positive status. Home for Mbela is no longer an epitome of comfort, care and respite where those infected can choose as the place to end it all, but it epitomizes uncertainty, alienation and despondence. In such circumstances, the ill individuals are forced to redefine home not as a place they come from but as a place they get to, a place that can cushion them from the existential anguish and agony of AIDS.
The writer also engages with the stigmatization of AIDS as the disease for Africans and the racist myths of origin which articulate the sustained Orientalist enterprise to stigmatize the continent where AIDS is deployed as a narrative device to contain Africans in a racist paradigm. For instance, representing AIDS as emerging in faraway places, far from bodies of ‘other’ that then contaminate the rest of the world generates racist stereotypes and inculpates the African. The House of Doom recreates this racist myth of origin of AIDS in order to dispel it. Despite the gravity of the matter, Mutahi employs humour to debunk the racist myth of origin of AIDS:
Researchers say that somewhere in Africa, a chimpanzee picked up the virus by cutting itself while eating a carcass…., the very researchers claim that humans got the AIDS virus from eating chimpanzees. They say chimpanzees got AIDS by eating monkeys. Chimpazees eating monkeys! Where on earth has a chimpanzee eaten a monkey? Wambui asked. That is the researchers’ theory. They also claim that AIDS originally came from the Green African monkey. So once upon a time, these sexually active monkeys swung AIDS from tree to tree until the disease reached us, Mbela told Wambui….The researchers say that we either slept with monkeys or ate their flesh. You know Africans are said to do things which prove that they are close to the animal world. It is the pet theory of the white man who still looks down on us this century… (p.189-190).
The illogicality of the myth claims revealed in this excerpt expose the irrationality of the Western episteme which has perpetuated a negative image of Africa as the source of evil things, HIV disease included. As observes David Levi Strauss, the important aspect of social relationship is that:
there is always a relationship of power at stake, that there is always an attempt to tell a story, and that this story is always told from a particular, politically charged angle. And so it is for HIV/AIDS where the West have couched their representations of African AIDS in a rhetoric of ridicule and with established patterns of Orientalism’(cited in Barz, & Cohen 2011:408).
On the same issue, Philip Hilts reflects:
Consider for instance, how some of the first media accounts of HIV/AIDS revolved around theories that trace the origin of the disease in Africa. One particular theory was based on the assumption that HIV virus had actually been present in Africans for years but simply remained undiagnosed. That is, until they “passed it out to the world as civilization reached them” (Hilts, 1988: 2)
while Ronald Bleiker& Army Kay, writing in 2007 opine that ‘Another theory stipulated that HIV evolved from a parent virus discovered in wild African green monkeys. The disease was then said to have crossed species barriers and found a human host in Africans, who later passed it on to the rest of the unknowing world (Bleiker & Kay, 2007:145),a position also picked by Schoef (1992)who has suggested that:
Western popular and biomedical accounts of AIDS contain examples of racist constructions of African culture. Africa has been designated as a source of AIDS; exotic cultures have been held responsible for passage of the virus from monkeys to humans and the sexuality of the Africans has been characterized as promiscuous and different from that of peoples elsewhere (Schoef, 1992:265).
On his part, Watney (1989) opines that some of the imagery used to describe AIDS in Africa operates within a long discursive tradition which ‘speaks of a peculiar and special affinity between the virus and the continent’ and ‘reads the modes of transmission of HIV as signs of a generalized and homogeneous African ‘primitiveness, whether sexual or medical’ (Watney, 1989: 52).
It seems that the onus of most of the Kenyan AIDS novels studied here is to debunk this AIDS racist paradigm. I have already illustrated how Mutahi dismantles these racist myths in The House of Doom. In Miracle of Remera, Imbuga subverts the West’s racist supremacy by presenting Africa as a trail-blazer for AIDS cure while Moraa Gitaa in Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold erases racial boundaries to counter AIDS stigma and to gesture towards the possibility of romance where it is denied by the reality of AIDS. In The Last Plague, Meja Mwangi assumes a skeptical view of Western AIDS NGOs whose intervention against AIDS in Africa is pilloried at because they appear out of synch with the realities on the ground.
In Miracle of Remera, a noble and altruistic move by Maiyo and his father to donate blood turns out tragic when Maiyo’s blood tests positive. This shatters Maiyo’s life and unmakes his world, an existential vacuum that force him to withdrawal and meditation. The inevitable agony and anguish pushes him into reticence and he has to maroon himself in his university room seemingly to refocus his life and mediate his disrupted life. Thrust into existential chaos by the reality of HIV infection, Maiyo’s ‘body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment’ (p.98), he suffers acute isolation as he confronts the ‘trouble of remaking a sense of purpose as the world demands’ (Arthur, 1995:107), an existential quest he feels can only be undertaken if he keeps himself apart from a world that could not understand his predicament, given the magnitude of AIDS stigma. The campus setting of the novel becomes a way for the writer to represent the AIDS stigma in the university where it is supposed to have been debunked in order to underscore its magnitude and indict the intellectuals for their complacence in combating AIDS. In mediating his disruption, as I will argue in the next chapter, Maiyo demonstrates how academic research can be utilized in the fight against AIDS, an insight he feels is denied those who have not experienced the limit-experience imposed by terminal illness.
Presumably because of its anti-apocalyptic inclination, the novel does not dwell much on Maiyo’s existential anguish just like it refuses to focus on Brenda’s experience with AIDS, only reporting her condition through her letter to Maiyo but depicting her leading a complete life in her incompleteness. The novel strongly foregrounds Maiyo’s mediation of his way out of this existential quandary. More of this will be explored in chapter four.
Imbuga is out to idealize the two in order to urge a more sober response to their sero-positive status and to debunk the fallacy that nice people cannot contract the virus, an understanding that asserts the paradoxical nature of AIDS. Brenda acts responsibly when she is diagnosed with the virus and writes a letter to Maiyo, informing him of the importance of being tested for AIDS. Her frankness subverts the typical responses of blame game or denial and urges a change of ethos in conceptualizing the disease. The other reversal of conventional response is seen in Maiyo’s stoic acceptance of his AIDS positive status. The statement being made here is that AIDS is the disease of our time and should be accepted as such if we have to confront it effectively.
In The Mysterious Killer, the description of Cecilia’s body ravaged by AIDS with black spots on the face mark her body for condemnation. Though she rejects the doom scenario imposed on her life by embracing optimism for recuperation and consequently resisting a narrative surrender, her condition deteriorates pathetically and her grotesque body distances her from accommodation, ‘she is so pathetic that if you look at her you won’t be able to eat anything’ (p.28), a noisome smell wafts from her body which has been reduced to a mere skeleton and she seemed to gaze from the other world. Even her sober niece is alarmed by her apocalyptic image and naively believes the disease afflicting her is highly contagious through casual contact. When Ceclia is taken to Nkulu hospital to ease her excruciating pain, her diseased body on the bicycle carrier supported by her peers, is a horrific spectacle that people turn away from. This dramatization of death unsettles the naïve onlookers who wallow in the miasma of ignorance and have not come to terms with the enormity of AIDS.
Cecilia Odo is obsessed with herself and is actually aware of her precarious circumstances as a trumpet in the era of AIDS. Her obsession with self is juxtaposed with the care free lifestyle of Mama Baby, whose actions and choices seem motivated by materialistic pursuit. Though the text does not focus on her illness, it is implied that she is infected since she is in the infections web of Yamo and the diseased patrons of Cloud 9. Her craving for materialism can be seen as escapism from confronting the reality of infection, an escapism that does not ameliorate her condition, but one which denies her the opportunity to seize the advantage of disadvantage to quest for meaning.
In the society of the novel, AIDS is known as ‘fojijo’ in the local patois and the mere mention of it is enough to still tavern revelers into silence. The ignorance in which the epidemic is framed accounts for the stigmatization that stalks the diseased body to the grave. The AIDS deceased body attracts gossip in a situation where such deaths are so horrific that there is a conspiracy to silence them instead of accepting them as a process of life. This silence about AIDS is ‘institutionalized by policies of most governments in developing countries who are apprehensive that representations of HIV/AIDS could damage thriving industries, such as tourism, on which most African countries depend’ (Sabatier, 1988:96, Fleury, 2004:1).
Fr. Michael, who is infected with the virus through the machinations of Yamo, seeks a quick exit rather than die each day out of stigmatization. His burial at St Mathew’s cemetery as a priest of dignity who was relentless in his crusade against the AIDS pandemic saves his body from discrimination and stigmatization. Even his arch enemy Yamo, who attends the funeral to witness his end, is hushed and cannot spread malicious calumnies against him. His infection underscores the arbitrary nature of AIDS, cautioning against discriminating against those with AIDS because AIDS itself does not discriminate. Through Fr Michael’s narrative the novel seems to check on and critique the restrictive moralizing of the evangelicals that promotes celibacy as an intervention against the pandemic, which the text exposes as unviable and unrealistic in the face of innate corporeal (sexual) desires.
Yamo is himself emaciated and coughing pathetically and a personification of death itself. He is a spectacle that caused consternation in the cell where he is thrust as a suspect in the murder of the late reverent Fr. In his grotesque and abject body, which is viscerally reviled by AIDS, Yamo endures isolation and social death in prison where the inmates shun him as a carrier of death and delight in taunting him: “if he just touches you with that tortoise-like hand, you get the killer disease’ (p.220). This stigmatization and stereotypical phobia of AIDS is so rampant in the society that even the affluent Yamos are not impervious to it. This marginalization of the diseased is of great concern to the Gulabu Catholic Mission which decries the fact that the AIDS patients are being stigmatized, discriminated upon and even abandoned by their relatives.The Catholic priest in Bolob church endeavors to correct the apocalyptic understandings of AIDS as a divine curse. He urges more compassion and Christian love for the diseased in order to counter the hegemonic discourse about the illness:
As Christians, we should show compassion to the sick, the poor and those who have fallen to sin. It is saddening to hear that most people suffering from AIDS are usually abandoned by their relatives and friends. ‘According to statistics from the National AIDS Awareness Society, the HIV ratio is now one to three within Busaki city. With such prevalence, what will become of our society if we ostracize the infected? (p. 225)
Elsewhere, the text addresses cultural impediments to the fight against AIDS through Rachel who uses a funeral ambience to render a didactic and cautionary speech on the perils of AIDS:
I want to share with you what I have gathered about death. There is a disease hiding among us. It’s a deadly disease. The disease moves from one person to another through what our ancestors say is the sweetest thing in the world. You die if you contract this disease. You die if you sleep with a man or woman who has it (p.151).
She distances a biological illness from its cultural significations by discussing in public what was regarded as taboo:
I know that talking about matters of sex is a taboo. But this disease, which has killed my aunt, is contracted through sexual intercourse. There is a man here, out there, who has infected my aunt with the disease. If such a man sleeps with girls from this village, they will all die. And there must be a woman here, out there, who infected that man with the disease. If one of you men sleeps with that woman you will die. Your body might appear normal, but beneath that appearance the fatal disease will be growing…
I insisted on speaking here because my aunt’s death could serve as a lesson to us all. There are men and women among us here, and outside these villages, who have this disease. Please, please, don’t jump into bed with a stranger or anyone who is not your youthful life’s partner. For if you do, you will probably have stepped onto the unmarked road. And you will die.
We must change our ways or perish… (p.151-152).
Her sterling oration on AIDS awareness on the occasion of her aunt’s funeral is something of an authorial intrusion and can be regarded as an artistic ventriloquism which allows the writer to directly and openly educate the ignorant about AIDS for them to be more cautious or risk being decimated by the capricious virus. When Rachel is later on falsely diagnosed as sero-positive, the inevitable social death is so overbearing that she is driven to attempt suicide. Her will to live enervated by false HIV diagnosis, she pens a letter to her parents in which she narrates her social death as she prepares to terminate her life which has been rendered meaningless by HIV diagnosis. Her letter read in part: … my heart, above all else, is aching from the weight of bitterness and a gruesome fate….
But now I am bitter because all my dreams and hard work have come to naught. (p. 245)
The novel’s surprise endings, the discovery that Rachel actually does not, and never did have HIV disease and that the first test had been a false positive, is a relieving counter-apocalyptic AIDS closure. The novel implicates stereotypes of masculinity and traditional practices and their consequent harmful effects of gender inequality in the spread of the disease, symbolized in the novel by the figure of Yakobo, and which ipso facto, gets dismantled after the old man’s demise in Rachel’s hands.
The Mysterious Killer appears conflicted with respect to the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, which presents AIDS as a forward march to impending death. It resists and disturbs the smooth linearity of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. The narrative is broken into many chapters, each with subheadings and the narrative resists moving the story forward in a predictable linear fashion. Though HIV looms in the text, considering the web of infections, a linear apocalyptic trajectory is subverted by AIDS counterplotting where Rachel, whose initial AIDS test is reactive, turns out to have been a false positive, a realization that restores order and affirms life in the face of mortality. In the same vein, the text does not depict a solitary AIDS patient as she spirals down toward her death, surrounded by helpless doctors, a lover and a harrowing circle of friends. Instead it describes a richly textured web of interrelated relationships that cushion the diseased from despondence.
This anti-apocalyptic temper is also evident in Gitaa’s Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, which delineates Lavina’s personal apocalypse as she agonizes over her AIDS condition. Though the writer does not immerse the reader into her physical emaciation, her alienation is made palpable by her acute consciousness of stigma and social death summoned by her condition. She is forced to wear a social mask as a façade to conceal the pain that was tearing in her insides, she is a charade with everybody apart from the Munges, her confidants and significant others. She is consumed by anxieties and feeling of worthlessness which has made her cynical about love as she considers her diseased body incapable of attraction. Her stigma induced solitude and the incompatibility of her condition with the torrid emotions of love she feels about Giorgio trap her in a half- dead existence. Her dilemma of unfulfilled love is the dilemma for all and her question: how were people in her situation expected to deal with their sexual urges? When was the right time to tell someone? (p.97) is a question for all who become afflicted with the HIV disease. Fear of rejection after discovery of her condition captures the conflicted situation where the sick are zoned off from romantic engagements and love emotion in this state equals pain. Her crisis had projected her into a private world of aquatic accidents and a sense of depersonalization.
AIDS associated stigma is so strong in the society of the text that it violates kinship bonds and Lavina suffers rejection from her own father for her condition. Her father harbours a grudge against her for not heeding his advice to keep off Rawal, her serial philandering boy-friend who has apparently infected her. When her condition calls for empathy, Lavina is denied it and instead what she gets is recrimination from the amorous boyfriend and castigation from an offended father. This serves to underscore the depth of stigma as an oppressive discourse on the AIDS diseased subjects. Rawal ultimately symbolizes the mortal effects of Lavina’s sexual history, itself a haunting past which squelches her sexuality in the present time.
