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It is impossible of course not to feel angry about the Aids epidemic that is ravaging our world. The number of unrecorded cases is astronomical and terrifying. For the majority of those affected, death is inevitable. Only a limited number of those with the disease have access to effective ARVs and the full resources that can more or less control the virus.
The virus can infect anybody at all who is careless, unaware or irresponsible. But depending on where you were born or who your parents were, the implications are different. The virus will also infect those who, through poverty, are forced into situations where they are exposed to it. This in itself is enough to arouse and justify anger. This is what our world is like, a twilight zone for poor people in the so-called developing countries. At the same time it is an illusory paradise for those who live in the rich ghettos surrounded by palisades that are growing higher and higher. Death has become an economic question. Solidarity with our fellow men and women is being made more and more difficult.
A growing number of people are forced to accept that their lives are going to be unexpectedly short. They will not be able to watch their children grow up, grow to be in a position to look after themselves. That is why they write their memory books, so that they do not completely disappear from the memories of their children.
In the midst of all this I see Aida and her mango plant. I never saw any trace of her anger, but I am convinced that it exists. Why should her mother have to die when she herself is still so young? Why should Aida have to shoulder responsibilities that are much too great for her to bear? She finds herself in a situation in which she has no choice. The only thing she can do is to protest, and she does that by tending her mango plant, watching it live even as she herself is surrounded by death and more death.
This is the point of what I am writing. We must hope that Aida will not need to write a memory book about her own life for her own children. She is aware that the disease exists, she knows how she can avoid catching it, and she will make demands of the man she meets one day.
Memory Books are important for Aida's sake.
It will be best if her own is never written.
44
What did Aida say when she took me to see the mango plant that she had hidden among the banana trees? As she was very shy, she didn't say much at all.
I think she felt an affinity with that plant. It was young, as she was. I think she wanted to show that she was able to nurture a piece of life, to make something grow and survive; that she had drawn up her own line of defence, there in among the banana trees. Surrounded by death and fear she had planted her little tree as a protection for the living, for things that grow.
But I do remember one thing we spoke about. What mangoes taste like. We were in complete agreement: if you eat one mango, you want to eat another one. Mangoes always make you want more. I asked her how long it would be before her plant was big enough to bear fruit. She didn't know, but she promised to write and tell me.
Now, several months after I met her, as I am writing this, I can't help but think about her name. Aida. One letter makes it different from the name of the disease. Just as one hair's breadth separates life and death.
45
I shall end as I began. One night in June, in 2003, I dream about dead people in a coniferous forest. Everything in the dream is very clear. The smell of moss, the steam rising after autumn rain. Fungi around the roots of the trees, unseen birds taking off from branches that are still shaking. The faces of the dead are inlaid in the tree trunks. It is like wandering through a gallery with an exhibition of unfinished wooden sculptures. Or a studio that has been hurriedly abandoned by the artist.
The faces are contorted. No cries come from their half-open mouths, only silence.
In many ways the dream fills me with unanswered questions. But I know the important thing is that death has a name: Aids.
If I look carefully enough, at the periphery of the dream, I can see a young and still very fragile mango plant, hidden under layers of twigs that protect it.
And close by, a half-rotted plywood coffin that once was used on a theatre stage, but then was spirited out into dark and horrific reality.
We are the ones who decide, nobody else. About what will happen in the trial of strength between the mango plant and the coffin of rotting, black-painted plywood.
Nothing is inevitable.
Nor is anything too late.
Afterword
The people I have written about here exist in the real world. But their words are not only theirs, the words are also mine. What I have written is a record of what I heard them say and to an equal extent my interpretation of what they didn't say out loud.
In conversations overshadowed all the time by death, silences are often long and full of meaning. I have interpreted what I heard and tried to understand what was not said. I have named some people by name, but the text also contains other people and other stories.
I am full of respect for all the dignity, all the strength I found.
My worry is that we do not all of us in our part of the world understand that these people need – and have a right to – our solidarity.
H.M.
Sweden
AUGUST 2003
Twenty Years of Denial
Abridged afterword to the original Swedish edition of this book
It will soon be 20 years since the HIV/Aids epidemic first cropped up as a very real problem in our societies. We know now that some individuals had died of Aids before then, but it was not until the mid-1980s that HIV could be identified clearly and unambiguously. It started as an inexplicable epidemic among gay men in the San Francisco area. After a while we started to hear more and more reports from Africa about a new type of immunodeficiency illness that was affecting many of the countries south of the Sahara.
There was immediately a flood of publicity surrounding this new epidemic. Once the virus had been identified and the ways in which it could be passed on clarified, barely a day passed without enormous headlines in the press and the rest of the media. HIV was portrayed as a horrific plague, in the same league as the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Newspaper reports came from African villages where hundreds of people were ill or dead, from American sauna clubs and drug districts in Zurich and Barcelona. American and European experts competed with each other to describe worst-case scenarios of the future spread of the disease.
Even so, it seemed that the epidemic was not really being taken seriously. One explanation for that might be that the pattern of infection seemed to vary in different parts of the world. In the USA the infection was spread most quickly among homosexual men, and close behind them came drug addicts who injected. Other groups were hardly affected at all in the early days. It was more or less the same in Europe. In Africa, however, a much wider cross-section of society was under threat, with the majority of those infected being women.
Many people in our part of the world drew the somewhat too hasty conclusion that HIV was first and foremost a problem among certain minority groups, notably gay men and drug addicts. That meant that the majority of the population could wash their hands of the problem. This pattern did not apply to the rapid spread of the infection in certain developing countries, it is true: it was maintained that in such areas the problem was due to widespread poverty and poor levels of general health and health care among the population at large.