Review -- Chimombo’s ‘Aids artists and authors’:A look at creative arts responses to Aids

Reviewed By Emmanuel Luciano

The theme of Aids as a source of artistic inspiration has brought and borne many artistic products in the form of poems, short stories, novels, paintings, and even films.
Though the didactic role artists have played in the fight against HIV/Aids since its discovery in the country in 1985 is well documented, not much academic study has been done in this area so as to critically look at the artistic responses to the pandemic.
Professor Emeritus Steve Chimombo’s Aids artists and authors is the book that critically dissects the creative works that the theme of Aids solicited from 1985 to 2006.
This is the not the first time though that Chimombo, the literati, is involved in a project of this nature. Actually this is the author’s fourth book in which he is analysing popular responses to ‘selected social-political event in Malawi’.
In Malawian Oral literature the author examined the use of folklore in contemporary society while in the Culture of Democracy, a book he co-authored, the emphasis was on the society’s responses to the transition from dictatorial to democratic rule. The Epic of the Forest Creatures is an analysis that was handled in a poetic form. Other works by Chimombo need no cataloging just as the author himself need no introduction.
But in Aids artists and authors, however, the author exposes the bathos and pathos of the literary genres of short stories, poems and the novel that captured the Aids theme from 1985 to 2006. How the Aids theme was explored in the visual arts has also been tackled to a greater extent.
It is interesting to note, for instance, how the authors’ handling of the theme in their works was largely influenced by the knowledge they had about the disease. In earlier writing the writers were picking up the beliefs, misconceptions people had about Aids and incorporated them in their works.
Though Chimombo has covered everything that needs to be said about the way the works of art, it is the structural problems, the jargon used, the character employed that demonstrates that HIV/Aids might not have been covered properly after all. The language of Aids campaigns inevitably creeps in sometimes rather awkward places…It is obvious not much communication is taking place here (Page 104).
It is not surprising, therefore, that while applauding other writers in the case of short story the author says: At one end of the instinctive evaluative scale we have an almost formless mass of text masquerading as a short story because the editor published in a column labelled such (page 108).
The book also demonstrates that there was little coverage of the Aids theme in the novel and visual arts area. Masa Lemu’s Masks of Aids and The grave Diggers, and David Scot’s The Shadow of Aids seem to be the only noted paintings to have been exhibited on Aids. Aids on stone, as the book demonstrates, was also peripherally covered.
I would have loved if the author had included some recent songs from other artists other than only zeroing on Black Paseli’s contribution.
Considering that the nature of the project necessitated the author to furrow in a large volume of archive material, he needs to be commended for thus dissecting the works of art that inundated the country from 1985 to 2006.
It might as well become a recommended if not a prescribed text for studying Aids and creative arts in Malawi.
Published by Wasi Publication, this 226-paged book is available in all bookshops in the country.