Life Writing

In the mid-1990s, the publication of AIDS memoirs reached a peak (Demmer 2007, 295). With few exceptions, however, they were written by white US-American homosexual men who offered insight into the lives of people who were affected by what was then considered a terminal illness. With the introduction of antiretrovirals, these ‘chronicles of dying’ (ibid.) lost in relevance because the number of AIDS-related deaths was in decline in North America and Europe. In South Africa, however, the situation is different; the epidemic has long been a taboo topic and treatment is not as widely available. Exploring their lives with HIV/AIDS, Adam Levin's AIDSAFARI (2005) and Edwin Cameron's Witness to AIDS (2005a) render the virus and its effects visible to the public. In the art book Long Life: Positive HIV Stories (2003), the Bambanani Women not only write about their experiences and lives but also express themselves visually, mainly through painting and photography.

‘Life writing’ is an umbrella term referring to a variety of texts about the ‘self’ or ‘individual’. One reason for using the term ‘life writing’ in this study becomes apparent in the term's connotation: unlike ‘autobiography’ or ‘chronicles of dying’, the term spells out the writers' interest in and focus on staying alive. Another major reason is its inclusiveness. In her introduction to Essays on Life Writing, Marlene Kadar defines ‘life writing’ as a category of ‘texts that are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else, and who also does not pretend to be absent from the […] text himself/herself’ (Kadar 1992, 10).