Such cavalier attitudes towards the diseased is exhibited by Rawal when Lavina, impelled by introspective search of who might have issued her with ‘a death certificate’, confronted Rawal. Rawal’s act of ordering her out of his office was inconsiderate and bellicose and can be read as a literary statement against the lack of firm legislation on deliberate spreading of HIV. That Rawal dies not long after this confrontation confirms his culpability and it is significant that Lavina extended compassion to him as a way of using spirituality to conquer prejudice.
Recriminations by Tony Kamunde, a kill joy who initially had a crash on her and who spreads calumnies about her immune system, vilifies her as a whore and scolds her for her condition, is a further criticism of the glaring lack of legal interventions in the fight against AIDS pandemic, for this sniggering is uncalled for and borders on slander and character assassination. The text is critical of such calumnies directed against those living with AIDS for it is these that aggravate Lavina’s situation, driving her to suicidal attempts.
Saved from suicide only by the quick intervention of Giorgio, her condition has turned her into a commitment phobic, which alienates her deeper from those who, like Giorgio, promise her marital bliss. While others in her condition might negotiate this dilemma by adjusting for each other through use of alternative sex like the use of vibrators, she is averse to them for their vulgar connotation. The acute alienation this moral stance engenders is only mitigated by the ‘consoling landscape of the sea smell drifting from the ocean, which provides a soothing balm to her frayed nerves’ (p.141). Giorgio appears to be the author’s ventriloquist when he asks:
when are your people going to learn that and discard this notion about HIV and AIDS. When are you going to stop treating your very own who are infected and affected like they are pariahs and with contempt while at it? I am a foreigner and I love you, so long as we’re careful and understand the methods of transmission (p.143).
This way the writer seems to have assigned the role of exposing and castigating AIDS stigma to a foreigner who comprehends the danger of stigmatizing diseases and objectively evaluates it as an alien.
As Farmer and Kleimann (2002) observe, ‘stories of sickness, of people with AIDS are texts of suffering that we can scan for evidences of how our cultures, communities and individuals elaborate the unique textures of personal experience out of the impersonal biological illness’(Farmer & Kleimann, 2002:139). As I have endeavoured to show in this chapter, novelization of AIDS stigma and the consequent social death speak to the constraints on the human spirit of the AIDS infected inflicted by a callous and a hypocritical society that refuses to listen to their experiences. As advanced in the foregoing discussion, the stigmatization of HIV disease has been engendered by the fusing of AIDS with sex and death. Flawed moralizing and the attribution of blame, as I have demonstrated, have undermined the fight against AIDS stigma and the concomitant social death.
HIV disease imposes a heavy weight to the existence of the disease subject. As observed in the previous chapter, Persons Living with HIV disease alienate themselves from the outside world to cushion themselves from stigma and oppressive structures, a sort of alienation that plunges them in existential ennui which has the potential to destabilize the core of the individual and undermine one’s sense as an existing being. This situation is best articulated by May (1950) who describes anxiety as an apprehension cued off by a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality, ‘the experience of the threat of immanent non-being…the subjective state of the individual becoming aware that his existence can become destroyed, that he can lose himself and his world, that he can become nothing’ (May,1972:50).May’s conceptualization of anxiety illuminates the understanding of the ontological disruption facing those living with HIV and AIDS.
Existential framework with its focus on man as a being enmeshed by the structures of his existence is central to understanding the challenges of living faced by human beings. Yalom (1980) posited that, existential philosophy is best suited to assist the HIV infected to adjust and ‘look within and attend to their existential condition’ while Silvio (2010) pushing the view further, posits that challenges in a human being’s life such as induced by life changing situations like chronic illness or debility induce mixed reaction of anxiety, despair, creativity and transcendence. The stigma attendant to HIV/AIDS is illustrative of the extent to which the existential experience of the HIV positives is shaped as they mediate the disruption on their lives as contaminated and disreputable bodies immersed in oppressive discourses where their individuality is only asserted through ultimate demise.
This different mode of being in the world as a consequent of disruptive disease necessitates existential reorientation in which the disease subject makes rearrangements and quests for new existential pathways as a being witnessing the collapse of his/ her life-world. This process of life reconstruction in the wake of debilitating illness is also articulated by Gay Becker in her text: Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World in which she emphasizes the need for the disrupted to re-evaluate their view of what a whole life is, reconcile differences between the past and present so as to create continuity. It is her view that inner chaos and disruption concomitant with disillusionment in expectations in the course of life represent a loss of the future and the restoration of order. It ‘necessitates reworking understandings of the self and the world, redefining the disruption and life itself’ (Becker, 1998:4) so as to create order from chaos and render life meaningful. In what follows, I focus on the reactions to HIV disease by the diseased subjects in the selected texts to explicate their coping strategies from limbo to continuity.
Adalla’s novella Confessions of an AIDS Victim utilizes the epistolary form as strategy in which Catherine negotiates her predicament, she turns to her bosom friend and to letter writing for support, the friend and the letter writing provide her something to lean on in her hopelessness, a refuge from the terror of AIDS diagnosis. Writing this letter is her introspective turn for support from writing and like Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, Catherine’s alleged letter addressed to her friend Maryline does not from the outset consist of letter-pages to be send directly but rather a notebook more to be put to other, unexplained ends. Its sections appear as chapters instead of letters.
The epistolary text can thus be viewed as an exercise, not in letter writing but in self-communication in which Catherine can be seen to be writing to herself to locate the source of her disequilibrium: the reality of her sero-positive status and the introspective search for who infected her. She therefore makes Maryline an imagined sounding board for her self-scrutiny. Her letter is akin to what Obioma Nnaemeka refers to as the exteriorization of an internal dialogue, a dialogue that the author wishes to share with the reader, and pretext for a dialogue with the self’ (as read in Muriungi, 2005:27). She utilizes letter writing to negotiate her disruption; embracing it as what Mildred Mortimer recognizes as a “dual process of introspection and writing, enclosure and disclosure” (ibid).
Agnes Muriugi highlights the effectiveness of the confessional as a literary ploy to negotiate cultural meanings and significations that cluster around AIDS in Kenya and notes that Catherine’s portrayal as a confessor-cum-victim in the text mitigates her culpability as the bringer of her own tragedy over which she is remorseful. Catherine’s decision to go public about her status fully aware of the public scum she was exposing herself to is a statement that in some circumstances, declaring the status is the only sane thing to do. Testing positive means she has to re-invent herself and forge a new identity as a strategy of negotiating the inevitable disruption and by ‘presenting herself as both confessant and victim, Catherine makes possible the expression of subjectivity and voice denied by the dominant culture in her society while at the same time claiming the worthiness of those infected by HIV/AIDS’ (Muriungi,2005:2).She tells Maryline that she writes to occupy herself and also relives her past to circumvent her present predicament. Writing, she informs her, relaxes her, transforms her way of thinking and enables her to come to terms with the fact that she is an AIDS patient.
The fictional duration of the novella seems to mitigate the apocalyptic nature of AIDS since its narration starts after she has been diagnosed but flashes back to secondary school days through university to give a hint to the time she might have been infected. Her ex-boyfriend, Brian, the likely culprit, is reportedly going on well with life in the US and his affair with his new girlfriend Denise goes on without the complication normally posed by sero-positive status. Similarly, she herself seems to lead an ordinary life with her boyfriend, Alex, who has since come round to apologizing for ill-treating her over her condition. Alex is still healthy and goes about his job energetically and his lecturer friend has been cleared to travel abroad, hinting to the possibility that he is sero-negative.
These optimistic portrayals and the fact that their affair has been going steady for over three years seems to negate the hegemonic rhetoric that frames the illness as a death sentence, with those infected expected to make exit from the world not long after the infection, a rhetoric that ignores the scientific facts of the pandemic. Her acceptance of her situation emboldens her and any tendency to condemn her for her condition is redeemed by the courage she exhibits in confessing her condition to Brian and advising him to get tested for the antibodies. She also takes occasional strolls to relax the tension imposed on her by her condition, on top of proper dieting to buttress her immunity, and is upbeat that the medical researchers will come up with an AIDS cure and vaccines for prevention.
Catherine finds solace in confiding in her friend Maryline, for confiding in others allays pain. There is a hint in the novella that this correspondence will continue since she hopes to include more details in her next letter and her friend will sure reply to egg her on against adversity. Optimism and affirmation of life in the face of menacing illness, not the inevitable doom, is thus underscored in the novella. Catherine’s wish that the content of her letter were made public for the benefit of all is an indication that this is no ordinary communication but a burning urge to go public about her condition as a panacea against AIDS associated stigmatization. Catherine seems to embrace Paul Monette’s conviction, which was born out of his experience with AIDS that: ‘If my life has been useful enough to help people understand that they are not alone, and then I know those people will go off and help others. That is how we change the world’ (Monette, 1991:46). Monette further adds that it would give him satisfaction to die knowing that his was a kind of first voice telling the story of what AIDS did to the infected.
Meja Mwangi seizes on a similar stoic conviction in the The Last Plague which depicts the apocalyptic nature of AIDS in novelizing the menace on Crossroad and in the apocalyptic trajectory in which the protagonist Ben Broker dies of AIDS. The text also at once subversively portrays AIDS in resisting the apocalyptic AIDS cultural narrative by showing increased time before the characters demise in which Broker tends to nobility in a quest for meaning.
Re-enacting the motif of return and death, the text portrays a man who has come to terms with his condition and has made a resolve to transcend the immediate challenges of his condition as a diseased being:
Before leaving Pwani to return to Crossroads, he had known for certain that it could not be easy to regain everyone’s love and acceptance. But he had promised himself to out-wit them all. He would bombard them with his presence, smother them with his patience. He would suffocate them with his shadow; crowd them till they forgot he had ever been away. He would wear Janet out with his endurance, the same way he had worn out countless other women before and after her’ (p.239)
In the figure of Broker we see a resolute man who has steeled himself against what he has accepted as irreversible and who is out to affirm life in the face of death. Through him the writer critiques the general view of People Living with AIDS as passive and shows that they can negotiate their disruption more meaningfully. His bold portrait against this existential challenge is a literary attempt to distance defeat and death from their phobic association with AIDS.
Broker mitigates the gravity of his condition by adopting a humorous attitude to illness. He exhibits great stoicism so that even in time of acute pain, he is able to humorously describe his pain as holes filled with broken and dying things. Though humour has been criticized as being ineffective in talking about AIDS (cited in Lisa, 1996:59), presumably because it domesticates terror and presents AIDS as any other calamity, Feiberg (1992), takes the opposite view that argues in favour of using AIDS humour, positing that humour not only achieves great emotional impact when juxtaposed with tragedy, but also asserting that in an absurd world, ‘humour may be the only appropriate response’ (Feiberg, 1992:56).
In his consideration of early American AIDS Literature, Feinberg provides five arguments in favour of humour: that humour is central to everyday life and that black humour…achieves great emotional impact by juxtaposing humour with tragedy. He also argued that humour is ‘a survival tactic, a defense mechanism, a way of lessening the horror’, noting that ‘gallows of humour allow emotional release through an appalled oxymoronic desire to laugh and cry’, that in an absurd world, humour may be the only appropriate response (Weirs, 1989:96). Broker’s jokes in the midst of illness articulate this philosophy of humour in mediating the AIDS crisis.
In Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin expounds on the subversive nature of laughter and writes that:
...laughter was never "infected," even slightly, by the "red tape" of moribund officialdom. Therefore, laughter could not be deformed or falsified as could every other form of seriousness, in particular the pathetic. Laughter remained outside official falsifications, which were coated with a layer of pathetic seriousness. Therefore all high and serious genres, all high forms of language and style, all mere set phrases and all linguistic norms were drenched in conventionality, hypocrisy and falsification. Laughter alone remained uninfected by lies.(Bakhtin, 1981:236).
Broker’s guffaws even in the face of adversity are therapeutic and are attempts to laugh off his illness. His laughter, directed to himself, seems to have the Bakhtinian subversive value of disrupting dominant discourses about AIDS; it can be read as a strategy to trivialize the tragedy and the cultural meanings of the disease. This is especially so because Broker uses humour for his self-abasement as one anguished and vanquished by AIDS. Mwangi juxtaposes AIDS humour with tragedy by inscribing its apocalyptic nature and paradoxically presenting dying as the easiest part of the illness, which calls for stoicism, even if it is that fired by humour. It can be argued that this humour enables him to avoid suicidal thoughts and instead facilitate a philosophical reconstruction of meaning of life with AIDS.
Through configuring Broker as stoic man who has made peace with his HIV status, the writer portrays what it means to live with HIV. The laughter generated by AIDS humour disrupts the hegemonic discourses about AIDS which ‘represent AIDS as unmitigated tragedy and assured doom’ (Garmire, 1996:64). While arguing that AIDS laughter remains outside official falsifications of AIDS, I do not mean to contradict the reality that AIDS is a fatal disease. I only insist, with The Last Plague, that there is an alternative way of representing living with AIDS quite apart from the apocalypse in which the pandemic is widely framed.
Humour becomes a way to make AIDS feel more manageable. As Feinberg notes, ‘once you joke about something, you appropriate it, you attain a certain amount of control over it (Feinberg, 1992:87). Even though it is clear that AIDS is progressing and that his time is finite, Broker continues to resist the apocalypse AIDS threatens, by laughing in the face of apocalypse, he copes with AIDS.
The Last Plague also constructs narratives of memory that focus on mourning those who have died of AIDS. Remembering the life and loss of particular loved ones is a strategy for mediating existential quandary and Broker spares time to visit Jemima’s deserted home to mourn his departed friend with whom he had eloped to Mombasa eight years back. Mourning those who have died from AIDS is a way of memorializing them, a way of testifying to their existence, that they once lived, though now departed, and that it is their testimony and not their death that becomes the last word. The audacity with which Broker takes a stroll around the many graves and identifies with Jemima’s grave smacks of a hardened character preoccupied not with the fear of death but with meaning of existence amid the existential challenge of illness.
His self flagellation and penitence which he executes by opting to spend his final days in the bare Crossroad teahouse where he sleeps on the floor out of choice, all this despite his opulence, is evident of his individuation in the illness- induced transformation. Curl Jung wrote that individuation:
is the first stage of spiritual journey. This process is set in motion by the ‘self archetype; an unconscious self’ which acts like a guiding force towards the discovery of one’s own ‘authentic being’, one’s real self’, the source of one’s potentialities (Jung, 1934:158).
Individuation calls for ‘a willingness to undergo a complete transformation of the human being’ (Wehr, 1987:164). Jung realized it by devoting time to reflection on and intellectual understanding of the emerging material; it facilitates ‘a thoughtful reflection on an upsetting situation (Hackmann, 1997:125).
Jung further posits that ‘the conscious or the ego must take the lead in sustaining an active dialogue between conscious and unconscious , which must stand side by side as equal partners in the process. If this is successful, the process unfolds until the seeming opposites are united and there is ‘a living birth that leads to a new level of being (Jung 1958b:90).
It is not surprising therefore that Broker overstretches himself in preparing for his end by buying for himself a tombstone to be erected at his grave, itself a further attempt at memorialization. Such extremity in preparing for one’s burial, though bordering on absurdity, speaks of the anguish and the existentialism of the persons living with AIDS.
