|
Literary
dimensions of AIDS: French and German autobiographical AIDS-literature as
resistance literature
Anu
Pande
Centre of German Studies, School of Languages,
Department
of Literature and Culture Studies,
Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi (India)
One of the many contradictions
associated with AIDS pertains to the fact that this global killer has also
given birth to a tremendous amount of literature. In writing about their
illness people affected by AIDS have transcended the narrow definition
ascribed to them as patients and have come into their own as authors.
Writing about their lives with AIDS has enabled them to appropriate their
lives and their identity as individuals again, as opposed to the
impersonal identity of an AIDS-patient which society, and to a large
extent the medical establishment, have forced upon them since the
discovery of the HIV virus. The AIDS experience is different from the
experience of other diseases since it entails not only a daily struggle
against one’s own disease, but also against marginalisation from society
and the loss of human dignity, brought about as much by societal attitudes
as by the disease itself.
The most striking feature of
French and German autobiographical AIDS writing is that it is a form of
resistance. This resistance is aimed at the prospect of certain death
imminent in the future as well as at the virtual death experienced by
people living with AIDS in a paranoid, ill-informed and hostile society.
The AIDS authors fight back by reinventing themselves through writing,
even as they are being reinvented by the ravages of AIDS. The battle
against AIDS and death is turned into an SM game between master and slave.
The author tries to regain the role of master by taking control of his
life, by becoming active as the subject of the story of his life. Instead
of being written about, he chooses to write himself. In this process he
rejects the passive role of a normal patient. Instead of being reduced to
a mere pathological object being examined by a doctor, he becomes the
narrator, who appropriates the doctor’s right to examine and diagnose.
Like a doctor he observes and chronicles the various stages of his
illness, thereby rejecting the traditional hierarchy in a typical
doctor-patient relationship.
In this paper I propose to
elaborate on the theme of autobiographical AIDS writing in French and
German literature as resistance literature, in order to demonstrate how
certain common strategies are adopted by writers affected with AIDS to
translate their experience of AIDS into a literary resistance. The
literary response to AIDS is particularly significant in the times we live
in, where globalisation and technological progress threaten to overshadow
the human factor. Most discussions about AIDS too tend to veer towards the
latest scientific breakthrough in the search for a cure and statistics
about prevalence rates. While the scientific aspect is undeniably of
utmost importance, it cannot be denied that the people affected by AIDS
are first and foremost human beings and clubbing them all together to come
up with statistics and data is tantamount to doing them a great injustice.
Each individual’s experience of AIDS is specific to him or her and I
firmly believe that we need to engage with these literary responses to
AIDS in order to acquire a holistic understanding of the disease and its
impact.
|
