Growing up in Ethiopia in the early 1980s and coming to the United States as a young teenager in 1989, Dagmawi Woubshet witnessed unprecedented expressions of mourning and loss in both countries in response to the AIDS crisis.
Woubshet, associate professor of English in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频, analyzes these cultures of mourning in 鈥淭he Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS,鈥 published in March by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chronicling some direct responses to the epidemic 鈥 elegiac and otherwise 鈥 as people lost friends, lovers and family members to the disease throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Woubshet provides a comparative study of AIDS writings in the United States and Ethiopia.
He identifies a 鈥減oetics of compounding loss鈥 among orphaned children in Africa and queer American artists, whose collective grief was met with social and political repression, even as they faced their own mortality as a stark and imminent reality.
鈥淏efore life-preserving AIDS drugs such as protease inhibitors became available, an entire generation of gay men were also reckoning with their own impending deaths,鈥 Woubshet said. 鈥淭he political climate was hostile to these men who were dying. There was widespread malfeasance, deafening public silence, deep fear 鈥 and initially there was no government response. The medical establishment did not take AIDS seriously.鈥
For a chapter titled 鈥淎rchiving the Dead,鈥 Woubshet spent more than two months at the New York Public Library reading obituaries in the gay and mainstream press.
鈥淭hat concretized for me how relentless that death toll was,鈥 he said. 鈥淔or some cultural figures who were being lionized in mainstream publications, their cause of death and their sexuality was being erased. In the gay periodicals, there was a different kind of political project going on 鈥 a yearning and effort to actually embrace those elements that a mainstream publication sought to disavow. That resonated for me.鈥
Losing loved ones to HIV and fearing having the virus themselves, mourners were also denied the traditional ritual processes of consolation, time and closure normally afforded the bereaved, Woubshet contends. They instead responded with art and protest.
An AIDS education poster from Ethiopia, "See, hear, speak no evil,鈥 from Cornell's Human Sexuality Collection.(Cornell Library Division of Rare Books and Manuscripts)
鈥淎 few communities actively had to campaign for their survival. That element of fighting to stay alive, literally mourning to survive, informed their creative artistic production,鈥 he said. 鈥淲hen a doctor tells a poet, 鈥榊ou鈥檙e going to die in two months鈥 time,鈥 how do you begin to put that on the page or a canvas?鈥
In addition to gay communities in the U.S., Woubshet also looks at 鈥淎IDS orphans in Ethiopia who鈥檇 lost their parents and were completely shunned by their communities, facing the same kind of stigma,鈥 he said. 鈥淲hen their parents died they couldn鈥檛 find any other caretakers. Some were left abandoned in hospitals, some were left on the streets to fend for themselves. Not only were they bereft of parents, but the world, the entire society, had abandoned them.鈥
Woubshet translated from Amharic into English several letters from children to their deceased parents, written by members of Sudden Flowers, a collective of orphans in Addis Ababa ranging in age from 9 to their mid-teens.
鈥淗ow do children bear loss? They can鈥檛 carry caskets,鈥 he said. 鈥淪ome of the rituals that ground us as adults, they were without. These children did not have a fixed sense of where the dead go. So they kept on talking to the parents, seeing the relationship between them as a separation that was tentative, somewhat in flux.鈥
鈥淭he depth of perception that these children had, that comes across in these letters, was just so profound, and profoundly moving. 鈥淎nd they were carefully crafted,鈥 Woubshet added. 鈥淚 call them Epistles to the Dead, in part because of their literary quality.鈥
While writing the book, Woubshet also taught a seminar on AIDS writing and art, with class assignments utilizing Cornell鈥檚 Human Sexuality Collection. He is now at work on two book projects: 鈥淣ew Flower: A Memoir鈥 and 鈥淗ere Be Saints: James Baldwin鈥檚 Late Style.鈥
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