“Compassionate Leave”?: HIV/AIDS and Collective Responsibility in Ingrid de Kok’s Terrestrial Things

Over the course of her career, South African poet Ingrid de Kok has invited readers to encounter in intimate terms the physical, psychological, and spatial effects of entrenched difference, and to glimpse, often through radical gestures of empathy, the possibilities for social transformation.¹ Like David Goldblatt,² whose photographs for almost five decades documented the commonplace details of life in the apartheid state while deliberately avoiding the spectacle of state-orchestrated violence that was so avidly captured on film by photojournalists, de Kok eschews the sensational and the polemical. Even on occasions when her poetry of witness brings readers face to face with the most widely publicized of South Africa’s historical traumas—the Sharpeville Massacre, the findings of the Human Rights Violations and Amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the shattering effects of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic—her treatment of public crises foregrounds their psychological and embodied impacts on the quotidian routines of speakers and readers. De Kok’s poetic testimonies do not simply offer counter-narratives to official histories; rather, they expose the false logics and dangerous consequences of blame and disavowal; examine the limitations of inherited language, poetic forms, and conceptual frameworks for responding to escalating crisis; and reanimate the collective imagination with a sense of ethical engagement. The poems locate social crisis precisely in the failures of compassion, of language, and of historical awareness to engender a sense of collective responsibility. They invite readers to reflect upon their own implication in, and deep responses to, the crisis at hand.

This essay examines de Kok’s attempt in “Freight,” the final section of her 2002 collection, Terrestrial Things, to bear witness to the devastating effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in contemporary South Africa, and to invoke the critical need for responsibility and redress. The poems in “Freight” complicate myths of national recovery, query the relevance of the lyric form, and trace connections between the proliferating manifestations of anxiety in public space and discourse, the escalation of violence and harm, and the spread of apathy and offloading of moral responsibility for the crisis. Shoshana Felman observes that the articulation of trauma is always belated, incomplete, and bewildered, giving rise, for speakers and listeners alike, to a desire to transcend or establish distance from suffering, while at the same time creating the possibility of a newly lucid and empathetic exchange.³ In a similar manner, de Kok’s poems not only draw attention to the continued apartheid of suffering, but they also gesture toward the urgent need to acknowledge that we exist as human beings only in relation to one another, and to one another’s suffering, however difficult such a vision of mutual implication may be to attain. As we will demonstrate, de Kok’s poems imply that any hope of addressing the devastating and far-reaching effects of the pandemic lies in a radical rethinking of the oppositional logic that shatters reciprocity, heightens denial, and justifies complacency. Yet her poems also suggest that reciprocity is no easy matter of transcendence and is, moreover, always troubled by a desire to resolve the discomforts of witnessing by recourse to a rhetoric of objective understanding.

Over the past two decades, many poets have endeavored to bear witness to HIV/AIDS losses. Melissa Zeiger characterizes “the genre of AIDS elegies” as concerned with bringing “a communal politics and an overriding sense of shared catastrophe into the sphere of poetic production.”⁴ A main concern, then, of poetry responding to HIV/ AIDS is the creation of a rhetorical space in which these losses could be made to count as legitimate and grievable. In Zeiger’s survey of elegies by gay men, even AIDS poems that are not explicitly political participate in a politics of representation through their skeptical questioning of elegiac conventions as a potentially amnesiac form of memory, which, by favoring a model of working through grief, may pave the way for motivated forgetting that reinforces social exclusion.⁵ Rather than commemorating the dead and moving on, AIDS elegies summon their...