Kubler-Ross (1993) describes five stages of grief in the dying person, namely; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. On the verge of death, Broker has undergone the first four stages of dying and is now on the fifth stage of acceptance and is thus able to confront his mortality with equanimity.
In spite of the death toll, Crossroad is never devoid of hopefuls who are determined to reverse the deaths and bring life to a lifeless town. At the centre of the novel is Janet Juma’s battle against the spread of the disease. Janet Juma is a planning officer of Crossroads; she is described as tall, beautiful and self-willed, desired and feared by every man in equal measure. We learn that since her abandonment ten years earlier by Ben Broker, her husband, she has been cured of men. She now wages a single minded struggle to deliver her community from the clutches of AIDS. She fights against the dangerous traditional practices like polygamy and mass circumcision that fortify the stranglehold of AIDS. For instance, she recruits Frank Fundi into her condom campaign mainly to help her stop Kata Kataa from inheriting his brother Solomon’s wife since Solomon had died of ‘the plague’. She also, against conventions, entered the inner circle of circumcision and dared Kata Kataa, the most feared man and custodian of Crossroads’ tradition, to circumcise her first before circumcising the boys. She warns him to ‘…stop making dead men out of healthy boys’ (p.109)
Together with Frank and Big Youth, she distributes condoms and posters around Crossroads and gives out family planning pills for free. They visit several schools and markets, for example Sokoni, enlightening people on family planning and HIV/AIDS and people ‘listened to Janet and Frank unfold what they thought was a brilliant idea, a grand plan to turn Crossroads from an abode of despair. From a garden of death to a spring of life’ (p.114)
With Janet as the beacon of hope, the text endeavours at educating people on facts about AIDS in order to shutter cultural bigotry that intensify its spread. Her triumph in her effort radiates optimism where it is denied:
…she brought with her certain warmth, energy and a vivaciousness that was painfully lacking in the old town. [Musa] had never told anyone, not even Uncle Mark, but Janet was the reason he was still in Crossroad (p.15).
In the portrayal of Janet, the text disrupts constricting masculinity to negate female passivity in order to reclaim female agency. Janet exhibits masculine capabilities in the way she mounts her bicycle. She stamps her feet in giving Broker a wide berth, only extending active sympathy at the appropriate time, this way foregrounding gender equality as a prerequisite in checking the spread of HIV. She is also resolute in her fight against other anachronisms like wife inheritance and traditional group circumcision that exacerbate the spread of AIDS.
Janet gets invaluable support in her noble crusade from Uncle Mark who helps her in her bid to stop Kata Kataa from inheriting his brother’s wife. Uncle Mark tells the congregation that had gathered to decide on Janet’s case over Kata Kataa’s wife inheritance:
Many of our customs and traditions are old…older than the hills, older than the ageless, black crow and even older than most of us. And, like most old things, they are weary and slow and not very useful in today’s world. Some of them are blunt and a rusty, awkward old tool that have outlived their usefulness…to inherit the wife of a brother who has died from the plague is not merely foolish; it is the height of madness itself. There, now I have told you (p.84-85)
This rare support from a man expected to be bogged by patriarchal thinking prevalent in Crossroad lends optimism to Janet’s fight. They both succeed in dissuading Kata Kataa from marrying Solomon’s wife, saving Julia from contracting the disease.
Bakari Ben Broker, the delinquent husband who abandons Janet for ten years and disappears with a local prostitute to Pwani, flirts with many women before returning home, dying of AIDS but determined to resurrect his dying community and earn their affection before his end. He supports Janet’s condom campaign by selling condoms arguing that people would attach value to it when bought than when it is given out for free. He also buys Janet a book that helped her in her AIDS campaign. The book contains pictures of AIDS patients and was more appealing than mere campaign by words. In fact it helped Kata Kataa accept to use condoms. He revives the petrol station in Crossroad despite his deteriorating health.
Before his death, Broker engages in community development, for instance, he offers to build a children’s home behind pastor Bat’s church and to repair the church’s leaking roof. He buys food for the beggar and gives him a new name, Meya. He helps Janet receive her European guests led by Don Donovan who came to assess the condom project. They brought with them testing equipment for testing HIV which helped people know their HIV/AIDS status. This gave people confidence. These benign acts testify to a character who has been transformed by illness and who transcends its limitation by stretching out to the communal and altruistic. More of this will be explored in the next chapter.
In his personal life, he readily accepts his status as HIV positive but does not worry about it; he laughs when he is in pain and has even bought a tomb stone and kept it in his car boot. It is a sign of stoicism and acceptance of his predicament that Broker can afford to be calm, humorous and futuristic even in his failing health as brought out in this descriptive excerpt.
…warding off the flies and the pain by dreaming up new projects for Crossroads, they surround him and order him to lie down and identify himself or be shot to death. Broker did not budge from his seat; he had long passed the stage where the threat of death could make him do anything, he watched them rave and rant and because he did not care whether they shot him dead or not, Broker found them comical in the extreme. When he was through laughing at them he invited them all to the Tea house and introduced them to Mzee Musa and his sweet potato mandazi…Shortly after the new mobile petrol station was commissioned, Bakari Ben Broker passed away peacefully in his sleep (p.419)
Even though his death is impending, Broker is not depicted as a passive victim of HIV/AIDS who is void of agency, on the contrary, he is portrayed as an active man who is determined to resurrect Crossroad, a man who is not defined by suffering but by renewed altruism, a transformation of character which wins him acceptance and appreciation from all Crossroadians. He has moved himself to seclusion and restful quiet and aridity of the Teahouse where he manages to forge an alternative family which affirms social meaning to him.
Frank Fundi was the brilliant village lad who abandons his plans for further studies after a presumed sero-positve diagnosis. Already a vet, the community had rallied around his father to raise money for him to study medicine abroad. He exhausts the village scholarship and returned home to their censure and certain death. Attracted to Janet, his boyhood crash, who apparently has better plans for him, Fundi becomes a reluctant recruit to her condom campaign. Later when Don Donovan team visited Crossroad, he was tested HIV negative and his hope of life was restored. Such plot development speaks to possibilities of false diagnosis common in AIDS testing, especially were testing gear is faulty and where unscrupulous medical personnel fail to exercise due diligence. It functions to disrupt the apocalyptic AIDS rhetoric in circulation in the society of the novel.
The writer also utilizes symbolism in his effort to subvert the doom generated by AIDS. For instance, Uncle Mark’s watch is a symbol of strength and durability:
…it was an old kienzel, heavy and solid with real chrome and real old leather and did not have a piece of plastic in it. He considered it a work of art, created like the men of old, to be tough and indestructible and resistant to adversity, a true symbol of strength and durability (p.16)
Similarly, the phone booth is described in formidable symbolism, one that transcends the disruption wrought by AIDS. Frank is able to observe that after the death of the post office, ‘only the phone booth remained, a weary sentinel keeping last vigil over the dead street’ (p.7).Other characters also typify this resilience and resistance to calamity. For instance, Musa remains in Crossroad to keep the Muslim fire burning after Maalim Juma left while the beggar too has never thought of leaving Crossroad, despite its many deaths.
The anti-apocalyptic temper in The Last Plague is a true manifestation of human vibrancy even when death is an accepted fact. In the novel, the writer seems to remain faithful to the adage; in every desert of calamity, there is an oasis of comfort. Before he takes his final blow, Broker ensures that hope is restored in Crossroad.
In Joseph Situma’s The Mysterious Killer, Cecilia Odo’s individuation begins when her escapades in Busaki as a commercial sex worker are jolted by the reality of her compromised immune system. She operates in a setting where superstitious knowledge constructs AIDS as witchcraft and her immediate reaction is to seek the intervention of a traditional apothecary. Her conceptualization of AIDS as witchcraft enables her to view her condition as curable, boosting her optimism for recuperation. This feeds to local AIDS discourses and beliefs that AIDS is witchcraft, an ascription of AIDS with supernatural causes which harmonizes with the denial of infection, or ‘the conviction that one’s affliction is anything but that particular dreaded disease’ ( Yankah 2004:185).
Her faith in the effectiveness of the curative herbs from the Wauzi traditional practitioner taps into the popular understandings and reaction to the pandemic as caused by a spell cast by the evil eye. This seems to be a psychological denial of effects of lethal sex which was a line of her duty as a substitution trumpet. This denial of what is most feared provides Cecilia with a psychological cushion the result of which is some degree of equanimity and her opportunity to journey through her soul in the face of a failing health. Her option for traditionalist intervention, refusing ‘ghettoization’ in a hospital ward can be read as a determination to live as a patient ‘in the world’ and not ‘in the ward’, and by extension therefore resists oppressive bio-politics. This process of subsuming AIDS with the supernatural serves to elicit public pity and sympathy and in effect shields the diseased from stigma and prejudice. These views are subsumed within uniquely Kenyan AIDSlore, where ‘the illness that accompanied AIDS were thought to be caused by a ‘microbe’ or by malevolent magic or both’, and the coterminous belief that ‘AIDS related illnesses could be treated by doctors or voodoo priests or herbalists or prayer or any combination of these (Farmer, &Kleinman, 1990:83).
Cecilia’s maturity and transformation in illness compels her to abandon her naivety and affectations. Sharply conscious of what her condition portends, she re-thinks Nuom’s persistent request for her hand in marriage and looks forward to securing a meaningful future in matrimony, which guarantees her the inner-connectedness essential for construction of meaning. This illness induced transformation boosts her spirit and subverts the doom scenario portended by the humiliating illness. This belated union affirms her continuity and connectedness, especially as it is hinted that she is expecting his child. The author is however ambivalent of the ethicality of this move by Cecilia because of the danger it poses to Nuom, who apparently gets infected and dies in the space of the novel. The ambivalence could be attributed to the absurdity of life in the era of AIDS where the literary writer contends with the glaring lack of a viable solution to the pandemic, only depicting diseased characters in desperate attempts to live more meaningfully in borrowed times.
It is noteworthy that from the outset Cecilia Odo is depicted as a stoic woman who endures pain and suffering with equanimity, she calmly takes whatever comes her way, a strength of spirit that she falls back to in order to affirm life in the face of death. This stoicism is seen in the way she tolerates Mama Baby, her roommate for ten years in the turbulent Busaki city, who appears too boisterous for Cecilia’s modesty, and who is totally blind to the immorality of their business as sex workers. Cecilia’s ethical stance even has she practices substitution prostitution redeems her character. Hers is a compelling character that shines in illness as it did in the moral dungeon that has become Busaki city, a hotbed of HIV infection. Cloud 9 in Busaki in fact reads like the liberal embodiment of urban culture which accentuates HIV infection levels, an epitome of meaninglessness and nihilism that engulfs the larger society of the novel. Revelers in the joint indulge in debauchery and immorality which is presented as a meaningless quest. Revelers are haunted by their excessive sexual past because in the AIDS era, there is no such thing as sex without angst anymore, the specter of death cannot be ignored even as people wallow in escapist debauchery. The text re-enacts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative as we see Cecilia hospitalized and witness her gradual emaciation and ultimately death from AIDS. Be this as it may, the novelist invests characters who assert a free will to act within the limitations engendered by their AIDS diagnosis, aware that their inner selves have been constructed by their own historicity.
The Mysterious Killer does not depict a solitary AIDS patient as she spirals down toward her death, surrounded by helpless doctors, a lover and a harrowing circle of friends. Instead it describes a richly textured web of interrelated relationships. Cecilia’s inner development is intertwined with her deteriorating condition when, pathetically emaciated within a year after she leaves the city and hoping against hope, she is emboldened by her altruism and is able to show affection to her niece Rachel. The writer offers her a transient moment in her process of dying, where, ameliorated by modern medicine, she tells her: ‘I feel much better now, I think I may completely recover, when that happens, I will make sure that I do for you something nice’ (p.144).This preoccupation with a future where illness is cured, and the fact that she can agonize over her safety in the hands of Yamo, even in her dying process, affirms life in the midst of death. We are confronted with Cecilia’s life rather than an abstract image of disease. Her identity is not reduced to that of a lonely sufferer; she is a loving wife, mother and aunt. She is refused from functioning merely as a plot device and as a mere source of spectacle, which is the writer’s way of reclaiming her agency and full human aspects of her character.
Yamo in The Mysterious Killer is portrayed as a larger than life man with money galore who engages in hedonistic pursuits to ease the agony of his diseased body. His debauchery and sexual escapades at Cloud Nine, the bonfire of vanities, has worn him high esteem among fellow revelers and sex workers, the beneficiaries of his big heart. He has thrown all caution to the wind and philanders with abandon, embracing an epicurean philosophy which celebrates pleasurable living even in the precarious times of AIDS, justifying that death is ultimately inevitable even outside the apocalypse portended by the AIDS pandemic. The epicurean reaction to his condition does not however guarantee him any meaning or fulfillment. On the contrary, it is an ephemeral and mechanistic sex exploit that leads to his void and half-dead existence. This epicurean construct however feeds to the popular discourses about AIDS where some indifferent HIV positives may opt for wanton spreading of the virus presumably in order not to die alone, rationalizing that they contracted the virus from someone to justify their callosity. He meets his comeuppance when Mama Baby poisons him to prevent his abandoned wife from inheriting his estate.
Yamo is redeemed by the brief moment of transformation where, confronted with death, he cherishes noble thoughts of a rapprochement with the wife long abandoned in the village, and the desire to ensure safe conveyance of his estate to her through his attorney. Though belated, this noble thought is a bid for continuity in quest for meaning that transcends the present existential challenge. He was initially easily drawn to the superficial and inadequate source of meaning by his initial failure to come to terms with the nihilism of his diseased status. Rather than deal with the frightening specter of nihilism and all its pain and uncertainty, Yamo tries to escape through hedonism and consumerism, only realizing through the baptism of illness that there is no escape from the possibility of nothingness, and that ‘a firm grasp of nihilism and all its implications is absolutely essential to the search for meaning (Camus, 1960: 41).
Yamo’s hedonistic way of denial of AIDS as a coping strategy is an anti-quest that is not endorsed by the writer as a worthwhile response to illness. Though to some extent the horror of the pandemic is forgotten when Yamo wallows in hedonism, this is only transient and it denies him a chance to embrace nobility, a chance to do more with his life. He only wakes up to this reality when his past and the present come together in his bodily condition.
Yamo’s worship of mammon and his destructiveness, exemplified by his consumerism and rapist tendencies (he attempted to rape Rachael) was a mode of ‘having’ which negate the more meaningful mode of ‘being’. Elaborating on the benefits of the care of the self, Foucault writes that:
…The risk of dominating others and exercising a tyrannical power over them arises precisely only when one has not taken care of the self and has become the slave of one’s desires. But if you take proper care of yourself, that is, if you know ontologically what you are, if you know what you are capable of , if you know what it means to you to be a citizen of a city…, if you know what things you should and should not fear, if you know what you can reasonably hope for and , on the other hand, what things should not matter to you, if you know, finally, that you should not be afraid of death- if you know all this, you cannot abuse your power over others ( Foucault, 1997:31).
