I’d like to base my response to this week’s topic heavily on Musa W. Dube’s anecdotal essay reflecting on the AIDS/HIV pandemic in Botswana.
The text brings up many fascinating points on discourse surrounding the pandemic, particularly how language builds a narrative which extends to the national and social scale. A particularly poignant quotation which I’d like to unpack reads as follows:
“I describe HIV and AIDS as a text that wrote itself upon our physical and social bodies.”
Breaking this down, I’d like to think about the usage of the term “text” to describe HIV/AIDS, and the concept of physical and social bodies.
In this statement the pandemic is described as an active force acting “upon” the nation. There is a sense of the pandemic being central to the narrative of a nation’s identity through its description as a text in this active form. It is not a passive part of the nation’s story, but rather integral to it—the author seems to consider the pandemic as part of Botswana itself.
This gained further multitudes when I considered what could be meant by this idea of “physical and social bodies”. Clearly, HIV physically affects the body. However, Dube’s idea of the “social” body stood out as it gets to the root of what differentiates a pandemic from just a prevalent disease. A pandemic deeply affects these social bodies, whether these bodies be families, local communities, or otherwise.
The text goes on to consider “The historic discovery of HIV among gay communities, and later among other vulnerable communities such as sex workers and injecting drug addicts, seemingly associated the virus with sexual and moral discourse.” This furthers these ideas of the “social” body. A narrative was constructed which categorised the nation into groups of higher and lower morality, associating the virus with these groups.
This all gave a much greater sense to what Treichler perhaps meant writing “The AIDS epidemic is simultaneously an epidemic of a transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification.” This writing of HIV as a text upon social bodies, separated by community, does indeed make it an epidemic of signification. Ingrained beliefs about the communities at the heart of the discovery of the virus adds signification upon both these communities, and upon the story of the virus itself.
I’d like to end this post by sharing a poem by Mary Bowman, an American poet born HIV positive. This poem, Dandelions, was Bowman’s way of revealing that she had lived with HIV her whole life as a result of her mother’s drug addiction. Bowman’s mother died when the poet was just three as a result of complications. One line in particular stands out in light of Dube’s and Treichler’s ideas.
“I will gladly give myself as the sacrifice if it means that all the dandelions in the world become viewed as more than the consequence of sins behind closed doors.”
References
Dube, Musa W. “The HIV and AIDS Collective Memory: Anecdotal Notes on Texts of Trauma, Care-Giving and Positive Living.” Botswana Notes and Records, vol. 48, 2016, pp. 435–438. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/90025361. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
Treichler, Paula A. How To Have Theory In An Epidemic. Duke University Press, 1999, p. 11.