I forgot to mention that I’m reading Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant. Interesting book so far but wow is he angry, at both the left AND the right, for utterly and absolutely failing to help what he calls the “poor white” community in this country. More on this book later, when I’m done reading it.
I’m off to New York this week to promote New Pages, Catalyst Book Press, and myself (J.L. Powers). And also to have a good time in New York, meet up with some good friends, and see both my agent and my editor. So probably no new postings for about a week, though I’ll try.
I left at least one gaping hole the other day in my discussion of AIDS and South Africa, and that is the community’s attitude towards victims. Again, this is complex and varies from family to family, but many families don’t acknowledge their relative is dying of AIDS. They just don’t talk about it or, if they do, they call it something else such as “isidliso.” (Isidliso is the name of a small creature that witches put in a person’s chest. It then eats away at the person’s insides, accounting for the ‘wasting away’ phenomenon.)
The fact that many families don’t acknowledge a relative is dying or has died of AIDSÂ is true in much of Africa, and accounts in part for “witchcraft” as an explanation. It is easier to accept that a person has been cursed by evil witches than a) that their spouse or partner got them sick or b) that their own behavior is to blame. Besides, it is not difficult to imagine how a sickness that spreads as easily as HIV and is so devestating to the people who have it could have a supernatural dimension to it, or that it might be easy to believe a supernatural explanation. (We have had our own version of that in the West, with many religious leaders suggesting that the disease is God’s judgement on gay people or promiscuous people.)
Despite the fact that so many people have it, AIDS is highly stigmatized. When I was in South Africa last year, I never heard it mentioned, even though I was living with two different Zulu families and has several conversations with teen girls about their boyfriends, who were sometimes more than twice their age.Â
When I was staying with a family in a small town about an hour or two outside of Pietermaritzburg, a friend of mine went to the local health clinic and asked the doctor there what the stats were. Based on rates of testing in the clinic, she estimated that 80% of child-bearing-age or pregnant women (ages 15-40) were HIV positive. That seems unnaturally high (and we shold definitely consider the source, a doctor in a struggling clinic who desperately needs money and might estimate on the high side in order to guarantee a better source of funding from the government) but it could be true.
More later.
I’ve been remiss writing about this topic, which has consumed me for the last few months and will probably consume me for the next couple as well while I put the finishing touches on my latest novel. The novel is a coming-of-age story set in urban South Africa, with a young Zulu girl reaching puberty just as her mother starts dying of AIDS. Now in South Africa, as in much of subSaharan Africa, AIDS is a tricky topic. Though many people understand that HIV is transmitted sexually, they do not see that as incompatible with the idea that they have HIV because they were also cursed by a witch. 
Photo credit: Sumayya Ismail They also are not entirely convinced that western medicine is any better than traditional healing and in fact recognize certain diseases as purely African, not western, which can only be cured by a sangoma (diviner/healer) or inyanga (healer)Â because western doctors simply aren’t equipped to deal with it. Further, death is never natural, especially when the person dying is young.
Yesterday my sister-in-law Annie, who is well on her way to being a doctor, told me she had finished reading an earlier version and she had a few questions.
First of all, she was wondering how the western medical tradition and the sangoma/inyanga medical tradition viewed each other. Read More
Last night, we went to eat at a local sushi restaurant that happens to be our favorite sushi restaurant. (Chris doesn’t eat sushi but he gets the Happy Dinner Box, which allows him to get beef and chicken and vegetable tempura, while I go for the raw fish. Yum.) I was about halfway through my hot sake, and feeling it baby, when I heard a voice that sounded suspiciously familiar behind me. I sneaked a peak and realized (oh sh**) that one of my students from last semester was there with her boyfriend. I did not want her to see me soused with hot sake (Chris assured me that yes, I looked thoroughly and unrepentently drunk) so I hunched my back and whispered to Chris and generally tried not to look around again. But me and my pink hair are hard to miss. When our bill came, inside was a note instead of the bill: “Ms. Powers, I had a great time in your class–thanks so much! I learned a ton. Love, K____.” That was really sweet of her–and brought tears to my eyes (maybe that was the hot sake)–and reminded me that sometimes you feel useless and horrible and unliked as a teacher but that’s not necessarily true. Thank you, K_____ for making it all worthwhile!
I got an email from Lee Byrd at Cinco Puntos Press today, telling me that Bobby always said he shot himself in one foot when he decided to become a poet and shot himself in the other foot when he decided to become a publisher. Then she said, “Well, you already know what it’s like not to be able to walk.” (She’s referring to the 3 months I spent in a wheelchair post-getting-hit-by-a-truck-twice while I was trying to cross a busy intersection.)
This is what scares me MOST about this new venture. The last two years in the Ph.D. program, it’s been hard hard hard to do both. I readily admit it. I am miserable, trying to do both at the same time. When I’m just writing, I’m fine. When I’m just doing the Ph.D., I’m fine (well, not fine, exactly, because I’m miserable when I’m not writing but it’s not as stressful as trying to do both at the same time.) My adviser, who has always been incredibly supportive, has told me just this: You can do both, he has said several times, but you probably can’t do both at exactly the same time. He might have used the word “sequencing.”
And now I’m publishing books. Am I crazy?
Yes, somebody shoot me now.
But this is precisely why I’m a) going to keep the number of books I publish small, very small and b) not follow the traditional publishing format. Tons more on that at the press’s blog, of course, in coming weeks. And here.
By the way, the New Pages table at the AWP will be table 215 Americas Hall 1.
Michael Ventura, a writer I have never heard of but probably should have because he’s a Texas writer. Anyway, he apparently knows what it takes to be a writer–and so he wrote a really interesting essay, “The Talent of the Room,” about what it takes–the ability to sit, alone, in a room for twenty+ years. You can have skill, talent, fascinating things to say, etc., but if you don’t have that one skill, you will never last beyond your initial promise. At least, that’s what he argues. But he also says that if you have the talent required to spend years alone in a room, it’s a dangerous talent and it can be your undoing as a writer. Writing is about memory–and if you spend too much time in that memory, your love for the present subsides and your writing begins to suck and peopel will tell you it sucks.
Good article. Definitely worth reading.
I will be at the New Pages table for much of the AWP conference Jan. 30-Feb. 2. Please drop by and say hi.
