Breaking the Silence: South African Representations of HIV/AIDS by Ellen Grünkemeier (review)

In South Africa, a country where AIDS has touched many lives, there is a shocking lack of literary representations of HIV and AIDS. In Breaking the Silence: South African Representations of HIV/AIDS, Ellen Grünkemeier attempts to make sense of this silence and analyze those instances in which HIV/AIDS is creatively rendered. Who speaks and who does not? What discourses address HIV/AIDS and which avoid it? Breaking the Silence mainly focuses on how cultural productions respond to the challenge of representing HIV/AIDS in a “culture of silence” that pervades South African society. Drawing on insights from the fields of interdiscourse analysis, literary theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory, Grünkemeier decodes meanings conveyed in signifying practices across a range of disciplinary boundaries, some literary or verbal and others visual. Metaphors of “speaking” are used even in discussing cartoons, murals, photos, and films. An image can break though silence.

The sociopolitical context of the culture of silence is grounded foremost in the public controversy over President Thabo Mbeki’s refusal to acknowledge the causal link between HIV and AIDS at the turn of the century. The denialism practiced by the president and his administration (most notably public health officials) is made to explain the confusion about the nature of HIV found in realms beyond the political stage. In other words, where the president leads, the people follow. President Mbeki is drawn in stark contrast to Zackie Achmat, the founder of a South African activist group that lobbied for access to treatment. In Breaking the Silence clear and direct communication about HIV/AIDS is held out as a moral standard.

Yet many of the representations of HIV/AIDS that Grünkemeier examines explore difficulties of direct speech. South African literary works move characters through worlds made dangerous by the threat of HIV/AIDS–related stigmatization. Some characters are rewarded for their brave openness, thereby representing a world the authors hope to help usher into being. Other characters find themselves harassed for their openness, a shameful tendency that compounds the tragedy wreaked by HIV/AIDS. These works of South African literature are self-consciously about talking (or writing) about HIV/AIDS. Breaking the Silence is based on a postcolonial studies approach that places communicative acts within contexts of structures of power. For example, the only two published HIV/AIDS memoirs by South Africans were written by white males of relative privilege. In contrast, memoirs by black South African people living with HIV/AIDS are conspicuously nonexistent. This is indeed a silence—especially when one considers the emergent genre of apartheid “struggle memoirs” written by nonwhite South Africans.

“Silence” may sometimes be a misnomer in characterizing speech acts of indirection and obfuscation. South African authors write of characters whispering about HIV/AIDS with indirect speech and coded language. Indirection (or even denialism) is not a failure to speak but a refusal to say certain things in certain ways. However, except for the analysis in the chapter about imagery (chapter 4, “Imagery”), which is one of the strongest chapters, the author rarely takes ambiguous or coded representations seriously as modes of communication, but rather characterizes these rhetorical strategies for what they are not—direct, clear. How might indirect messages be decoded by culturally adept receivers? What generic traditions exist among South Africans that utilized indirection, and how has indirection been adopted (for good or ill) with the coming of HIV/AIDS? To fully embrace a postcolonial framework one must consider the possibility of communicative and epistemological diversity.

The chapter on imagery does acknowledge the inherent ambiguity of visual imagery and offers a variety of possible “readings” of their symbolism based on cultural context. The ubiquitous “AIDS is war” metaphor is shown to aid in understanding some aspects of the disease but to distort important details and contribute to stigmatization of individuals with HIV/AIDS. At its best Breaking the...