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5 The strong healthy man: AIDS and self-delusion LIZZY ATTREE Historically, men, unlike women, have not needed to explore their own body image, because their relation with the world is not mediated by the body… Indeed, in order for men to preserve the hegemony of male power, it has been essential to keep the body at a safe distance, even if it cannot be rendered completely invisible. The body is always there, but rarely accorded (by men) its place as a fundamental structuring principle. Indeed, in order to retain their power, men have collectively refused to interrogate their bodies, which have thereby become unhealthily protected from public (and often private) scrutiny. Illness changes all that and makes the body urgently present, albeit in a state of deterioration and decay (Worton, 2004: 157). The n nuanced p presentation of conflict and perceptions of illness in selected short stories from Mungoshi's Walking Still (1997) and Kanengoni's Effortless Tears (1993), seek to establish a world in which war and violence are no longer the markers of power. The disruption of conventional gender roles is linked to the fragmentation of the nation and disillusionment with national structures, but Mungoshi’s focus on individual stories symbolises and evokes new struggles. In contrast Kanengoni’s focus on the brutality of war and its effect on the family exposes alterations and scars in the national psyche. By questioning the consequences for communities that abandon the land to join the liberation struggle, or are forced to commit patricide to express loyalty to a cause, Kanengoni unveils the barren heart of a nation whose masculinity has been usurped by a greater power: fear. How do men reclaim their lives and define themselves in these circumstances? Can masculinity survive with integrity when under pressure to survive in any form? Who are the heroes and saviours now? By comparing stories by these two great writers against the background of HIV/AIDS, it is possible to see the extent to which the depiction of the health of the individual male disrupts conceptions of a stable patriarchal masculinity that in turn upholds the 58 hegemony of male power in the nation. I would argue that part of the definition of a father figure relies on the identification of a son or daughter with a ‘strong healthy man’. According to Freud the father figure is the first logical means by which we seek to identify masculinity in our formative years and yet Oliver Sacks might say that in the absence of a father figure or due to neurological damage, we could equally identify a hat stand with the masculine authoritative phallus that shapes our formation of self and identity. In other words the creation of gender norms is arbitrary or at least the accepted definitions of what constitutes masculinity in a patriarchal society is governed by the language and culture in which we live. I will bypass Lacan’s abstract formulations of psycho -sexual development, to concur with Sacks that ‘the study of disease and identity cannot be disjoined’ (1986, x). This prompts the question: how does one formulate the masculinity of a father figure when that figure is absent, ill or dying? The male body is inextricably bound up with notions of masculinity and physical performance, sexual or otherwise; the body provides the dominant foundation for the initial separation of the sexes. Clichés such as that the female is the weaker sex are of course inaccurate, (particularly in Zimbabwe where women bear the majority of labour in the average household ), studies of genetic diseases show that the ‘X’ chromosome is far less vulnerable to hereditary disease than the male ‘Y’ chromosome. However the myth of the ‘strong healthy man’ lingers in the imagination as the defining , if not the basic aspiration of men in most cultures. In Zimbabwe this is further linked with the hegemonic rhetoric of heroism that is deeply associated with violence and which valorises men in the context of the Second Chimurenga as ‘war veterans’ or ‘sons of the soil’. Above and beyond the social disruption of war, and in a quite different context Michael Worton evinces that: As soon as the social structure is shaken, as it has been through such different phenomena as the creative challenges of feminism and the ravages of AIDS … traditional certainties about masculinity begin to dissolve and the male body becomes the site of interrogation rather than of affirmation and confidence, and this means that masculinity needs to be increasingly...

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