"Anger and hostility, snide subterfuge and a great deal of pious finger wagging. The illness is less important than appropriating blame, if blame were there"
Pascal Brannan, At your own Risk p.123.

While in medical discourse the link between the HIV+ status and the development of full-blown AIDS is not as clear as it was once thought to be, there can be little doubt that in the mind of the lay person a positive HIV diagnosis still equates to a terminal condition. As an incurable, largely sexually transmitted, and frequently fatal infection, AIDS holds a particularly fertile grip on the imagination; so much so that it is now a cliché to invoke the trinity of great human and literary themes - love, sex and death - in any summation of the disease's significance.

In matters of the epistemology of AIDS, scientific explanations seem, on the whole, to have been granted common currency in the popular press with questions such as "Where did AIDS originate?" running alongside those of "When will we find a cure?" However, parallel to the rational scientific pursuit of knowledge in the hope of finding a vaccine by tracing the geographical and biological origins of the virus, a darker murder-mystery style motivation of finding a culprit is visible beneath the veneer of philosophical respectability as one progresses from the purely medical to the literary. Indeed it could be maintained that the desire to apportion blame is part of an emotive quest to seek and destroy the villain responsible for the AIDS epidemic since the desire to hold someone, or something, accountable for one's misfortune seems to remain a fairly constant human trait. Consequently it is possible, as the AIDS epidemic reaches the end of its second decade, to draw up a list of suspects in the hunt for the original killer, the one who brought this misfortune on mankind.

As, to date, no one single cause of AIDS has been identified, the critic-cum-detective cannot rule out the literary significance of any one suspect. It is nonetheless possible to firstly classify the originators of the disease into two broad categories; the "personal" and the "metaphysical-mythical". For the purposes of the present discussion, the "personal" is understood to mean the "real" individual to whom the body-positive person can attribute their condition; thus, when applied to any AIDS narrative (short story, novel, personal account, (auto)biography), the "personal" suspect can generally be identified as the individual (or group) responsible - explicitly or implicitly - for transmitting the AIDS virus to the HIV+ protagonist(s). The "personal" suspect is almost always known to the AIDS sufferer. So, for example, in Jim Hutton's Mercury and Me, his account of his life with pop-singer Freddie Mercury, the suspects for Freddie's infection are his numerous lovers. For Jim, who also diagnoses HIV+, the personal suspect is Mercury himself. In contrast, the "metaphysical mythical" implies those thought-systems, theories or paradigms which attempt to codify the advent of the AIDS virus in terms of its historical, religious, philosophical or moral significance for mankind: to elucidate simply, "metaphysical-mythical" explanations are frequently those which are generated in response to the question: "Why has AIDS happened to humankind"? In the ensuing discussion the concept of the "personal" suspect is explored in relation to a variety of AIDS narratives. This is then followed by an examination of the notion of the framing of Africa as a "metaphysical-mythical" suspect.

Among the list of personal suspects drawn up from any literary AIDS corpus, one would expect the names of past and/or present lovers to be evoked, or possibly the memory of a fellow IV drug user. Frequently the nature of the virus transmission between the AIDS sufferer and the personal suspect is depicted in cause and effect terms: X (AIDS carrier) slept with Y, so Y now has AIDS, or A (seropositive) shared needle with B, and B is now HIV+, and so on. The collection of interviews edited by Elaine Landau, We have AIDS, provides a number of excellent illustrations of this point. This book comprises a series of nine testimonies made by HIV+ American adolescents who attribute their positive status to different causes. With each teenager it is possible to identify a (relatively precise) personal suspect; for Karen it is her former boyfriend Ken, for Cheryl it is her drug-user ex-boyfriend Larry, for Allison it is the boy to whom she lost her virginity in Italy, for Allen and Jason it is their gay lovers.

