Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Poems and Stories From Southern Africa (review)

This long-awaited collection is ground-breaking in its scope and courageous in its attempt to uncover taboos around the devastating disease of AIDS. As Njabulo Ndebele says in his introduction, "The power of this collection lies in helping to ensure that we will not have remained silent in the face of such enormous loss," which until now, with a few exceptions, has been the sum total of the literary writing about this disease in many African countries.

In 2002, the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA) provided AIDS and Society Research Unit (ASRU) with a grant to run a creative writing competition and to produce an anthology of writings on AIDS, a project initiated by Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas, graduate students at the University of Cape Town. The competition was judged by Njabulo Ndebele, Professor and Vice Chancellor at the University of Cape Town, and the writer Ingrid de Kok, also a professor at the University of Cape Town. The anthology has been edited by Meg Samuelson, Kylie Thomas, and Nabantu Rasebotsa (University of Botswana) and was published by Kwela Books in 2004. The collection includes recognized names such as Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Achmat Dangor, and the recently deceased Phaswane Mpe, alongside writers who have never before had their work published. Short stories are presented with poems, which weave their way around a subject that until now has been much neglected. The poetry even includes work by Dambudzo Marechera, who died from AIDS in 1987 and whose featured poems were written during the last year of his life and by association seem to address not only his death, but AIDS directly, particularly in the poem "Which One of You Bastards Is Death?" The editors note that although his poems were "most likely penned before his diagnosis [. . .] they offer an uncanny premonition of his approaching death." It is poignantly important to remember that writers were dying from this disease as early as Marechera, yet it is still rarely mentioned in literary circles.

Highlights of the collection also include Khaya Gqibitole's "Fresh Scars," which reiterates the purpose for publishing such a collection—"[T]here are just too many taboos in our society [. . .] the truth is the more we remain silent the more we will perish"—while others revisit familiar metaphors of national and postcolonial failures and loss of hope, such as stated by Kay Brown in "The Harvest": "I mourn for him, and for our blighted harvest." Depressing and yet beautiful, in terms of creating beauty from a confrontation with an unrecognizable foe, or a disease for which there is no hope of a cure, is Lesley Emmanuel's depiction of a wedding scene in which confetti is made from HIV pamphlets. The stories often blend a sense of fatalism with a distinct awareness of tragedy in the loss of beauty, romance, loyalty, and youth, as well as highlighting injustices toward women in prostitution, marriage, child-bearing, and divorce.

Oral songs and poems in indigenous languages are also included. For example, Johanna Nurse Malobola's "Death" is translated from isiNdebele, and the excerpt from Teboho Raboko's "Sefela—Migrant Worker's Poem" is not only translated from Sesotho but is accompanied by various definitions or terms of the disease from different cultures—"AmaXhosa call it kill-all / Basotho call it the lying-on-the-back disease"—showing a growing awareness and representation of AIDS among local people but also offering a commentary on the devastation wrought on a daily basis. Eddie Vulani Maluleke's title poem "Nobody Ever Said AIDS" is joyous in its beginning, describing drinking and dancing in the shebeens where women with "rouge red glossy lips" and "Tight red dresses" wait for "Jimmy / Petros / Jabu / To buy us a drink." She leads the reader into the hell that resulted "After they kissed the lips of red berries" and that "Nobody wanted to touch any more." She continues the tragedy: "Some of us...