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Explorations in the Cultural History of AIDS

III

International Conference

México City, 9 - 12 December 2006

 

Poesída: Poetry and the New Activism of HIV/AIDS

J. Elizabeth Clark

City University of New York

LaGuardia Community College

 
The powerful have been practicing saying out loud, if only briefly, those unmentionable people who are then otherwise ignored and remain oppressed, people who live what seem unimaginable lives: the drug addict we look away from as we pass her in the street, the son who has been disowned and kicked out of his home by his parents, the crack baby abandoned quivering in the incubator.  We have said, with our newfangled antiretroviral vocabulary, that AIDS belongs to another people.
–Rafael Campo.[i]
 
 

Gay, North-American literary production of the 1980s and 1990s was marked by a profound engagement with the poetry of AIDS.  The same virus that gave way to such local, regional, national and international activism also shaped a new literary motif—literature grappling with the virus and its meaning for individuals and a larger society.  Seminal North American works such as  Paul Monette’s West of Yesterday East of Summer  and Love Alone:  18 Elegies for Rog, Mark Doty’s My Alexandria and Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats achingly portrayed the devastating effects on the gay community in the United States.  Their work became the standard by which other AIDS poetry was judged, but while important, their work also created a portrait of AIDS as a largely white, privileged, North American gay experience. 

Amid this prolific writing, the Latino and Latin American experience remained largely invisible in the United States.  Critics and poets alike have speculated on the roles of racism, homophobia, machismo and Catholicism as leading factors in hindering the formation of a gay, Latino identity.  In the mid-1990s, however, a marked change in literary production saw the publication of a number of new works by Latino and Latin American authors, adding the poesía panlatina to the body of AIDS literature, complicating our ideas about sexuality and desire.  This paper, which borrows part of its title Poesída, from the anthology of AIDS poetry compiled by Carlos A. Rodríguez Matos, will examine the poetry of several North-American Latino poets featured in the Poesída anthology:  Rafael Campo, Miguel Algarín, Gil Cuadros and Ramón García and Latin American and Caribbean poets Francisco Casas, and Laureano Albán, seeking connections between their social and political elegiac presentations of SIDA in poetry.  This paper will also argue that against the powerful cultural, social, political and religious currents that have defined what HIV/AIDS means, poesída panlatina has provided a critical outlet as a new form of activism. 
Notes:
 
[i].  Campo, 162.
 

About J. Elizabeth Clark

I am an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York— LaGuardia Community College campus where I teach composition, Cultural Studies of Medicine, poetry and creative writing.  I have published interviews with Tory Dent and Rachel Hadas in the minnesota review.  My essay “(In/Out)side AIDS Activism:  Searching for a Critically Engaged Politics,” appears in the Journal of Medical Humanities (2004) and a chapter of this manuscript, “Defining Post-Protease AIDS Literature” has been accepted for Chris Bell’s collection, Remember AIDS?.  I have also presented on AIDS poetry at conferences such as the Northeastern Modern Language Association and the Valdosta State ’s Women’s Studies Conference.
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