SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis maps the literary responses to HIV and AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe from 1990 to 2005. It begins by asking what counter-narratives does HIV/AIDS literature in English from South Africa and Zimbabwe offer to narratives produced in the West since the 1980s? By the conclusion it is possible to see different developments in HIV/AIDS narratives from South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as distinguishing features of genesis and form, with a particular focus on the body and the individual. Theories of silence, trauma, displacement and amnesia are employed to address why it has taken so long for writers, particularly women, to claim the subject of the self for themselves. Chapter One outlines the socio-political contexts in both countries and asks whether literature about HIV/AIDS has formed a national literary genre or style. Chapter Two compares dominant Western HIV/AIDS imagery such as plague and apocalypse to depictions of HIV/AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe and seeks to explain why such metaphors are frequently absent in these national literatures. Chapter Three recognises that HIV/AIDS narratives in each country are gendered and that analyses of the male body are often ignored in order to preserve patriarchal hegemony. The relationship between masculinity and disease is deconstructed in the context of predominantly male authored texts on HIV/AIDS. Chapter Four identifies the small number of women authors who have written about HIV/AIDS and how their gender has affected their subject matter, in particular novelistic portrayals of love, sex, motherhood and mourning using semi-fictional autobiography. Chapter Five locates HIV/AIDS in literature about the city, examining urban spaces of infection and focuses particularly on Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow. Chapter Six looks at first person narratives and the distinctions between confession, witnessing, testimony and autobiography, linking their relationship to truth with the novel and fictional narratives.