In the text, it emerges that Fr Michael’s homilies and crusade against immorality in the fight against AIDS does not shield him from the disease. Though depicted as humane and dedicated to the eradication of immorality as a bulwark against the spread of AIDS, Fr Michel is, paradoxically, infected by the irresistible Kose, the attractive parishioner with whom he gets intimate in an evil and vindictive plan which is connived and executed through Yamo’s machinations.The juxtaposition of the altruistic and moral priest with the callous and amoral Yamo, and the victory of the heinous scheming of the latter serve to underscore the triumph of evil over good in the philistine society of the novel.
Confronting the reality of his terminal condition and the social opprobrium it attracts, Fr Michael seeks solution in a suicidal journey to avoid slow death and oppression by marginalizing discourses. In choosing this quick exit, he lends some majesty and sublimity to his demise and also resists the medical gaze and bio-political colonization of his diseased body. He was buried as a reverent priest at St. Mathew’s cemetery, his body saved from discrimination and stigmatization. Even his arch enemy Yamo, who had attended the funeral to confirm his demise, could not gossip about his body because it had not been condemned and ‘otherised’ by disease. Through his suicide, his body accrues a sense of nimbus, especially considering the fact that he was infected through Yamos’s machination.
This easy escape from stigmatization is also sought by Rachel who scrapes through a contrived accident in a bid to terminate her life following a presumed positive diagnosis. The novel however, resists the apocalyptic AIDS narrative when further testing reveal that Rachael was not infected with the virus and that the initial diagnosis was a false positive result. The happy reunion with her family, the possibility of her marriage with Edison, and the fact that her position at Wayn Company was still secure, affirms continuity from the limbo engendered by the unmaking of her world by a false diagnosis. It is an optimistic closure that subverts the cultural apocalyptic plotting of AIDS. Rachel makes exit from the novel healthy, intact and restored and it can be inferred that she will continue disseminating cautionary AIDS facts that will go a long way in eradicating AIDSphobia. HIV and the despondence it brings loom in the text, considering the web of infections in Yamo’s nexus, but the inevitable linear apocalyptic trajectory is subverted by a counter plotting that initiates a surprise ending of the novel.
In The House of Doom, AIDS illness is presented as a marginal category out of which individuals reconstruct their selfhood as they enact their illness. In his heterological thinking, de Certeau ‘recovers unexpected resonances of effectiveness in even the powerless’ and ‘urges us to look for capabilities on the margins where ordinarily ideology suggests we will find only dependency and subservience’ (Terdiman, 2001:416). On his part, Foucault proposes that ‘we escape as much as possible from the type of relationship that society proposes for us and try to create, in the empty space where we are, new relational possibilities’ (Foucault, 1997:160). Foucault perceives of the void such as that engendered by terminal illness as ‘a space at the threshold of constituent praxis’ (ibid) and insists that an experience is something that one comes out of transformed.
In The House of Doom, Mbela conjures epiphany from his illness experience as he endeavors to quest through chaos. He disrupts hegemony by boldly exposing hypocritical response to AIDS rife in the society. Not taking life for granted any more, he is out to live his day as if it were the last one in preparation for the inevitable. Before this day of his corporeal extinction, he seeks what will guarantee him continuity. He wants to love and to be loved, and Wambui’s appreciation of him makes his life worth living. Like Lavina and Giorgio’s relationship in The Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, Mbela and Wambui’s romantic rebirth is meant to affirm life and postpone doom and death. He invests in the fulfilling intimacy with Wambui, the only person who understands and empathizes with his predicament to transcend the apocalypse associated with his condition. As mentioned elsewhere, their bold public declaration of love and marriage plans infuse an anti-apocalyptic temper that privileges life where doom and death compete for supremacy. His enactment of illness after the narrow escape from contrived accident seem to tally with de Certeau’s idea of the ‘epistemological status of alterity’ (Terdiman, 2001) where meaning arises from the margin as the disadvantaged reconstruct their selfhood.
His illness experience leads to acute awareness of his impending destruction and its body’s decomposition and enables ‘his conversion to something else, a conversion that marks the shift from destination to constitution. In reconstituting himself, Mbela is inclined to more altruism and quests for continuity beyond his inevitable physical extinction by arranging to bequeath his books to a local secondary school , which can be read as an attempt to ‘create order out of the chaos and thereby render[his] life meaningful’(Becker,1998:4).
AIDS diagnosis can be read as an immersion into Joseph Campbell’s mythical innermost cave from where a hero comes back with an elixir in form of a treasure won on a quest, or a realization that a special world exists and can be survived, or sometimes ‘it is just coming home with a good story to tell’(Vogler, 2007:274). The diseased subject may not be entering the Campbellian labyrinths to combat mythical beasts but may enter his innermost cave by going into their own minds as they quest through the disruption wrought in their lives by HIV illness.
A key component for Mbela’s emotional survival in Mutahi’s The House of Doom is his use of wry wit and humour to deflect the threat of AIDS. Self-abasement through use of grotesquely humorous descriptions( such as when he looks at his emaciated body in the mirror), is one strategy he uses to humorously deflect the humiliation and apocalypse that AIDS signifies, jokes that halt the linear forward moving time towards the apocalypse. He refers to his AIDS in a casual tongue-in- chick manner, the use of black humour which mitigates his AIDS experience and makes it more bearable.
Frank (1995) conceives of suffering as pedagogy, as having something to teach others. He argues that this conceptualization of suffering gives agency to the ill and reclaims their voice. For Frank, pedagogy of suffering is an antidote to ‘administrative systems that cannot take suffering into account because they are abstracted from the needs of bodies’ (Frank, A, 1995:146). I read the representation of the chaotic body in The House of Doom in the light of this postulation and attempt to show the body’s ability to transcend its own chaos towards regeneration and grandeur.
Mbela stoically continues to stay in his chaotic body after he survived attempted suicide, emboldened by the warmth and the ministration of Wambui. This fellow feeling and companionship enables the diseased body to find its way out of the chaos, and when Dr. Nzomo provides the missing link in the genesis of his illness, Mbela is buoyed to calling a press conference where he intends to go public about his condition. In this bold step, Mbela is in essence asking the public to tolerate his diseased body and to entertain it as normality. This is important because AIDS is a reality that has to be accepted and lived with. Through his courage to bring to the open what is perceived scandalous, Mbela takes it upon himself to tell the truth about AIDS suffering that society attempts to suppress. All are reminded of the contingency and the vulnerability of their bodies since being in bodies implies vulnerability. This public appearance allowed the discriminating others to define themselves through his diseased body.
What is being urged here is a new ethic, a moral orientation that sees the sick as persons and not as cases, as ‘being in the world’ and not ‘being in the ward’, a view strengthened in the disclosure by Dr. Nzomo that Mbela might have contracted the AIDS virus through blood transfusion and not through his amorous behaviour as it is widely gossiped. In publicly displaying his AIDS body, Mbela meant to shock his detractors out of their pretence and help them move forward towards a paradigm shift in the way they respond to AIDS illness. This public enactment of illness is a bold gesture which defies AIDSphobia. Mbela historicizes and materializes his queer identity as an AIDS diseased subject by self consciously constructing it before society’s eyes, which resonates with the Foucauldian notion of returning the gaze. In the words of Jeremy Hawthorn, ‘returning the gaze of the oppressor can …be seen as a challenge to the oppression, a claim of equality’ (Hawthorn, 2006:514).To paraphrase Jeremy Hawthorn (2006), gazing at the AIDS diseased subject distances one from its menace, having them return their gaze to you makes a claim on you and reminds you of your corporeal vulnerability. Returning the gaze to those who snigger and stigmatize those afflicted with AIDS offers a disturbing challenge and establishes a symbolic claim for a shared community who feel delegitimized from society on account of their AIDS syndrome.
Mbela’s stoicism in going public about his condition and the vow to take responsibility even in the light of the evidence that his suffering might have been a result of negligence on the part of the hospital personnel give him a sense of mythic heroism and grandeur, he is a hero who has been initiated through agony. It is an attempt at ‘normification’ (Goffman, 1963:44), his effort as a stigmatized individual to present himself as a normal person without making a secret of his diseased corporeality, a kind of a self-defence against marginalization. This voluntary public disclosure gives him the necessary piquancy to negotiate his disruption and also places his experience into what Goffman calls ‘a moral career’, which is ‘typically described as the final, mature and well adjusted’(Goffman, 1963:124) and which is elaborated by Foucault who opines that the essential features of the practice of one’s ethics
include exercises in which the subject puts himself in a situation in which he can verify whether he can confront events and use the discourses with which he is armed. It is a situation of testing the preparation (Foucault, 1994:239).
so that the subject can behave as he must when an event presents itself. His bold gesture participates in resisting what Foucault, in another context; calls ‘anatomopolitics’ , the ability of medical discourse to manage and discipline individuals’ bodies by managing the impressions others have about him.
Thus in The House of Doom, illness emerges as journey and as a quest, so that Mbela’s reflexive journey with his illness affords him insight that he feels impelled to pass to others. He reclaims agency for the AIDS infected and is able to tell their story quite apart from the fashion rendered on his behalf by the impersonal medical experts. The text supports a postmodernist medical episteme that views suffering as ‘an intractable part of the human condition’ (Frank, 1995:146). The sustained effort by Mbela to resist being ghettoized in hospital AIDS ward is a further attack on modernist medical practice which lacks the orientation to the patient as person. He resists the ‘colonization of everyday, communal life- worlds of human bodies by administrative systems that are driven by demands for profits and vote’ (ibid).
For Ezra Maiyo in Miracle of Remera for instance, an HIV diagnosis prompts heightened interests in intellectual pursuits beyond LLB, the degree of his choice, as he tells Kefa, with a clairvoyance gained out of his liminality as a sero-poitive:
knowledge ought to be truly fluid… The compartments in which we put it are artificial. I mean if a doctor writes an engaging novel about human nature, should we look down on it because the author did not do literature at school? It is within this spirit that I am now getting interested in medical research’’ (p.187).
Armed with this new found conviction, Maiyo:
became a frequent visitor to the main library of Mengo University. He was interested in traditional medicine to the extent that he virtually spent free time buried in that section of the library. It was at the time at the peak of his new interest in herbal medicine that he was transformed into a goat in his third dream (p.182-3)
Maiyo seems to be ventriloquizing for the author in advocating for the ‘decompartmentalization’ of knowledge and putting a truce to the constructed antagonism between hard sciences and social sciences, urging a compromise and cooperation in all branches of knowledge, especially in the fight against AIDS. The series of dreams that he has in a short period following his sero-poitive diagnosis testify to his preoccupation with matters existential and it is notable that the optimistic dreams dovetail with the anti-apocalyptic structure of the novel. Meditating upon his dreams, ‘he eventually reached the conclusion that through the dreams, something inside his mind was passing a special message to him. He saw a direct relationship between the dreams and his life (p.189).
All social knowledge, de Certeau asserts, ‘is enabled from the margin and all understanding arises in difference, as a result of privileged comprehension that can arise in any situation of social inferiority, exclusion, or disadvantage’ (Terdiman, 2001:417). Seizing the advantage of the disadvantage to view life from the perspective of the victim of the virus, Maiyo arrives at the conviction that ‘each one of us humans has a sort of anti-viral device akin to the anti-virus devices in modern computers’ (p.188), a conviction that has a far reaching impact in the way he successfully manages his AIDS condition through experimenting with curative herbs and miraculously curing himself of the virus. The novel closes with an anti-apocalyptic, optimistic note with Maiyo confirmed cured of the virus by Dr. Nimrod and with a breakthrough to AIDS cure in the offing. Like the Campbellian hero, Maiyo goes home with good news that he is HIV negative.
In The Miracle of Remera, Maiyo mediates his existential disruption of AIDS by intellectualizing AIDS. Rather than brood in sadness he turns his experience into an academic research which leads to an experimentation with ikinzuri, a curative herb which boosts his immunity and decimates the virus in his body. Realizing that a man makes a journey of his own devising, Maiyo elevates the philosophy of mind over matter; which the text endorses as a meaningful existential quest. Through intellectualizing AIDS, Maiyo seeks productive self-knowledge rather than obsession with oneself (Mwangi, 2009).
Necessity impels Maiyo to discover the curative potentiality of traditional herbs; wisdom bequeathed him by his grandfather. He gets obsessed with herbal treatment of his condition to the extent that it becomes his research passion, despite the fact that he is a law student and not a medical student. He seizes the advantage of the disadvantage occasioned by HIV illness to channel his intellect to finding a cure for his condition instead of allowing himself to be consumed by despondence, an insight, which according to Michel de Certeau, occurs in marginality. de Certeau asserts that:
meaning is the consequence of a limit and an effect of margins. The boarder we materialize such meaning is what makes meaning possible. We perceive and conceive and construct and learn on this frontier. The margin or frontier is where something is divided from something else. That something can be anything, but the margin makes it what it is (as read in Terdiman, R, 2001:399).
It is significant that it is this intellectualization of illness that initiates the counter-plot and the surprise closure of the novel and leads to a discovery of the ‘miracle of Remera’ of the novel’s title. In his intellectual response to illness, Maiyo does not deny his condition but meets it head on, accepts it and seeks to use it. He separates his diseased corporeality from the metaphysical, a strategy that enables him to diffuse stigma and to seek herbal medication, itself a stoic philosophy that empowers him to resist the social construction of AIDS which embeds the illness in stigma.
As mentioned elsewhere in this work, through this depiction of Maiyo’s stoic and intellectual response to his condition which miraculously cures him of the virus, the writer not only renders an alternative way of representing AIDS but also urges the universities to embark on research and use scientific knowledge to combat AIDS and AIDS stigma.
The writer uses Maiyo to critique the compartmentalization of knowledge typical of Western metaphysics which hitherto has not yielded any cure of AIDS. Imbuga deconstructs the Orientalist view that privileges Western medicine over indigenous approaches, a scenario decried by Felistus Kinyanjui who laments that:
Traditional healers will naturally not seek out a plant, prepare it and imbibe or otherwise employ it to lessen pain or cure ills unless it produces some physiological effect. If a plant has any physiological or psychic effect, it must have at least one bioactive chemical constituent, but their knowledge is looked down upon by biomedical doctors who solely use western epistemology and its lens as the only recognized and therefore ‘legitimate’ or ‘authentic’ way of healing and treatment (cited in Chepkwony & Mabururu, 2009:104).
This oppressive medical ideology is akin to Foucault’s postulation of discourses and knowledge as technologies of power. This critique of Western medicine as an oppressing discourse is supported in the novel by Dr Nimrod who cautions that:
We may have stumbled onto something big, very big indeed. This could be the beginning of a breakthrough. We will need to work together, but we will have to keep it secret. You know how the world reacts when it comes to medical research. The intrigues of global medical politics demand that we keep this as a top secret (p. 215).
