The diseased body and the quest for meaning in Kenyan HIV/AIDS fiction

Abstract

The study explores the representation of the diseased body and the quest for meaning in six selected Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels: Carolyne Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim (1993), Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague (2000), Joseph Situma’s The Mysterious Killer (2001), Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom (2004), Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera (2004) and Moraa Gitaa’s Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (2008). I analyze the selected texts as fictional spaces in which rhetorical struggle with AIDS apocalypse is staged, where AIDS propinquity with death is exposed and criticized and where the illness is re-visioned. My thesis is that the selected Kenyan HIV/AID novels provide spaces for the diseased subjects to pursue a quest for existential meaning to transcend the disruption and meaningless wrought on their lives by AIDS. The study seeks to map out the mediation of existential disruption by characters in the works under study, to explicate the quest for meaning by the diseased subjects in the selected fiction and to establish the relationship between illness and characterization in the selected novels. To this end, the study attempts to answer the following research questions: How are the diseased subjects negotiating the existential quandaries imposed on them by AIDS in the selected texts? What is the relationship between AIDS and characterization in the selected texts? What ontological issues are embodied in the texts under study? To explore the quest for existential meaning by characters in the selected texts and to explicate how these characters quest through chaos, the study utilizes the existentialist notions advanced by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and the Foucauldian postulations on the politics of and the care of the self. It also draws on the thoughts of liminal thinkers like de Certeau and Victor Turner. These paradigms have the self as a shared feature and are useful in focusing the study to the individuality of the diseased subjects and their relationship with themselves and the complex social world around them. This is a library based qualitative study in which data is collected and analyzed through existentialist and postmodernist models. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodology. Through a critical analysis of the selected texts, the study establishes that the texts deconstruct the cultural significations of the diseased body and demonstrate its regenerative potential. It also shows that the texts offer an alternative way of representing AIDS by subverting and countering the apocalyptic rhetoric that surrounds the pandemic.