The concept of personal suspect might reasonably be extended to include "point of infection" for those with medically acquired AIDS, and so in Landau's book the point of infection for Gary is the blood transfusion he received after his car accident, and for Paul and his brother, both haemophiliacs, it would be one of the many transfusions or injections of blood products. Although not the case in Landau's book, it is clear that the "point of infection" may take on the human face of a member of the medical corps. The professionally negligent doctor or nurse is then, along with the lover and the drug addict, another member of the category of personal suspects.

For some writers and AIDS sufferers the personal suspect or point of infection is of great significance, for others the issue passes unmentioned. Among the body of fiction in which the exact identity of the personal suspect is not explicitly revealed one can include those texts generated by many openly gay authors/narrators who simply allow the reader to suspect an anonymous lover. This is the case with British film director Derek Jarman - in both his Modern Nature and his At Your own Risk - whose concerns are more based around living with AIDS than analysing the source of his personal infection. American novelist Stan Leventhal in his Skydiving on Christopher Street also falls into this category; concentrating on improving his present condition and developing a new relationship with a HIV+ partner, he gives no thought to the past lover, or lovers, who may have been responsible for his own acquisition of the virus. Similarly, in PWA, writer for Britain's Guardian, Oscar Moore focusses on the day to day reality of living with the disease and omits any revelation of his personal suspect. This literature of silent personal suspects may be deemed to include works in which the central character is openly homosexual and the cause of infection is assumed (by the narrtor and the reader) to be unsafe sex; this is the case in Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli's Someone you know; here the subject of the novel is the friendship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man who contracts AIDS; the personal suspect is not known to the author/narrator, Maria, and is never mentioned by Jon the sufferer.

In contrast, there are those for whom the point of infection, or personal suspect, is of critical importance; such is the case with April Fool's Day, in which author Bryce Courtenay is at great pains to insist upon the fact that his heterosexual, haemophiliac son, Damien, was infected by medical means. The novel is in no small part an indictment of the medical profession and its handling of the AIDS crisis. For Courtenay it is the medical profession that is entirely to blame for the spread of AIDS among haemophiliacs and other recipients of blood products.

Elsewhere, the relationship between personal suspect and person infected is central to the storyline as in David Rees' The Wrong Apple, in which David's relationship with his younger lover Kim is badly soured when David passes the virus onto him. The novel also shows the ironic blissful happiness of another couple where one partner, Mike, does not reveal his HIV+ status and the other, Danny, chooses not to investigate. This viral link between HIV carrier and partner is also at the heart of Laura's wild ravings against Jean in Cyril Collard's Les Nuits fauves, in which Laura (wrongly) believes herself to be HIV+ as a result of her sexual relationship with bisexual Jean. The perverse and psychologically damaging rapport between Laura and her personal suspect is central to the action in both the book and the film. That Laura is not actually HIV+ is a detail which is concealed from the reader until the novel's conclusion, an important fact in the maintenance of Laura's self righteous blaming of Jean for her unhappiness and mental turmoil.

Certain personal suspects transcend the boundaries of their individuality and in the collective consciousness attain an almost mythical status. Almost every major Western metropolis has its share of crime stories in which hold-up victims are held at syringe point, fearing a deadly injection of the AIDS virus. And there are the many urban myths and legends about the HIV+ nymphomaniac, a modern avatar of the femme fatale, who cruises the nightclubs in search of one-night-unsafe-sex-lovers in order to pass on her virus to all men, by way of revenge - Juliette, the narrator of Pourquoi moi? Confession d'une jeune femme d'aujourd'hui, is one such character. In particular, one personal suspect to attain this high degree of notoriety is Gaetan Dugas, the French-Canadian airline steward, subject of several documentaries including "A Time of AIDS" and the unusual musical-comedy "Zero Patience". Through his unbridled sexual promiscuity, he is believed by many to be the legendary "Patient Zero" allegedly responsible for the early rapid spread of the virus in the United States. Airline stewards have long held a particularly important place in the theories concerning the diffusion of the AIDS epidemic. As Lévy and Nouss rightly point out in their Sida-fiction (34-35), their mythological status is akin to that of Renaissance sailors who, it is believed, were responsible for the spread of syphilis. In Adam Mars-Jones' short story "A small spade" [The Darker Proof] the character Bernard subscribes to this line of thought:

Bernard had an image of airline stewards (flight attendants, whatever euphemism you cared to choose) as sheer vectors of sexual transmission, their buttocks a blur all the time they weren't actually handing out soft drinks and headphones [...] If any political party had included in its platform the compulsory fitting of chastity belts to airline stewards, he would have thrown his full electoral weight behind it. (88-89)

As patient zero, Dugas thus personifies the flight-attendant theory of AIDS transmission and therefore stands as a kind of collective personal suspect on the threshold of the metaphysical-mythological.

