Since 1999 South African writers have discreetly and distantly written about HIV/AIDS in their work, but it was not until 2009 that HIV was given its own voice - in the first person - in Kgebetli Moele's The Book of the Dead.
Dr Lizzy Attree will be presenting an excerpt from this, The Voice of HIV - Representing the Invisible and Speaking the Unspeakable, at a seminar hosted by the Faculty of Humanities along with the English Department on 12 April at 5 pm.
Attree has a PhD from SOAS, University of London on 'The Literary Response to HIV and AIDS in literature from Zimbabwe and South Africa from 1990 - 2005' and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa in 2009. She has taught at both undergraduate and master's levels in African literature at SOAS.
The trajectory of the representation of HIV/AIDS in South African literature has crept closer and closer to the personal over the last ten years. Now, thirty years after the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, HIV finally can speak for itself.
The voice that remains absent in South African fiction is the voice of the first person narrator who is infected with HIV. Moele cleverly depicts twinned narrative perspectives as two sides of an angel of death, one embodied in the third person and the other, disembodied in the first person, both united in the haunted body of the HIV positive protagonist Khutso.
The presentation will be held in the Faculty of Humanities Seminar Room. All who are interested are invited to attend.