Blood On The Page: Interviews With African Authors Writing About
HIV/AIDS By Lizzy Attree (Hardback, 2010)

The fourteen interviews in this book form an unprecedented wealth of material on authors' responses to HIVAIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe They comprise a valuable archive which documents and contextualises the variety of views and opinions of different authors on their often ground-breaking choices in writing about HIVAIDS Each author ranks among the first to publish fiction on HIVAIDS in their respective countries These interviews are of particular merit as these issues have not been discussed at length with any of the authors before Collectively they offer a unique range of approaches and opinions in response to the HIVAIDS pandemic in southern Africa Their significance lies in their specific literary as well as their broader social cultural and political perspectives on a disease
which continues to spread despite extensive NGO medical and government intervention In both South Africa and Zimbabwe government responses have failed to address the urgent need for new political and economic solutions to the challenge of HIV infection Responses among the population have varied from widespread silence shame and fear to political activism and outspoken critiques of government inaction Writers give voice to this silence and contextualise the disparate reactions amongst diverse peoples Globally AIDS killed approximately 2 million in 2008 In 1998 AIDS was the largest killer in southern Africa nearly double the one million deaths from malaria and eight times the 209000 deaths from tuberculosis It has long been the case that of those dying globally of AIDS the majority live in
southern Africa When the associated social and cultural implications of infection with HIV are considered fictional representations contribute significantly to our understanding of the impact of HIVAIDS on communities and individuals and provide a much-needed basis for 'humanising' an epidemic which is unimaginable statistically It has been said that the feelings and reactions that HIVAIDS inspires are often 'too unreal for words' and it is this very notion that certain diseases are taboo unmentionable and hardly even named as such that makes verbalisation of this epidemic a modern imperative