How do people respond to the news that they are HIV positive? To date, there have been few published qualitative studies of HIV diagnosis experiences, and none focusing on Caribbean people. Twenty-five HIV-positive Caribbean people in London, UK, related their diagnosis experience and its immediate aftermath in semi-structured interviews. Diagnosis with HIV caused profound shock and distress to participants, as they associated the disease with immediate death and stigmatisation. The respondents struggled with biographical disruption, the radical disjuncture between life before and after diagnosis, which led them into a state of liminality, as they found themselves betwixt and between established structural and social identities. Respondents were faced with multifaceted loss: of their known self, their present life, their envisioned future and the partner they had expected to play a role in each of these. A minority of accounts suggest that the way in which healthcare practitioners delivered the diagnosis intensified the participants' distress
Hodge candidly talks about her childhood, studies, life, etc. She also states that she writes about her cultural situation in the colonial era, but not as feminists take it. She also works for social advancement of women
In April 1999, Dionne Brand, Leslie Sanders, and Rinaldo Walcott sat down to have a conversation about Brand's second novel At The Full and Change of the Moon. The
interview took place over a promised riposte, and was a conversation among friends.
The novel concerns itself with the contemporary lives of the descendents of Marie Ursule a slave who commits a rebellious and horrific act of mass poisoning on a plantation but saves her daughter Bolla.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
209 p., Collects interviews with queer Caribbean writers, activists, and citizens and challenges the dominance of Euro-American theories in understanding global queerness.