From this small sample of AIDS texts, it would appear that the question of blame for the contraction of the AIDS virus can be resolved, on the personal level, in a relatively simple manner, by both the narrator and the reader, in the sense that the AIDS sufferer is able to identify, with some degree of accuracy, the person who infected them or at least the circumstances in which viral transmission occurred. In these cases the culprit is more or less tangible, if not personified. In short, one person, event, or accident can be blamed for the acquisition of AIDS in the individual. However, as the amount of attention given to the personal suspect varies enormously from author to author, from text to text, it is evident that the question of blame itself is one which is not uniformly explored by all AIDS writers in terms of the personal. Furthermore it is important to recognise that the issue of self blame has not been explored in this discussion.

Whereas the AIDS sufferer is able to identify tangibly their personal suspect (or point of infection), on the metaphysical-mythical level, the question of blame or responsibility often falls, not on the individual, but on the abstract or intangible. In the collective consciousness of contemporary Western society, metaphysical-mythical explanations of the origins of AIDS are numerous and diverse; the most obvious falling into three broad categories: the religious (Donna Summer's talk of God's revenge and divine retribution for sins against the moral order), the conspiratorial (biological warfare), and the scientific (the Robert Gallo/ Luc Montaignier altercation).¹ Many AIDS writers have dealt with these broad currents of thought to greater and lesser degrees; Michel Philip in his play "Deuil", brings a priest on stage to debate the issue of whether or not AIDS is a punishment from God. In Skydiving on Christopher Street Stan Leventhal, uninterested in naming the individual who gave him the HIV virus, discusses to some degree the culpability of the US government in withholding funds for research and he questions: "Would you be terribly surprised to learn that AIDS was born in an American Military-Industrial test tube?" (71). As recently as 1996, Oscar Moore, Britain's writer from the AIDS front to the Guardian, in the introduction to his PWA, reveals a general acceptance of the scientific hypothesis that the disease originated in African monkeys:

And even as it [AIDS] thinks of more diseases of cats, sheep and pigeons to throw at me (predictable tactics for a virus believed to have jumped from a central African monkey), I will be here to tell you about it. (xxxvi)

In the light of the preceding discussion of personal suspects, the metaphysical-mythical framing of Africa as originator of the AIDS epidemic is of particular interest. In the epilogue to his study, De la Syphilis au Sida, Jean Goens reaffirms the scientific basis of the hypothesis of Africa as originator of the virus. He claims that tests carried out retrospectively on tissue conserved from the 1950s and 60s of victims of then unknown diseases have been shown to carry HIV and furthermore, that in all cases, the point of contamination was most likely Africa. He states that small outbreaks of the disease were known in central Africa in the 1970s and that the disease is generally accepted to be of African origin. However, little explanation is offered as to the reasons for the sudden and rapid spread in the 1970s of a virus which may be assumed to have been in existence for thousands of years.²

Furthermore it should be stated that scientific thought is only one of many elements which influence the production of any artistic work. Of equal, if not greater importance, are the cultural beliefs held by the artist. Logically, in this case, it would seem of critical significance to make mention of the notion that in the Western imagination, as Lévy and Nouss reaffirm, the African continent has long been associated with all that is instinctive, primitive and sexual. A visual reminder of this is provided by the photographic work of the late Robert Mapplethorpe, himself having succumbed to AIDS related illnesses. Much of the originality of his photographs of African-Americans hinges upon the play of contrasting cultural associations. His frequently cited "Man in polyester Suit" (1980) is a case in point, where the Apollonian respectability and conventionality of the Western outfit is in stark contrast with the naked sexuality of the (African) penis.

