Q&A with Johnny Steinberg
2008-05-15 08:55
News24 chats to Johnny Steinberg, author of Three-Letter Plague about the many facets he uncovered about HIV and Aids in South Africa.
Award-winning author Jonny Steinberg explores the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of HIV/Aids. He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who runs a spaza shop who refuses to be tested for Aids despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is this apparent illogic that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a complex and traditional rural community.
As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain maddeningly just out of reach, he realises that he must look within himself to unravel certain riddles.
News24: What motivated you to write a book like Three-Letter Plague?
Johnny Steinberg: There's a very weird situation with Aids in South Africa. Although we talk about it incessantly, we've bracketed it off from the rest of life and given it it's own stone-dead language, one that is becoming increasingly meaningless. Yet Aids is probably the biggest thing that's happened in everyday South African life in generations; this many people confronting this scale of death - it changes everyday life irrevocably.
So I wanted to stitch the question of Aids back into ordinary life, to give a visceral sense of how it infects a healthy young man's sense of himself as a son, a lover, a father and a shopkeeper: how it changes what these things mean.
News24: You spend a great deal of the book trying to understand the choices and beliefs of the people you interview. Do you feel these views are representative of the larger South African population?
Johnny Steinberg: Any piece of South Africa you choose to write about is simultaneously particular and general. One of the big lessons I learnt writing this book is that Thabo Mbeki's views on Aids are illustrative of a deep seam in South African society; that he expresses a discomfort many black men are feeling.
I learnt too that Jacob Zuma represents a whole different sort of Aids denialism; one we will see more of in the future, and that that too is reflective of a discomfort many black men are feeling. I think I learnt much about South Africa writing this book, and hope that readers did too.
News24: The concept of paranoia and mistrust felt by the people you interviewed towards white men and science - that they bring the disease in their needles when they come to administer testing and ARVs; that there is a cure but it is held back - is a powerful theme in the book. Do you think that will continue to prove to be a barrier in the fight against HIV and Aids for many years to come?
Johnny Steinberg: People who feel shame are always on the brink of feeling as if they are under attack. It comes with the territory. That feeling expresses itself in different ways at different times and in different places. In South Africa, where Aids has become thought of as a black disease, it's hardly a surprise that many people feel as if they're under racial attack. I don't think that that will ever evaporate entirely.
News24: How powerful did you experience the stigma attached to HIV and Aids to be during your research for this book?
Johnny Steinberg: I guess its power lies in its subtlety. Sizwe, the protagonist in the book, knocks on the doors of people who are sick and in denial, and drags them to the clinic. He takes time off work to do so. Spends money from his own pocket. He's saving people. And yet he himself will not even test for HIV. What does this say about his relation to the people he's saving?
I think it shows how complex stigma is. He's drawing them close and distancing himself from them at the same time. He's saying that he's saving them, but only as ruined human beings, and that he refuses to countenance that he may be a ruined human being himself.
News24: One of the dominant narratives is about a man's ambivalence towards testing ("He did not want to test for dirt in his blood, he said, because the knowledge would kill him"). Do you think this is prevalent in South Africa?
Johnny Steinberg: It seems to be a lot more prevalent among men than among women. Women are much better at accessing healthcare than men are, for a range of reasons. They are much better at taking care of their health. Of the people on antiretroviral treatment in South Africa, 70% are women. A lot of men, among them people who have tested positive for HIV, are staying at home and dying.
News24: You touch on African traditions and culture and spirituality many times. How much of an influence do you think this plays in dealing with virus - from the individual to the community and the government?
Johnny Steinberg: I think that many political difficulties are passed off as cultural difficulties. For example, Sizwe's fear of white motives is more about politics than culture; it's about having been dominated for generations, not about innate beliefs.
Another example; there is no intrinsic reason why traditional healing should be pitted against ARV medicine. Our health minister has ensured that they are pitted against one another. A better health minister would have handled things very differently.
News24: You explain Mbeki's Aids denialism like many others have - that accepting the dominant scientific viewpoint is to accept a failure and inferiority in black people. Do you think this completely explains his puzzling HIV/Aids policies? Is there perhaps more to it?
Johnny Steinberg: Well, I think there was real racist prejudice in a great deal of the early epidemiological analyses of why Aids was so bad in Africa, and that Mbeki's ear was finely tuned to such prejudice. Mbeki's problem is that the prejudice got under his skin because in a dreadful way he actually shares it.
Read Mark Gevisser's biography of him and you'll hear him mouthing off at how black directors-general get Aids because their new wealth goes to their heads and they can't keep their pants on! He sounds, at times, like a redneck in a black skin!
News24: How do you think a new government could handle the pandemic? Are you optimistic things will chance once Mbeki goes?
Johnny Steinberg: I'm not optimistic. Jacob Zuma doesn't have the problems with Aids treatment Mbeki does, and he will hopefully allow good people back into the public health system. But on HIV prevention Zuma is a disaster.
We are deep into this epidemic now, and the rate of new infections remains very, very high. And here is a leader who says that when a woman is aroused it is his moral duty to sleep with her.
Zuma has projected himself as a powerful man who has been wronged, and so many men in South Africa who have done badly during the transition to democracy, men who feel they have had their control over women and jobs and households stolen from them, are identifying with him.
He is suggesting to them that they can retrieve their manhood through sexual prowess; in the midst of a sexually transmitted epidemic, this in not good news.
News24: You bring your own experiences of HIV testing into the narrative towards the end of the book. Was this a decision you made later based on your struggle to end the book or had you always intended to include part of your story into the tale?
Johnny Steinberg: It's a decision I made later. In the beginning I thought: "This book isn't remotely about me. Sizwe is different from me in every conceivable way." But then I found myself struggling to understand why he wouldn't test, and these vague troubling flashbacks from my past came to me. I remembered, for the first time in many years, that I too had fled HIV testing centres. The parallel was too glaring to ignore.
I tried to retrieve these memories more fully, and to re-experience as best I could the emotions I was feeling when I couldn't test, and I think that as a result I understand Sizwe a little better than I would have had I not explored my own past.
News24: The themes you try to tease out seem firmly rooted in "Lusikisiki" and in Sizwe's experience, but how universal do you think they are?
Johnny Steinberg: Well, they are both particular and universal. Sizwe feels shamed by a sense that he is greedy and is worried that the punishment he faces for his greed is the poisoning of his semen. That's a universal story. You can place it anywhere. The modulations will obviously differ a great deal from place to place, but I think that with a little imagination any and every reader can find him- or herself seized by Sizwe's fears.
News24: How involved do you remain in these stories and in these peoples' lives after your books are published? Do you feel a responsibility to continue telling their stories in other ways?
Johnny Steinberg: I've been living in New York since the beginning of the year which makes staying in touch hard. I phone Sizwe on his cellphone every couple of weeks, and find when I hear his voice that I miss him and his village very much. But no, I probably won't write much about him anymore.
But I carry with me a sense of gratitude that he and others shared at least some of their interior worlds with me; I like to hope that we'll feel warmly about one another for some time to come.
News24: What's next for Johnny Steinberg?
Johnny Steinberg: I'm in the early stages of a book about a community of Liberians who live in a housing project in New York.
I'm learning all over again that writing a book is an experience filled with continual anxiety. Am I understanding things? What am I missing? Will I ever know this world well enough to write about it with confidence? I seem to erase the memory of these anxieties every time I finish a book!
News24: Johnny Steinberg, thanks so much for your time.
Johnny Steinberg: You're welcome!
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