This is not merely hypothetical; Imbuga could be reacting to the breakthroughs in the search for AIDS cure pioneered by the Kenyan medic, Prof Arthur Obel and others that came a cropper as result of related intrigues. Imbuga artistically lashes at the ‘monstrous iniquity of the pharmaceutical corporate patent and pricing regime and the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement that aimed to enforce stringent laws regarding intellectual property(Barnett & Whiteside, 2002:339), which is racist in application.
The possibility advanced in the discourse in Miracle of Remera that Africa can trail-blaze the invention of the much desired AIDS cure subverts and disrupts the existing hierarchies and power relations between the Occident and the Orient by validating multiple local knowledges and practices, for this is the continent that the West has perpetually constructed as incapable of any invention, least of all a cure for AIDS. The writer is in essence calling for a more concerted effort by all regardless of geopolitical location and skin pigmentation in the fight against the ‘Third World War’ which threatens to wipe all humankind.
The devastation to be wrought on the Remerans by this virus is best captured in the fantastic images of afflicted goats which are dying helplessly and which instinctively discover a curative shrub. The use of the fantastic and magical realism where Maiyo transforms to a goat becomes a basis for putting a case for indigenous herbal treatment of AIDS as a viable alternative to Western medicine. This is so because it is through this dream that he recalls his grandfather using ikinzuri to treat his sick goat.
Maiyo has entitled his notebook Irony of Ironies to capture the irony that he, Maiyo, the sworn champion of the war against AIDS and one time winner on AIDS Awareness Day, is now going to die of the disease. For him it is as if the business of living is itself an irony of ironies, a stoic view which introduces a nihilistic philosophy into the text. This fatalistic and nihilistic streak is disrupted by the optimistic note that closes the novel where Maiyo’s pain and suffering is ended after several AIDS tests give him a clean bill of health.
Saved from suicide by the swift intervention by Giorgio Santini, Lavina in the Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold is able to journey through her soul amid the reality of her condition. Through the encouragement of Giorgio, she realizes the defeatism of suicide as a panacea to her current indignity and embarks on her quest for the worth of life in the glaring end of it. She seeks meaning of life in adversity to get her out of the quagmire of existential ennui which is exacerbated by her feeling of worthlessness and hopelessness. She is forced to wear a social mask, to create another self around herself in order to hide her inner pain and suffering and also to fortify herself against verbal attacks and innuendos from the likes of Kamundes who personify the general tendency in the society to inculpate those with HIV disease by constructing AIDS as a moral metaphor. She realized that these kill joys had to be avoided if she had to succeed in a will to meaning. She has learnt the hard way that self-pity destroys and sympathy enervates, she sets out to resist both, preferring the rewarding company of the Munges, her significant others whose accommodation of her deepen her understanding of life’s purpose. She is able to mitigate her sense of loss and transcend her debilitating reality by confiding in them. This choice of existential pathway enables her to avoid isolation and alienation.
The Munges play an important role in Lavina’s existential well being for they are the ones who match-make her with Giorgio, the Italian tycoon also engaged in search for meaning of life out of the void and emptiness of affluence and materialism. Lavina and Giorgio both aspire for quality and meaningful living as opposed to superficiality. The writer describes the intensity of their relationship as if they were fated for each other and their lives became complete by meeting, insisting that without each other, their lives would have been less meaningful. The writer utilizes the romance genre to redefine the diseased body, portraying it as flawless and capable of love, thus dismantling its conventional construction as repulsive and condemned. Though they have different motivations in their quest for meaning, their love testifies to loving through the minefield of AIDS and it is significant that it blossoms in the space of the novel, culminating in a colourful wedding. Despite the fact of HIV/AIDS, the novel presents a picture of a secure and happy couple, a couple with money galore to buy all they could possibly need, including the expensive but much needed anti-retroviral therapy. Their state-of-the art wedding, with Lavina finally in safe hands, is a triumph over stigma and discrimination of those diagnosed with AIDS, a celebration of life and love in the era of AIDS. In the novel, Lavina is not entirely defined by suffering, she circumvents her initial alienation to integrate herself in her unfortunate surroundings, she enjoys the social attachment to Giorgio and the Munges, the alternative family she has forged, and also pursues sculpturing as a creative activity.
Giorgio’s reification of Lavina dispels pernicious AIDS stigma and the conflation of HIV disease with immorality and death, emphasizing that AIDS wasn’t drawn to obsessive sex or meaningless sex. The novel reinforces the understanding that sex itself, pure and simple, was the medium, and the world was ravenous for it …, gay men are not sick because of sex, they are sick because of the virus. Sex is not the cause of disease, and sex is still possible, even when one has it (Murphy, 1993).
The blossoming romantic rebirth between the two eclipses AIDS and its consequent disruption of life, with the affluent Giorgio committing to channel his wherewithal towards Lavina’s medication. Giorgio is successful in protecting Lavina from the insensitive people in the society such as Tony Kamunde and steers her into productive treatment. His determination to take a bullet to save her life in the botched bank heist is compatible with De Rougemont’s assertion that ‘ the lover can reach self-awareness only by risking his life and being on the verge of death’(De Rougemont,1956:50-51) and that ‘romance heroes seek a death passion that will act as a goad to sensuality’(cited in Eisner, 1997:216).
Risking death for her sake lifts their love into a new heightened state of passion, itself an alternative way of representing AIDS. The tone of the novel changes to one tinged with hope, Lavina has found a lover who cares for her and she gets the child she had given up on after her infection, a gesture that communicates hope against the angst that characterize sex in the times of AIDS. The novel has Lavina and Giorgio celebrate their marriage and their sexuality, despite the reality of AIDS.
Tested through this minefield, the two feel like brand new snakes that have emerged from the slough, they have passed through the furnace of loving though the precarious times of AIDS to become the pure gold alluded to by the title of the novel. Their success story and ‘condomization’ of sex, emanating from self discipline, love and mutual understanding between the two is a statement of the triumph of love over its negation by AIDS. The successful herbal ministration that reduces Lavina’s viral load, finally reversing the apocalyptic trajectory of AIDS, allows love, not AIDS related death, to have the last chance. This is not merely hypothetical, for Zidodu Vine Therapy (AZT) has been proved to prevent HIV infection in babies born to HIV positive women.
The novel’s title derives from Proverbs, Chapter 17, verse 3: ‘the crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart’. This testifies of a soul tested by the reality of illness but which eschews the easier but vegetating path of hedonism to embrace one that enlarges life and guarantees existential worth as a strategy to transcend the limitations of diseased corporeality. This existential path in questing for meaning is endorsed by the author against Rawal’s licentiousness. Like Biblical characters Modeccai and Daniel who endured insurmountable feats, she summons strength of spirit to circumvent the challenges imposed by her clinical syndrome. While she invokes Biblical insights to embolden the soul against adversity, her physical strength is buttressed by proper diet and avoidance of stress. This, and the formidable camaraderie offered by the Munges, strengthens her will to seek meaning out of the meaninglessness thrust on her life by her HIV positive condition. She also transcends her unfortunate situation by preoccupying herself with carving and sculpting not purely for pecuniary gains but as a search for the elusive meaning of life.
Her sense of the artistic and creative enables her to appreciate the idyllic setting of the beaches, which mitigates the apocalyptic temper summoned by these sad reminisces. These include a tranquil atmosphere, flight, and her memories of her home back in Kericho and an imaginary, idyllic past of her grandmother.
The writer does not however, downplay the enormity of HIV disease and the disruption its mere diagnosis causes to the life of the individual, she intertwines optimism with melancholy by depicting Lavina rapt in apocalyptic meditations, identifying with literary characters like Sohie Mol in Arundati Roy’s The God of the Small Things, lying on the byre at the funeral. She lapses into nefarious mood swings and nightmarish dreams of funerals, but still in such melancholy, all hope is not lost. She is able to envisage Giorgio writing an epitaph extolling her good fight with AIDS. The overarching tendency of the text however, is to affirm meaning amid the existential impediments of illness. In Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, AIDS has been reinvented and the tragic inevitability of AIDS deaths has been replaced by the prospect of living positively with HIV.
The AIDS narrative in The Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold is not driven by the experiences of those who are defeated by the disease but by those who defiantly make a life for themselves in spite of it. In the portrayal of Giorgio and Lavina, the novel does not merely allude to the love among people living with HIV disease but graphically depicts sex as what that love entails. Lavina falls in love and rediscovers her sexuality. In its eschewal of spectacular images of abject people living with AIDS, the novel is unique in the celebration and representation of the sexuality of people living with HIV/AIDS, depicting how the HIV diseased can live a productive life with AIDS.
These Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels seem to exhibit a narrative ambiguity in their dichotomous presentation of HIV/AIDS as manageable, chronic illness, on the one hand, and as an apocalypse, a deadly calamity on the other. Diseased subjects are seen to adjust themselves to the difficulties they face in their disrupted lives motivated by the necessity to resist the perception of their condition as a death sentence. Though most of the novels focus on characters who have become increasingly isolated in their condition, they also describe the lives of these characters as they actively interface with the larger communities in which they exist. In the next chapter, I look at the transformed selves that emerge out of the liminal spaces negotiated by the diseased subjects in the fiction under study.
Victor Turner’s work on liminality draws from Van-Gennep’s triadic model of the Rite of Passage which he elaborates to include other cultural phenomena. Gennep described the process of shifting from the social status to another in three stages namely: disengagement; in which the individual is symbolically removed from society and his own identity, the liminal stage; in which the individual is secluded from society and is under constant supervision, and the reunion or post-liminal stage in which the individual is reintegrated into society with his new status.
Turner took interest in Gennep’s notion of liminality which he expanded and applied to social structure and time as ‘an intermediate state of being ‘in between’ in which individuals are stripped of their usual identity and their constituting social differences while being on the verge of personal or social transformation.
The social and cultural theory of anthropologist Victor Turner focused on the interstices which ‘provide homes for anti-structural visions, thoughts and ultimately behaviors’ (Turner, 1974:293). His perspective is that these interstices are necessary sources of resolution, meta-explorations beyond, beneath and between the fixed, the finished and the predictable pregnant margins, the cracks of society, necessary thresholds of dissolution and indeterminacy through which socio-cultural order is said to be (re)constituted. Turner’s project is founded upon a sense that society is in composition, open-ended, forever becoming and that it’s (re)production is dependent upon the periodic appearance, in the history of societies and in the lives of individuals, of organized moments of categorical disarray and intense reflective potential. His project is most powerfully articulated as liminality, the zone of experience, the realm of pure possibility where the familiar may be stripped of its certitude and conventions are transcended. These are occasions where people, often strangers to each other, may achieve an ineffable affinity, where sacred truths are imparted and /or social alternatives explored. These concepts consolidate liminality in social and cultural theory where liminality is, according to Turner, ‘a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process’ (Turner, 1996:42).
In his study of the representation of illness in Jane Austen’s canon, Gorman (1993) notes that Jane Austen presents physical illness with awareness that though infirmity is arbitrary and comes to all, there are lessons to be learnt from illness experience. For her, illness in Jane Austen’s novels is used as a mechanism for the transformation of characters where diseases symbolize cleansing fires and physical weakness or where suffering metamorphoses into moral strength, survival and harmony of the characters. Her reading of Austen canon emphasizes the value of suffering in transforming people into more benevolent creatures, that people’s hearts are open when they overcome pain and that recuperation enables people to empathize with fellow sufferers.
Though acknowledging that illness is not necessary for regeneration, I argue in this chapter that in spite of it, characters experience inner development. In real life, however, there is neither moral reason for illness nor a definable pattern of its occurrence, but in literary representation, the literary artist may draft a universe where illness does not signify meaninglessness but demonstrates clairvoyant consciousness of the diseased towards a more enlarged meaning of life. In this regard, Gorman notes that in Austen’s canon, illness does not occur randomly but is skillfully employed to organize plot, enhance themes and further the exploration of characters. She points out Austen’s essential humanity as it is embodied in her juvenile and mature novels. She identifies with her insightful observation later in her life that though the body is frail and ‘illness cannot be completely avoided…, it can be dealt with and endured with dignity’ (Gorman, 1993:124).
This ontological function of illness is further seized by Frankenberg (1990) who discusses the implication of AIDS to the literature of disease and the body. He picks up earlier debates about the usefulness, if any, of inscribing the concomitants of ill health in literary art. His starting point is Jeffrey Meyers’ Disease and the Novel in which he makes his case about textualizing disease. He argues against Viginia Woolf and the German Romanticists that:
Disease in an individual is too arbitrary to make a worthwhile subject of literature. It is natural and uninteresting, like the wind, it bloweth where it listeth; only personal development and change in spirit is interesting. If King Lear had Alzheimers’s Disease or Othello and Julius Ceaser epilepsy, that was arbitrary; our interest lies in their reactions and interactions with others (cited in Frankensberg, 1990:353).
On his part, Camus was of the conviction that illness and other debilities are not permanent impediments to the search for meaning, but can become sources of meaning for both the victims as well as their loved ones.
I proceed from the premises that the literary texts under study represent AIDS as a humility creator and as an Accelerated Inner Development Syndrome’ that transforms the individual towards greater spirituality as the diseased subjects confront its enormity and struggle not to reject themselves but to find meaning in its meaninglessness. The meaning of life after the unmaking of the individual’s life by AIDS is also broached by Henking et al (1992) who see the possibility of an ecclesiology for Gay people under the threat of AIDS. Henking contends that ‘people with AIDS and those around them negotiate their entry into the world of AIDS with particular attention to religion’, asserting that AIDS-related memoirs represent ‘ the complex interweaving of loss with the construction of meanings and subjectivities’ (Michael, et al,1992:4).
AIDS related memoirs are seen as a fostering of a legacy and as ‘a religio-spirtual quest, an exercise in survival and in the struggle for meaning.’ (Michael, et al, 1992:5).This quest also expands and redefines conventional religion to encompass spirituality in its broader sense of immanence and transcendence, an individualized search for wholeness and meaning, a spiritual dimension which privileges connectedness with the cosmos and an experience of being part of the whole.
Lansing (2003) advances the Foucauldian view, arising from Foucault’s ideas about the need for critique, that:
in terms of smallness in the universe and the limits of mortality, the often obscured reality remains that every human on this earth is equal. We will all die eventually, as will our Earth, and no individual is exempt from it. Recognizing this limitation and questioning one’s socially-formed limitations are the first steps (Lansing, 2003:376),
towards constructing ‘a personal philosophy of morals and values’ (ibid) within liminal spaces created by illness and which can be relied upon in the individual’s quest for existential meaning.
Frank (2002) opines that ‘critical illness offers the experience of being taken to the threshold of life, from which you can see where your life could end’( Frank, 2002:1), illness offers a vantage point from where one is forced and allowed to think in new ways about the value of one’s life. AIDS diseased characters in life and in the novels under study live on the threshold or ‘be-twixt and between’ life and death, given the terminality of HIV disease. They undergo epiphanies and turning points where their awareness of their mortality is intensified as their diseased bodies apprehend death. The diseased subjects in these novels are depicted as experiencing the crisis of their impending death, an awareness of mortality which is isolating and alienating. As a point of crisis at which their lives have undergone a wrenching, liminality is the tension that drives the plots in these novels and motivates the characters’ transformation and insightful understanding of life, an understanding that helps the diseased subjects to reorient themselves so as to transcend or suspend their liminality.