Undoubtedly following the developments in scientific research and influenced to varying degrees by an inherited cultural value sytem, some Western AIDS authors have seized upon the role of Africa as being central to the epistemology of the epidemic. It appears that with the advent of AIDS writing, Africa has yet again been reinscribed, in Western thought, as the dark, mysterious and ultimately dangerous continent. The status of Africa as metaphysical-mythological suspect has had currency among writers of AIDS literature for over a decade. Indeed the allusions to the implication of Africa in the genesis of the epidemic have already undergone several mutations.

Presented as a radio play for Radio Canada in 1986, Michel Philip's "Deuil", written in the aftermath of the death of his companion, Fred, arrives at the question of blame in the final scene. A once-upon-a-time, fairy-tale aetiology of the AIDS virus is presented:

A qui la faute? Quelque part en Afrique, il y avait un virus mortel. Les médecins ne l'avaient même pas décelé: on meurt si jeune en Afrique centrale, les gens sont si pauvres, il y a tant de maladies, tant de malades, si peu de médecins... On est encore plus pauvre en Haïti, où il n'y a pas de travail. Des Haïtiens sont allés travailler au Zaïre dans les années soixante-dix. Ils y ont attrapé le virus. Ils sont rentrés chez eux. Il a suffi que quelques gays américains couchent avec des Ha�tiens contaminés... (40).

The accusation is vague; poverty and lack of hygiene seem to blame as much as anything; the deadly virus simply originated in Africa, the exact geographic, temporal and biological conditions which spawned it are veiled by the narrative's imprecision.

It is also an Africa of poverty and famine which is framed as the origin of suffering by the AIDS-stricken narrator of Adam Mars-Jones' short story "Slim" who deliberately avoids the acronyms of medical AIDS-speak. He goes so far as to oblige his volunteer buddy to call his lesions 'blackcurrants'. Although he apparently blames no-one for his condition, it is significant that he refers to his disease as "an African infection" (4), and that he only ever calls the virus "Slim" maintaining that "Slim is what they call it in Uganda, and its a perfectly sensible name" (3). Pursuing the link with Africa, the narrator imagines the following uncharitable scenario:

I think that maybe I've been adopted by an African family, that poor as they are they are sending me what they can spare from their tainted food, their poisoned water, their little lifespans. (4)

The multiple ironies of the conceit of reversed charity aid abroad do little to conceal a certain bitterness at Africa's presumed culpability.

Other writers have been more specific in their attribution of blame, claiming that the green monkeys are the biological breeding ground of the AIDS plague. Well before Oscar Moore, Hervé Guibert named man's simian cousins as the guilty party in A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie. Those acquainted with the identification of the character of Muzil with the philosopher Michel Foucault, will firstly appreciate the intellectual and cultural weight of the observation attributed directly to him by Guibert that AIDS: "C'est un machin qui doit nous venir d'Afrique" (17). Secondly, the narrator makes explicit the role of the monkeys in the infection of man, but not before another key element in Africa's potential culpability is identified: "Le sida, qui a transité par le sang des singes verts, est une maladie de sorciers, d'envoûteurs" (17). Sorcery and black magic, almost stereotypical in any Western depiction of Africa's exoticism and dangerousness, are brought into the picture and exposed as key elements in the imagery of AIDS.

