MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the early days of the crisis, it was almost redundant to die of AIDS. Many of those who were dying had been dead already to their families, to their communities, and to their nation for years. Yet there is a conspicuous absence of dead bodies in AIDS literature. Most often, the focus of AIDS literature is on the process, rather than the product, of dying. There is a fixation on absence of the AIDS body in both literature and public discourse.
What little AIDS literature there is that deals directly with the corporeal result of plague underscores the limber nature of these bodies by showing how they are simultaneously hidden and hyper-present. Thomas Glave’s short story, “The Final Inning,” and Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir, My Brother, demonstrate the tension created by shoving corpses into the closet—whether to moralize or memorialize—and reveal how the black AIDS body is both over-determined and hidden. Glave and Kincaid stress the materiality of the AIDS body. The body never disappears from their texts except to draw attention to this erasure. The authors refuse to suggest that there is anything either redemptive or unifying about AIDS. Instead, these literary bodies draw attention to the lines that are drawn in times of crisis. They break down absolute boundaries between right and wrong, insider and outsider, haves (It) and have (It) nots. When they are made visible and allowed to speak, the dead eradicate easy definitions of family, community, and nation. Instead, those who suffer from and die of AIDS are reinserted into the national imagination because the materialized AIDS body both participates in and refigures a central trope of the American twentieth century. The body becomes a battleground and a site of negotiation between the individual and the community, between the individual and the nation.