Liminality ‘encompasses chaos, despair, disorder and insecurity’ (Turner, 1986:46). It is ‘the scene of disease, despair, death, suicide…it may be anomie, alienation, angst…’(ibid). These various faces of liminality are portrayed in the novels studied here. In Confessions of an AIDS Victim, Catherine is assailed by the adhesiveness of AIDS label and experiences alienation. She sees herself as ‘a sort of two-headed human being unfit to live with the rest of humanity’ (p.3). As Kruger writes of her, ‘she is, and at the same time, she is not, a nameless HIV-victim living on the margins of society” (Kruger, 2004:112). Kruger points out Catherine’s ambivalence in liminality where she is portrayed as ‘giving in to AIDS and claiming a responsibility in the struggle for social acceptance and change’ (ibid). There is tension between her acute alienation and the novel’s privileging of her ostracized body as epistemological, recognizing the experiential authority of her diseased self. As she reminisces over her past tribulations and present predicaments, she critiques and challenges society’s attitude to HIV illness and claims that her confession will initiate such change of attitude. This way, as Kruger observes ‘a moment of catharsis extends through Catherine’s narrative to society per se’, (ibid). She writes:
Mine is not a selfish lament for or cry for my shortened life and obliterated future. It is a cry for the masses who fall victim yearly; and a cry to those among us who stick to high risk behavior. It is like a cry of a nation which has been defeated at war (p.4)
Her experiential authority as a liminal individual leads to a better understanding of the cultural meanings of AIDS and allows her to see them as ‘culturally and historically malleable rather than as rooted in and fixated by biology’( Murphy et al.1988:241-242). She tells Marylin, after meditations in liminality:
I write so that from my experience, you - and hopefully through you many others - may benefit and learn to avoid the mistakes I have made. And the first lesson is that AIDS is a reality, a terrible disease whose wages are death (ibid).
In Confessions of an AIDS Victim, AIDS illness has transformed Catherine’s understanding of herself and her selfhood; it has altered her relationship with her body and her feeling of location in the human society.
This awareness of one’s interior demesne, the fear and horror that springs from the increased awareness of mortality dominates the thoughts and action of Broker in The Last Plague. His emaciated body is a constant reminder of his propinquity to death, which he awaits with equanimity, he has the audacity to visit Jemima’s compound where, as if to acquaint himself with his impending death, he paces up and down the graves of those who have lost their lives to the pandemic. As mentioned elsewhere in this work, Broker resorts to humour to deflect his sense of loss and the fear of his fast approaching demise. Like Catherine in Confessions of an AIDS Victim, he assumes a status of grandeur because of his preoccupation with the sublime in a quest for meaning in illness. He acquires a profound and insightful understanding of life, conceived in liminality, appropriating de Certeau’s notion of the epistemological advantage of alterity.
Living in liminality, Mbela in The House of Doom is cloistered in his house at Mbembe, secluded from the rest of society. He undergoes an acute liminality where he is alienated from his thoughts, actions and feelings, or to borrow Foucault’s words, he is divided from himself and from others. This liminality forces him into a suicidal attempt, which is paradoxically a bid at a final incorporation through dissolution. His liminal experience induces in him a renewed introspective capacity and marks a turning point in his AIDS experience, where, propped and prompted by Wambui, he circumvents self-destructive nihilism and embarks on a quest for meaning in illness. Mbela has the serenity to accept the inevitability of death, and he has the courage to avoid becoming attached to HIV disease and instead uses it to encounter himself and others.
Maiyo in Miracle of Remera demonstrates the same stoic attitude towards critical illness when his life is pitted against death after his AIDS diagnosis. He draws on his intellectual resources as a university student and is able to transform himself from an AIDS victim to AIDS patient. Rather than wallowing in denial, he decides to live his illness actively, to confront it using any resource at his disposal. The end result is that he gains self-knowledge that cushions him from existential ennui engendered by AIDS. Though his experimentation with herbal concoctions almost leads to tragedy, his boldness in confronting the certainty of mortality is an account of heroism in illness. He recognizes that his diseased body had become a site of narrative teleology that needed a retelling, and he sets out to ‘renarrativize’ it in the stoic way in which he reenacts his illness. He ‘wants less to recover what he has been than to discover what else he might be’ (Frank, W, and 2002:2). He lives his illness actively by talking about it to his girlfriend, Daisy, and to his parents.
Yamo in The Mysterious Killer is depicted as being humanized by his prolonged liminality. The deterioration of his diseased body sets him on the path to renewal, illness offers him a vantage point from which to re-examine his life, his introspective capacity whetted by his acute liminality. The novel also portrays Fr. Michael living at the threshold, his life threatened and disrupted by AIDS. He opts to commit suicide to end his prolonged liminality and hopes that in his dissolution, he would regain incorporation.
Living with AIDS catapults Lavina in Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold into profound understanding of life denied her father and the sniggering Kamundes in the society. Illness has become for her ‘an odyssey to unfamiliar emotional and social terrains filled with passion, pain, and renewed purpose’ (Frank, 2002:5). Her body has known death through its diseased condition and through her suicide attempts and it provides different mirrors of self to her, for as Frank points out, ‘once the body has known death, it never lives the same again’ (Frank, W, 2002:16) and so does the self living in it. She mourns what she can no longer be, but does not let grief obscure her sense of what she can become despite her clinical condition. Rather than spend her life cursing her fate, she takes the advantage of the disadvantage of illness to count her possibilities. In Giorgio, she finds someone who could help her work out her reorientation after a protracted period of AIDS agony. Virtually all the diseased characters in these novels are depicted as transcending the immanence of nothingness and the certainty of mortality imposed on their lives by AIDS through altruistic acts and meaningful relationships.
Arthur Kleinman and Eric Cassel offer a broad definition of suffering, with Cassel asserting that ‘suffering involves whole persons and requires a rejection of the historical dualism of mind and body’ (as read in Frank, 1995:169). He adds that suffering occurs when a state of severe distress threatens a person’s intactness, ‘when an impending destruction of the person is perceived’ and ‘continues until the threat of disintegration has passed or until the integrity of the person can be restored in some other manner’ (Frank, A 1995:169-170). He conceives of the person as the whole of mind and body and posits that suffering can occur in relation to any aspect of the person. In collapsing the dichotomy between the body and the mind, Cassel is at one with Kleinman who sees the suffering subject as a body-self and adds that suffering ‘is the result of a process of resistance… to the lived flow of experience’ (ibid). For Kleinman, to suffer, a person must not only perceive a threat but must resist it through self- stories that redirect the lived experience towards a remaking of the body-self.
Kleinman diverges slightly from Cassel in postulating suffering not merely as personal but as ‘both an existential universal of human condition and a form of practical and, therefore, novel experience that undergoes great cultural elaboration in distinctive local worlds’(ibid).These models lead to two perspectives of suffering; the chaos narrative with its inclination to the threat of disintegration, and the quest narrative that seeks a new integration of the body-self from the ashes of the old intactness that must be stripped away. They both view the road through tribulations as a journey to self discovery and self-definition, a perspective I find useful in interrogating the heart-opening and regenerative potentials of HIV dis/ease in the selected fiction.
In Confessions of an AIDS Victim, the autobiographical structure enabled by the epistolary form of the text becomes for Catherine a way of retelling her self-story and redirecting her experience towards self-integration and redefinition. Mention has already been made of the cathartic function of the epistolary form which cushions her from degeneration to craving for meaning in the meaninglessness of HIV infection. She is able to regain agency and resist her interpellation as an AIDS victim by creating and telling her own story instead of having others tell it for her, hence resisting her sick-role in favour of a restitutive one. Significantly, she finds meaningful purpose in her self-declared project to unravel the mystery of her infection, and her hope that the contents of her letter be divulged as a deterrent to others. Her will to meaning prevails over her distressful condition as she reaches out to the noble and the altruistic. It is in this altruistic frame of mind that she writes to Brian, requesting him to test for the virus just in case she had infected him, a literary statement on the necessity of disclosure and testing as a strategy for prevention and coping, which, the text implies, would be possible if the illness were reconstructed to emancipate it from stigmatizing hegemonic discourses.
Broker in Mwangi’s The Last Plague represents a stoic diseased subject who resists despair and is out to embrace his borrowed time with altruism. Suffering has induced in him a complete metamorphosis of his character. His material wealth acquired in dubious ways and through stifling superciliousness can now be utilized to feed the burning desires of his soul. He has become magnanimous and is able to show kindred humanity to the beggar by giving him money and extends other humane gestures like buying him tea. Small gestures like asking Musa of the Teahouse to keep change, elevating the beggar’s status by allocating him sitting space, together with addressing him as ‘Mayor’, are benign acts that emanate from the need to redefine life and imbue it with meaning, to right earlier wrongs and save his soul. He has been deeply immersed in the present by his clinical condition to recognize the wisdom in the Foucauldian theories of the care of the self which postulate that:
the problem for the subject or the individual soul is to turn its gaze upon itself, to recognize itself in what it is and, recognizing itself in what it is, to recall the truths that issue from it and that it has been able to contemplate. (Foucault, 1997:29).
In tending to the altruistic, Broker is seeking ‘self-discovery as a means of obtaining salvation in the next life’; a focus on the afterlife and an existential pathway that Foucault believes has ‘drastic effect on how the individual relates to the self and society’ (Batters, 2003:8). This illness induced altruism arises out of the realization that he is living on borrowed time. He extends the same altruism to Head Faru by paying off his debts and asking him to keep change and also to the Pastor by contributing towards the repair of the surging roof of his church. He pays off Faru’s debt presumably because he does not wish to die indebted, but also because these acts, however trivial, enlarge his meaning of life and give him fulfillment; it is a more rewarding way of living his borrowed time.
His philanthropy is hyperbolically depicted to underscore the obsession with matters of the soul as he tries to reframe his suffering: ‘The rest of the time was spent surveying Crossroad, assessing old buildings and making plans for their restoration. He had enough plans for a whole lifetime of rebuilding’ (p.204). We get the picture of a man who wants to lighten the burden of his diseased corporeality through acts of altruism whenever an opportunity lends itself, an existential pathway he embraces in his quest for meaning of life with AIDS, one which also demurs to the doom in his disrupted life and that of Crossroad in general. Similarly, he uses his remaining life to help in selling condoms to stem the spread of AIDS in Croasroad, and makes an impressive performance when visitors from South South tour Croasroad.
Broker has undergone the experience described by Grof,
in which individuals feel that their‘consciousness has expanded beyond the usual ego boundaries and has transcended the limitations of time and space, and criticizes forms of therapy that are characterized ‘by rigorous isolation of the problem from its broader interpersonal, social and cosmic context’ (Grof,1985:153)
That Broker has undergone transformation is also attested to by his decision to throw his weight behind Janet’s condom venture despite their estranged relationship. He does this out of the realization that a communal problem needs concerted effort, an image of a man who has shed his individualism and can think and act in the interest of the entire society, itself a remarkable regeneration that becomes clear when contrasted with his initial indifference to human suffering.
On the same vein, the contrast between his heroic past of debauchery as a total man and his diminished present of physical debility speak of a man who has shed his recalcitrant masculinity as a stereotypical paterfamilias and is out to search for more meaningful relationship with himself and with his society. It can be argued that he is paradoxically richer in spirit than before because he embraces altruism to redefine a life shattered by illness. He is presented as man with money galore, enough money to buy a fleet of cars but one who resists affluence as ephemeral to embrace the more immanent altruism as a way of questing for meaning of life with AIDS. Broker is thinking of his life without him when he toys with the idea of founding an orphanage to cater to the many children orphaned by AIDS, a paradoxical altruism akin to that of the sea pirate Mil Ali Bay who used to give out his loot as alms to the poor.
Broker seems to have realized that ‘the only hope for a person living with AIDS is to live life in the present’,(Garmire,1996:3),which means making peace with one’s past and recognizing one’s future as limited but not dead. He realizes that it is only in living in the present that one can find love and appreciation, which he feels is the only reason to keep confronting AIDS and to continue living. He has thus redefined his disrupted life and enlarged his concept of a whole life and is cognizant of the insight that ‘---all that will matter in the end of your life is how much you’ve loved and how much you’ve given back’ (ibid). It is in this same quest for meaning that Broker proposes that he and Frank put up a condom shop and he proposes that the proceeds from the condom shop goes to the orphanage, he already has thought of the name of the orphanage he wants to construct in Crossroads: ‘Janet Broker Home for Orphans and old Folk’, a charitable venture that will outlive and survive him after he takes the final blow. He feels he has changed a great deal for the better and that he can spare a time in his moments in limbo to savour the fame that will emanate from these ventures shows a man who has transformed from his materialist past to spirituality to secure honour for himself even in ill health and inevitable demise.He finds these spiritual gestures soul nourishing, they make his life worth living even in times of uncertainty.
The magnitude of his altruism marvels others in Crossroad, the cynical Uncle Mark for instance sees futility of it all and is certain that Broker will not be thanked for it, but Broker thinks otherwise and he tells Janet: ‘I’ve never felt better in my life, nobody would ever say, he- Bakari Ben Broker, had not lived a life. And if he could do it all over again, he would do it in exactly the same way’ (p.271), a clear indication that his philanthropy is deliberate and calculated to sooth his tormented soul. These acts of altruism pass Broker as a person who has done ‘extensive work by the self on the self required ‘for the practice of freedom to take shape in an ethos that is good, beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable and exemplary’(Foucault, 1997:29, cited in Batters, 2011:5). Broker’s illness epiphany has illuminated his ‘path of spiritual development understood by Assagioli as ‘a long and arduous adventure, a journey through strange lands, full of wonders, but also beset with difficulties and dangers (Assagioli, 1991:116).
In staging his heart-openness, the text seems to hold that though Broker’s corporeality is enervated by illness and his whole identity interpolated into stigmatizing discourse, his inner self remains redeeming and is a beacon of hope in the face of all this adversity.
Illness has deepened Broker’s understanding of the purpose of a human being’s life on earth, he has a philosophical understanding of the Biblical rhetoric of ‘seeing the light’ which has been born out of his suffering as an AIDS patient, so much so that he refuses to be consoled by tired litanies about Christian salvation. His baptism through disease has transformed him into an agnostic who finds humanism a more practical faith than institutionalized religion, the latter which has been criticized for discriminating the diseased instead of offering them love and refuge. Just as he resisted the baptismal name ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ suggested by Pastor, Broker is steadfast in resisting any ‘otherizing’ interpellation and wants to be his own man as he confronts his diseased corporeality.
His regeneration has so endeared him to all Crossroadians that his brief disappearance to the neighbouring Makutano is missed by all, and as if in response to the premonition of his impending demise, he resurfaces in Crossroad with gifts for all; to wit: toys and clothes for his children, a dress for grandmother and an expensive Parker pen for Big youth, Uncle Mark, a droughts boar, Musa, colour magazines, presents for Janet, perfume and a text on AIDS and horrifying colour picture and a tombstone for himself.