Maxime Montel takes the contamination from monkeys theory a step in the direction of Africa's perceived polyvalent sexuality, thereby adding zoophilia to the catalogue of African evils. In his unusual Un mal imaginaire, Montel paints, albeit ironically, an apocalyptic vision of the consequences of inter-species copulations and unbridled lust hidden in an almost primeval mire of filth:

Une telle calamité n'a pas manqué de semer l'épouvante. A son propos s'est esquissée une sorte de cosmologie: dans un tiers monde nauséabond où copulent hommes et singes, des échanges incessants s'opèrent entre le sol, les haleines fétides animales et la lubricité des indigènes; les cycles d'une vie infernale se déroulent obscurément à l'abri des jungles et des marais; des vapeurs, des exhalaisons immondes y composent le venin qui va anéantir la planète. (39)

Africa, the metaphysical-mythological suspect, is subtly personified as Zachary in Yves Navarre's Ce sont amis que vent emporte. Roch, the narrator, in his poetic account of his love story with David, traces the source of their infection with the AIDS virus back to the time when they were living as a threesome with Zachary in New York. Zachary, whose cremation is paid for by Roch and David, is none other than their personal suspect, the reason for being of Roch's AIDS composition: "Zachary était «ravissant », puissant prétexte de ce texte, sang d'encre de ces lignes" (69). Young and athletic, Zachary's characterisation betrays him, however distantly, to be of African origin:

«je suis comme le vent du sud en Afrique, j'ai toujours été là »; parce que ce fut la bamboche avec Zachary, il sortait d'une chambre d'hôtel, il est entré dans la nôtre pour une cigarette, tout noir, totem, lèvres roses et dents blanches. (66)

The framing of Africa as a metaphysical-mythological suspect in the search for a philosophical culprit in the literature of AIDS takes on a variety of forms which, even from this limited and fairly random selection of Western texts, can be seen to draw heavily on a series of cultural myths frequently associated with Africa. As more scientific and investigative research is completed, it may be shown, as Leonard Horowitz suggests in his Emerging Viruses, that Africa's role in the incubation of AIDS is largely circumstantial. To truly redress the interpretive balance, a close examination of AIDS literature from an African perspective needs to be done. Undoubtedly, such a study would reveal quite different metaphysical-mythical suspects; Africans themselves may suspect their own governments of being implicated in the spread of AIDS, as is suggested in Dominique Fernandez's La Gloire du paria:

Les Zaïrois, dont la langue officielle est le français, avaient surnommé le sida «syndrome imaginaire pour décourager les amoureux» [...] Ils se moquaient de ce qu'ils pensaient être un stratagème du gouvernement pour combattre le relachement des moeurs. (86)

Alternatively, AIDS may be seen as a Western plague, the result of depravity and crime; as hinted, for example, in Moudjib Djinadou's Mo gbé: Le cri de mauvais augure. Thus, in matters of blame, to what degree Africa and the West stand on opposite sides of a metaphysical-mythical AIDS divide still remains to be seen.

Bibliography

Primary texts

Cyril Collard. Les Nuits fauves. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.

Bryce Courtenay. April Fool's Day: A Modern Love Story. Kew: Heinemann Australia, 1993.

Dominique Fernandez. La Gloire du paria. Paris: Livre de poche, 1988.

Hervé Guibert. A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Derek Jarman. Modern Nature. London: Vintage, 1992.

Derek Jarman. At Your own Risk. London: Hutchinson, 1992.

Juliette. Pourquoi moi? Confession d'une jeune femme d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Laffont, 1987.

Elaine Landau (Ed.). We have AIDS. New York: Franklin Watts, 1990.

Stan Leventhal. Skydiving on Christopher Street. New York: Masquerade Books, 1995.

Adam Mars-Jones and Edmund White. The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

Maxime Montel. Un mal imaginaire. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1994.

Oscar Moore. PWA: Looking AIDS in the face. London: Picador, 1996.

Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli. Someone you know: A friend's farewell. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 1991.

Michel Philip. Deuil. L'avant scène théâtre, 1er novembre 1987: 24-40.

David Rees. The Wrong Apple. NY: Knight's Press, 1987.

Films

Joseph Beven, Jenny Barraclough & Katherine Carpend. A Time of AIDS. 1993.

John Greyson. Zero Patience. 1993.

Secondary texts

Joseph Lévy and Alexis Nouss. Sida-Fiction: Essai d'anthropologie romanesque. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1994.

Leonard Horowitz. Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?. Rockport, MA: Tetrahedron, 1997.

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