Broker clings to his new found humanism as he prepares for his end and wins the admiration of all, so that when he departs, he is missed by all that his life had touched, including the beggar who, despite his non-compos mentis status, mourns his death. This is a testimony to Broker’s richness of spirit. His enlarged spirituality has enabled him to live his limited time more meaningfully and is no longer afraid of death as can be attested to by his having bought a tombstone for himself, which he discreetly arranges to be erected at his tomb by Big Youth.
It is Big Youth who asks the most eloquent existentialist question in the novel, which Broker responds to with the clairvoyance born out of illness: What is the purpose of life?’(p.432).Broker’s existential experience as an AIDS patient has led to the insightful understanding that though material wealth is essential, it does not guarantee spiritual harmony when human beings are confronted by their mortality, for ‘…to live honestly and decently, and live well, is good enough purpose’(p.433), which provides equilibrium to his disrupted life. It is also Big Youth who realizes the purpose of Broker’s benignity in Crossroad since he (Broker) came back from Pwani suffering from HIV/AIDS: ‘that he did all this for himself; he wanted us to attend his funeral…’ (p.448). That a mammoth crowd attended his funeral is a testimony of his altruism.
Though ravaged by illness, Cecilia in Situma’s The Mysterious Killer refuses to allow her corporeal vicissitudes to destroy her soul, she seems to have fortified her soul against the insulting stigma of her diseased physicality and still has the presence of mind, in spite of her distress, to care for and be concerned about her niece’s safety in the hands of the philandering and libertine Yamo. She forgets her own distress to worry over her niece's safety and regrets that she had unreflectively accepted Hausa’s idea to send her to Yamo. For Hillman, the world of the soul is ever-present, inter-penetrating the visible, and ‘the co-presence of the visible and invisible sustains life’ (Hillman, 1997: 111).
Within a year after she comes back from Busaki, Cecila has grown even thinner and her condition is only temporarily ameliorated by the medication Rachel brings her from Busaki. On the verge of death, she is able to shower her children with love and confide more in Rachel. In her private musings and in constructing a future that resists the ebbing present, she is able to tell her niece that ‘I feel much better now, I think I may completely recover, when that happens, I will make sure that I do for you something nice’(p.144). She got worried about her niece’s safety even when she was herself in a deeper distress. This not only speaks of her stubborn hope and an existential resistance to the apocalypse that AIDS threatens, it is also an overt expression of her altruism. She is cast as a person who still values her life in trying to connect meaningfully with her children and with her niece.
That she still values her life and is propelled by the urge to live her last moments meaningfully is seen in her relentless effort to get the last word about her money from Mama Baby. She hopes to get her money once she is discharged from hospital; she desires to be given one more moment in her life to be good to her niece around whom she finds meaning in her end time. Her altruism enables her to shine above the doom threatened by AIDS so that when she dies, her AIDS deceased body is not condemned but she is eulogized as one who had a generous heart and who gave away everything. Though her generosity is evident even in her good health, it is apparent that her diseased corporeality does intensify rather than blunt it, further attesting to the transformative aspects of her illness. The writer allows her to die at home in the company of family and not in the depersonalizing hospital ward, reasserting agency to her and enabling her to live her last moments more meaningfully.
In the same text, it is noteworthy that though Yamo’s condition deteriorates and he has his one foot in the grave, the writer has him die in the hands of his mistress, Mama Baby, which reads as an artistic killing that disturbs and destabilizes the apocalyptic trajectory of AIDS and also gives a brief moment of his interior renewal, for before he meets his comeuppance in the hands of the ruthless Mama Baby, he has so regenerated that he considers passing over his estate to his wife whom he had abandoned long ago, he was contemplating to instruct his attorney about the conveyance of the estate to her. This altruistic gesture, though belated, mitigates his villainy and enables him to secure continuity and connectedness.
Robert Butler, writing in Living with Grief: Loss in Later Life (Doka, 2002), propounded that:
The goals of life review include the resolution of past conflicts and issues, atonement for past acts or inaction, and reconciliation with family members and friends. People often reunite with the family and friends after years of separation or estrangement, and return to their birthplace for a final visit. Overall, the life review is a necessary and healthy process and should be recognized in daily life as well as used in mental health care of older people. The strength of life review lies in its ability to help promote life satisfaction, psychological well- being and self esteem.
The overall benefit of a life review is that it can engender hard-worn serenity, a philosophical acceptance of what has occurred in the past, and wisdom. When people resolve their life conflicts, they have a lively capacity to live in the present. They become able to enjoy basic pleasures such as nature, children, forms, colors, warmth, and love and humour (Doka, 2002: 6).
The transformative and regenerative impact of HIV disease in the fictional characters in a number of the novels under study seem to engage in the kind of life review postulated by Butler and embrace meaningful relationships in their quest for meaningful living in the midst of existential disruption. In The Last Plague, Ben Broker, who has come back to Crossroad, his birth place, apparently for the last visit, has undergone illness induced renewal and exhibits remorse for abandoning his wife Janet for hedonistic pursuits at the coast. This remorse is tinged with lamentations since it is this decision that exposes him to HIV infection. His inner development is so total that it has vanquished his initial recalcitrant masculinity which he seemed to have personified in his pre-AIDS days. His mother is able to observe that Broker is ‘not the rampant bull he used to be. The fire is gone in him and he is as gentle as an old goat now’ (p.180).
Broker is determined to make amends with Janet and will stop at nothing to win her rapprochement. His contribution to the condom effort redeems his image in Janet’s eyes and she begins to see him in a better light. It was a tactical move to secure her acceptance, a reconciliation he holds dear to himself because it is crucial to his quest for meaning in his fragmented life.
This tactic pays dividends when Janet, in spite of herself and despite her earlier avowals never to accept him back, begins to feel compassion for him and invites him home for tea and to bond with the children. This change of heart on the part of Janet is a result of empathy and commiseration with his condition, for ‘it was not just pity but something bigger and deeper, the primordial goad that drove poor people to take in injured animals and stray dogs they could ill afford’ (p.352). Meja Mwangi uses illness to effect reconciliation between an estranged couple. The two get to understand themselves better, there is mutual understanding and they are able to crack jokes together. Broker exploits the much needed reconciliation to bond more with his children and he not only takes them up from school but also plans a retreat to Soi hills with them, and Janet has the presence of mind not to deny them a chance to experience their father, only assigning Frank to accompany them.
The meaningful relationship guaranteed by this rapprochement enables Broker to disclose his condition to his children as significant others, and a retreat back to Soi affords him an opportunity to lift a big burden from his soul by apologizing to Janet for wasting her life. Broker has invested wisely on establishing meaningful relationship with his immediate family and with Fundi. Even after his demise, his continuity is assured and as Janet and Fundi acknowledge,because Broker thought of everything.
Though his initial reaction is to abhor Frank Fundi (he threatens to cut his makende), whom he suspects to be cuckolding him, he has the clairvoyance to regard him as a reliable friend and a trustworthy estate administrator. He not only assigns him the duty of estate administration but also exhorts him to take care of his boys and to teach them to be cautious of the perils of their times. Rather than delighting on the hint that Fundi is also HIV positive, Broker is saddened because what motivates him at the moment is not ill feelings towards a love rival, but the pressing quest for harmony and meaningful connections, especially when these can guarantee continuity. Existential issues, in the case of Broker, seem to override mundane rivalry, he is delighted on learning that Fundi’s diagnosis was a false positive, for this gives him hope for continuity, for his life without him .
His rekindled need for camaraderie is evident in the meaningful relationships he establishes with Uncle Mark with whom he plays droughts at the Teahouse. There is an absurdist streak in this repetitive game in which he is always losing to him, but it is not lost to the reader that, as a way of passing time, it gives him solace. His renewed value for human connection enables him to show kindred humanity to the trump whom he invites to sit with them as they played, a recognition that the beggar is a human being deserving respect and not social snobbery. It is significant that earlier, Broker had undergone a humbling experience when he spent a night in the fields after losing his way to the Teahouse from Janet’s place. Though he slept in his car, the scene is reminiscent of King Lear’s experience after the storm at Dover and his lack of abode. Broker’ experience, again, like King Lear’s reconciliatory moment with Cordelia, engenders regeneration in purgation. Uncle Mark will continue to treat the beggar with indignity, but Broker is conscious of his finiteness and would rather appreciate the beggar as a fellow human being and a fellow sufferer (p.189). This spiritual epiphany is comparable with Setel’s argument that ‘the disordering effects of the pandemic are simultaneously creative of new meanings and revealing of long standing values surrounding social reproduction’ (cited in Eves, 1999: 250).
In The House of Doom, the importance of meaningful relationship is reinforced by Wambui’s relationship with the sick Mbela. Wambui is conscious that her body is also prone to the chaos that bombarded Mbela and in ministering to him; she is urging compassion to those already infected and those like herself at the risk of infection. She stuck with Mbela in these trying moments and helps to reintegrate his devastated body. She is fundamental to the re-making of Mbela’s life out of the chaos thrust by the reality of AIDS. At the closure of the novel, it is envisaged that the two who have agreed to marry will form a formidable union against stigma as implied by their display of intimacy in the full glare of the cameras. Egged on by Wambui, Mbela embraces the wisdom that ‘one’s life has moments of happiness, and that the secret is to be happy, to walk on air in those moments that last only for a while’. Here, Wambui’s effeminacy is depicted as a source of power which heightens Mbela’s emotional sensitivity and depth. Through developing a relationship with Wambui, Mbela’s life is imbued with meaning and he learns how to love again. They both discover a personal connection to each other and their daring announcement of their impending marriage affirm a romantic rebirth that transcends the limits imposed by AIDS. Mbela’s diseased body is narrated as a ‘toller of bells’ who reminds Wambui of her vulnerability to AIDS as a substitution prostitute. By showing compassion and love to Mbela, Wambui is urging compassion for herself and for all, given the arbitrariness of the stigmatized illness. In finally opening up to Wambui, Mbela practises the Foucauldian care of the self ‘as a means of maintaining a stable sense of self’ (Batters, 2003:18).
Contrary to expectations and in an affirmation of meaningful relationships in the era of AIDS, Daisy in Miracle of Remera decides to stick to Maiyo fully aware that he is suffering from AIDS. A personification of genuine friendship in the hour of need, Daisy is cast as the heroine of the text who strengthens Maiyo and helps him out of the quandary. Hers is a statement against stigmatization of AIDS sufferers and it can safely be inferred that the enduring love between him and Daisy, who has stood by him throughout his AIDS ordeal, will culminate in happy matrimony.
Like Broker in The Last Plague, Cecilia Odo in Situma’s The Mysterious Killer returns to her birth place of Gulu from Busaki to pay her final visit, propelled by a yearning for warm meaningful relationship with family and community which is absent in the cold indifference of Busaki city. Her decision to go home was arrived at after a reflective life review. After pondering upon her condition and what it portends, she decides to establish her own family and home with her girlhood crash, Nuom, with whose child she suspects to be heavy. Though her thoughts of a settled future cushioned by her family do not mean that she will not die of AIDS, the mere fact of harbouring them boost her spirit and gives her serenity to accept what she cannot change.
Her rapprochement with Nuom gives her security of sorts since it affords her the opportunity to die at home and in the company of family, friends and relatives and not in the depersonalized hospital bureaucracy. She cherishes her reunion with Nuom and the romantic rebirth it engenders, fond moments that distant her impending death, for as Bernice Sigel opines ‘to be immortal one must love (cited in Weenolsen, Partricia,1996: xvi).
She finds fulfillment in supporting him and in raising their children together, and it is an affirmation of life in mortality that she will be survived by her children, Yohana and the girl named Halesi, which means seed. Dying at Nuom’s home is also an occasion for Cecilia to shower her children with love when they visit her with their grandmother. She wants to be happy and reciprocates in love in those moments that last for a while. Her narrative of dying is that of emotional legacy as she struggles to leave a will of love and good memories to the people in her life.
Faced with his own mortality, the larger than life Yamo in the same novel is also able to appreciate the need for connectedness and more meaningful relationship quite apart from the ephemeral liaisons with commercial sex workers that define his epicurean lifestyle in Busaki. In his last moments in the text, as mentioned elsewhere in this dissertation, he makes a desperate attempt to reconcile with his wife and bequeath her his estate, a noble venture that is thwarted by the selfish trumpet, Mama Baby. What redeems him as a character is that his last thoughts in the novel are altruistic. The novel indicates that altruism and the ability to let the past go through making peace with it offers life affirming options for persons living with HIV. Yamo is cushioned from existential isolation by his affluence and his immersion into hedonistic lifestyle, which seems to be part of nostalgia for secure relationship. It is as if he craves a good life when it lasts, until the epiphany of his deteriorating condition transforms him to altruism. His physical death signifies the death of hedonism and materialist ideals and is a gesture towards spiritual regeneration.
Moraa Gitaa attempts to disrupt the apocalyptic AIDS narrative in Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, a novel which, arguably, is broken into many sections that subvert the perspective that HIV means doom. The novel is tinged with hope in its counter-apocalyptic plotting in which the protagonist Lavina ends up cured of the HIV disease. The text understands meaningful relationships as a cushion against the loss of meaning engendered by HIV disease, an idea supported in the novel by the loving and caring attitude of Lavina’s boyfriend and husband Giorgio Santini, who not only gives the much needed emotional support but also caters for her medical expenses, promising to stand with her till the end. Their intense romantic relationship is given chance to thrive amidst the reality of AIDS so that the pandemic is presented no longer as a source of fear and anxiety. This way, the novel argues that there are alternative ways of representing AIDS and calls for an alternative symbolic order in which the diseased body is capable of loving and being loved.
The text underscores the importance of love in mitigating the tragedy of HIV disease and its grandeur lies in the extent to which it humanizes this tragedy. Romantic rebirth uplifts Lavina and she is able to embrace life more optimistically, her anxiety and sense of worthlessness abated by Giorgio’s love. It is significant that Giorgio was match-made with Lavina by her friends who had vouched for his warmth and gentility and were convinced that he could offer the elixir so much needed by their friend. Lavina, who had made several attempts at her life, to kill herself sooner than later since AIDS meant death, is given a new lease of life by the life-affirming romantic relationship with Giorgio which culminates in marriage. Lavina will live on, the novel suggests, if only to live with somebody she loves and who loves her, and at the closure of the novel, optimism is assured when the two conduct a state-of-the art marriage ceremony with its images of opulence which nullify the doom associated with AIDS.
Rather than concentrate on the death that HIV threatens, the writer seems to concentrate on the life Lavina’s love relationship has created. She no longer dwells on the past, represented by Rawal, whose death also predicts her own; instead she seizes the opportunity to reconstruct her meaning of life, to be back in the soup of life, of living life in the present time with her new lover, Giorgio. She rediscovers her sexuality, embraces her world with love and enjoys happy matrimony. She looks forward to rewarding trips abroad and is optimistic for an opportunity to climb Mt. Kenya.
The onus of the text is to represent the diseased body so as to reclaim it by dismantling and destabilizing the binary opposition between the healthy and the sick created by the cultural construction of HIV disease. Though a sero-positive and worried, Lavina is asymptomatic, horrendous bodily effects of the virus having been ameliorated by the use of anti-retroviral therapy. The text recognizes technological advances which alleviate AIDS tragedies, prolonging the lives of the infected and making AIDS comparable with other chronic conditions that could be managed with proper medical care. Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold is thus unique in its graphic depiction of love and sex in the time of AIDS, urging safe sex but at the same time inducing the reader to imagine love, even in the era of AIDS, as a celebration of love and sexuality.
The family plot in the novel also tells of Lavina’s yearning for her child, a desire frustrated by her AIDS condition. So conscious is Lavina of the crucial role of meaningful relationship in an individual’s quest for meaning that she finds solace in her close bond with her niece Makena, the mere sight of whom intensifies this lack in her life. Makena is both a symbol of lack and fulfillment and Lavina’s relationship with her succeeds in foregrounding not only Lavina’s desire for a child but also her strong and loving personality, so that it comes as a big reprieve when she conceives and delivers an AIDS negative child, thanks to herbal and biomedical medicine. The child enhances Lavina’s need for connectedness especially because in conventional wisdom, it is through having children that people seek to side-step the mortal trajectory, a need which is more acute for Lavina whose chance for procreation had been doomed by her AIDS condition. It is also significant that Lavina’s father transforms in the course of the novel and extends an olive hand to her daughter, a literary statement that calls for the re-visioning and re-imagining of AIDS as a biological illness, a revision advanced in the novel as a prerequisite for eradicating AIDS related ostracism.
The text also emphasizes social connectedness in depicting the camaraderie between Lavina’s friends, who are portrayed as her alternative family. They are her significant others who cushion her against alienation and despair. They comprise an economically stable clique defined by humaneness in an otherwise indifferent polity of Rawals and Munges. It is they who help promote Lavina’s artistic productions and arrange for her to attend international exhibitions. She finds them trustworthy to confide in and they do not disappoint in offering companionship and in helping her settle in a fulfilling matrimony. In the figure of the Munges, we find genuine friends who reject AIDS pejorative imagination by articulating a humane philosophy accommodative of the AIDS diseased.
The characters’ exhibition of enlarged spirituality in their renewed altruism and meaningful relationships as shown in the foregoing explication synchs with Jackey Stacy’s concept of ‘teratologies ’; ‘the stories of transformation in which the negative physical affliction becomes a position of self-knowledge’ (Stacy,1997:2).They have apprehended death more intensely, recognized ‘the inevitability of human mortality’ (ibid), and are seen to benefit from a new found wisdom.
In her book Teratologies, Jackey Stacy asks, ‘is writing one way of dealing with, deferring or indeed, of denying mortality?’ (Stacy,1997:28), a question which seems appropriate for narratives of AIDS discussed in this study, illness narratives that seem to engage with ‘the possibility of the talismanic power of writing to ward off death’(cited in Monica, 1999:283). Wendy B. Farris in her essay ‘1001 Words: Fiction Against Death’ argues in the same vein by suggesting that all fiction is a Scheherazadian effort to oppose and delay death’ (ibid). She argues that
when Scheherazade staves off death for 1001 nights by telling a continuously enthralling chain of stories to her captor, the King, she dramatizes an intriguing aspect of all literary discourse: its capacity to simulate the postponement of human death through the prolongation of fictional life.( Farris,1992:815).
This Scheherazadian trope pervades most of the AIDS novels discussed here in their implicit message that those infected with the virus not only require narrative as a fundamental approach to eluding AIDS apocalypse, but also in their sustained attempt to create order out of the existential disruption engendered by HIV illness. By depicting diseased subjects questing through chaos, the texts invest in forestalling death rather than defeating it.
Schwartzberg (1996) articulated a social function of AIDS literature in his claim that though no civilization in the world has the language to ‘compete with an epidemic’, though ‘words cannot end the epidemic or heal the infected, words and the individual’s search for the right word and the right combination of words, stays the Inferno’(cited in Scdbery, 2008:21). Though these texts cannot cure AIDS, they stay AIDS inferno by depicting the negotiation of existential disruption and gesturing towards the possibilities of constructing meaning out of meaninglessness.
In chapter three, I have discussed the agonizing experiences with illness undergone by diseased subjects in the novels, whose pain and suffering is exacerbated by the stigma and discrimination attendant to AIDS. The texts present isolation, alienation and social death as existential conditions of AIDS sufferers, but this alienation is presented as redeemable if the diseased subjects undertake a philosophical reconstruction of meaning of their lives. In The Last Plague, Broker, ironically withdraws to the radical alienation of life at Teahouse where existence is hardly bearable, but which, paradoxically, spur him into a fulfilling quest. Mbela is marooned in his house of doom in The House of Doom due to the shame signified by his diseased corporeality, while Maiyo in Miracle of Remera retreats to the solace of his campus room and Lavina in Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold is a damsel in distress when we meet her, pushed to withdraw to her psyche by the reality of infection.
I have shown in chapter four the various strategies different characters adopt to mediate the unmaking of their lives by the reality of HIV infection. These include Yamo’s hedonism in The Mysterious Killer, Maiyo’s intellectualism and stoicism in Miracle of Remera, writing as therapeutic in Confessions of an AIDS Victim, and humour as a survival strategy in The Last Plague. There is positive living and the use of anti-retroviral therapy in Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold. Though these strategies are not in themselves elixirs to the pandemic, they help the characters wring meaning out of the nihilism engendered by AIDS.
Sartre (1956) argued that while one cannot change one’s biological, physiological, social or economic circumstances, we are free and responsible to choose the meanings we give to these realities and to choose how we will live within our limitations. He claimed that one does not examine values or meanings when engaged in the predictable routine of daily activities but when crisis compels reflection. Lavine (1984) takes up the same question in his view that existential philosophy expressed the post-war need to rebuild one’s life, the freedom to remake oneself and the denial of the determinism of circumstances. On her part, Becker opines that ‘by initiating the process of rethinking what is meaningful in life; disruption can be a catalyst for change’ (Becker, 1997: 19).
Keany & Glueckauf (1993) support perspective transformation in their claim that people who make a good adjustment to the sudden onset of impairment are those who are able to redefine their values, broaden the range of things that are cherished and decrease the emphasis on physic as a measure of self.
A striking finding of this study is the philosophical quest for meaning in illness manifested in the selected texts. This redemptive and regenerative dimension of AIDS experience is discussed in chapter five where diseased subjects are depicted as engaging in efforts to transcend the limitations of their diseased corporeality by embracing perspective transformation. Spirituality in its broad sense becomes the essence through which these characters rediscover a purpose of life as they adjust to the disruption in their lives caused by AIDS. The care of the self and the concomitant quest for meaning is essential to the identity of the diseased subjects against the stigmatizing normativity constructed for them by the society.
The coalescence of spirituality and meaning is underscored by P. Coleridge who writes:
Basic needs are lacks which need to be supplied, like food, shelter and health…But there are other needs which are just as basic: the need to be creative, to make choices, to exercise judgments, to love others, to have friendships, to contribute something of oneself to the world, to have social function and purpose. These are active needs; if they are not met, the result is the impoverishment of the human spirit, because without them, life has no meaning. The most basic need of all is the need for meaning (Coleridge, 1993: 213).
My reading of these selected Kenyan AIDS texts has looked at the way diseased characters take advantage of the disadvantages of illness to become more altruistic in their quest for meaning of life. The clairvoyance acquired in liminality, in what Foucault refers to as the ‘limit-experience’, is discussed in chapter five which explores the overarching tendency in the texts to depict the epiphany of AIDS experience. Characters are seen to resort to making sense of their illness as individual responses to the fact of HIV infection, appropriating Katerina Tolstikova et al ( 2005) postulation that ‘although meaning-making efforts are not the case for everyone, the majority of those experiencing sudden potentially traumatizing grief concern themselves with issues of meaning’(Tolstikova et al, 2005:296).
The novels have created literary spaces in which AIDS apocalyptic rhetoric is subverted and AIDS myths debunked. This is not only achieved through the portrayal of characters reconstructing values to their existential disruption, but on many occasions, there are attempts at counter-apocalyptic plotting such as the surprise closures in Miracle of Remera, The Mysterious Killer, The House of Doom and Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold, endings which subvert AIDS apocalyptic rhetoric by presenting AIDS not as a death sentence but, at worst, a life sentence that can be transcended through a reconstruction of the individual’s sense of meaning of life. The texts are thus an attempt at detaching the HIV disease from negative metaphors advocated for by Susan Sontag who observes that:
The age-old, seemingly inexorable, process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for peoples deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have a more limited credibility in the modern world; the process itself is being questioned now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the efforts to detach it from loaded meanings and misleading metaphors seem particularly liberating, even consoling (Sontag, 1979:88-89).
Though in some societies overseen by the novels, knowledge about AIDS is produced in ignorance and AIDS is still a taboo subject, the texts depict voices seeking to break this silence about the disease. They indicate how their authors stand in a different relation to the dominant apocalyptic AIDS rhetoric. Their illness narratives portray characters who are able to transcend the ‘otherness’ of disease and become ‘self’, characters who are able to overcome the discriminative definitions and labels that limit their existence.
In different ways, the writers studied here participate in AIDS activist art called for by Douglas Crimp who claims that ‘We don’t need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS’ (Crimp, 1998:7). For Monnete, ‘a writer has a public duty, writing is not an excuse to close the door and have private fantasies and private realities: It’s a responsibility to live with public realities’ (Monette, 1991:57).
These works fulfill the function of literary AIDS, which according to Judith Pastore, ‘is asked to defend the rights of the marginalized persons with AIDS (PWAS) and also educate the general public about the nature of the pandemic’ (Pastore, 1993:102), which she underscores as one of the writer’s responsibilities of representing AIDS in literature. For her, literary AIDS has three major didactic goals, to wit: to preach the need for safe sex, to dispel unwarranted fears and to win sympathy for the infected and the loved ones. The texts studied in this work handle these functions well.
In their humanistic depiction of AIDS as advanced in this work, these novels become effective tools for broadening understanding of AIDS as a biological illness of our time to be avoided and also to be lived with. This is possible because the readers, diseased or healthy, vicariously identify themselves with the novelistic characters and situations. In deciphering AIDS, the novels urge sympathy for the afflicted and can be ‘enlisted as a device to shift onus away from both sexual deviancy and social bias’ (Doroty, 1991:26). Though these texts do not renounce AIDS, they reinterpret and refigure it as a beginning point for self-regeneration.
In coupling the theme of the quest for meaning with illness, the writers discussed in this study go beyond the meaninglessness wrought by AIDS by presenting the quest as possible. The novels posses a socio-aesthetic value in their representation of AIDS which allow them to be elevated from popular fiction to mainstream literature.
The study, as already acknowledged, has a major limitation in that it excludes short stories as part of prose fiction. The existentialist, Foucauldian and liminality paradigms utilized in this study can be replicated in a philosophical study of Kenyan HIV/AIDS short stories, such as Chaacha Mwita’s ‘Honourable Dishonour’ in The Mermaid of Msambweni and Other Stories(2007), Macharia Mwangi’s ‘Reversed Dreams’, Goro Wa Kamau’s ‘The Sun Goes Down’ published in The Sun Goes Down and Other Stories( 2010), West of the Rising Sun: The Remarkable Story of Pendo ( 2010), Bwocha Nyangemi’s ‘That is the Way Life Goes’ and ‘The School Dropout’ in his anthology, The Inevitable Burden and Other Stories (2013).The same frameworks can be replicated in the study of Kenyan AIDS memoirs, the most substantive one so far being Asunta Wagura’s Heartbreak to Daybreak (2010). A philosophical reading of these texts can offer further understanding of the fictional discussion of the problematic of meaning in illness.
Finally, to underscore the function of literary AIDS as a crucial intervention against AIDS, this study recommends the inclusion of Kenyan HIV AIDS novels as set texts in Kenya Certificate for Secondary Education. This will not only canonize the texts but it also keys in with multi-secteral approach to combating the virus. It also recommends an inclusion of medical humanities as a literature course in Kenyan universities. AIDS novels can also be adapted into films in order to reach a wider audience.
PRIMARY TEXTS
Adalla,C. (1993).Confessions of an AIDS victim.Nairobi: Heinemann.
Gitaa, M. (2008).Crucible for silver and furnace for gold Nairobi: Nsemia Inc.
Imbuga, F.I. (2004). Miracle of Remera .Nairobi: Africawide Network.
Mwangi, M. (2000). The last plague. Nairobi:East African Educational Publishers.
Situma, J. (2001).The mysterious killer. Nairobi:Africawide Network.
Wahome, M. W. (2004). The house of doom. Nairobi: Africawide Network.
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� Limit- experience is an experience that imposes limitation on one’s existence, destroying the subject as constituted to pave way for the individual’s transformation.
� Grotesque imagery, for example, with its emphasis on corporeality, complemented the new humanist perspective on the world; with their shared privilege of the human rather than the divine, they helped to call into question medieval ideology. Grotesque imagery can be seen as nothing more than a celebration of the freedoms permitted during the period of festivities
See: Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelius and His World.trans. H.Isnolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1984.(p. 362-363)
� Nocebo: from the Latin root, ‘noceo’, ‘I hurt’, which is the negative effect on health of beliefs and expectations.As Hahn and Kleinman put it, belief kills; belief heals. Cited in Cecil Helman,Culture, Health and Illness, 4th edn, 207-208, See also Hahn, R.A. (1997). ‘The nocebo phenomenon: concept, evidence, and influence on public health’.Prev.Med. 26,607-11.
� ‘anatomopolitics’, a term coined by Michel Foucault to refer to the management of individual bodies by medical discourse. See p. 359; Health, Illness and Medicine
� The term liminality was coined by Van Gennep to describe the middle phase of rites of passage. Writing in 1990, Van Gennep classified transitional rites into three phases to wit: separation, margin (or limen) and regeneration.The first phase that of separation is comprised of symbolic action signifying the detachment of the individual or group from earlier fixed point in the social structure. This separation demarcates sacred space and time from profane or secular space time. The central or liminal phase is a social limbo representing moments betwixt and between fixed cultural categories, while the third phase represents ‘desacratisation’, the participant’s celebrated return to society as a transformed or reborn individual, perhaps with new status, roles and responsibilities or simply an altered attitude or outlook of life.
� AIDS: John Mordaunt (1989) interpreted AIDS as Accelerated Inner Development Syndrome
See also Frankenberg (1990:353)
� Stacy, J. Teratologies, 1997. She used the term to refer to cancer survival narratives that generate fantasies of heroic recoveries and miracle cures, ‘teratologies’ are the tales of misery and marvels that pervade the popular imaginary of cancer subcultures.