Jonathan Engel: The Epidemic

I started reading Jonathan Engel’s The Epidemic - A Global History of AIDS, because I am still looking for information about the spread if HIV that’s not focused primarily on the US, or on the origins of AIDS, which tend to end once the virus reaches American soil.

The story of how the epidemic started, how it spread through west and central Africa, and how it reached the US is pretty clear to me at this point, as are many of the details of the battle to identify the caused and contain the epidemic in the US. But I am interested in what’s happened, what is happening, in other parts of the world too, and that information seems harder to find in the popular literature.

Engels is an academic with a background in the history of public health policy and administration. His history of the AIDS epidemic tends to view the issues through this lens, rather than the research/epidemiological and political/journalistic perspectives of other books I have recentky read on this topic.

Engels bypasses the early years of the epidemic’s history, when it was primarily confined to certain regions of Africa, and begins his account with the appearance of AIDS-related opportunistic infections among the members of the gay communities in New York and San Francisco. Engels moves the narrative forward with some dispatch, although he spends perhaps a little too much time lingering over somewhat titillating descriptions of bathhouse sexual activities. His account of the events of the early years of the epidemic in the US is mostly consistent with the more detailed accounts of authors such as Randy Shilts and David France, though clearly penned by someone whose perspective is situated outside of the gay community, but he also touches on aspects of the public health efforts not covered in those more narrowly focused books, such as the response of the US military and the prison system to the threat of AIDS.

I did find several aspects of Engel’s narrative of the epidemic in America problematic. Despite the fact that little funding was made available for research, and the Reagan government seemed unable to even say anything about the disease for far too long, Engel repeatedly states that the funding was adequate and he seems to think that homophobia played no part in government decisions and actions. I suspect that in this, he has taken public announcements made by administration officials at face value rather than investigating to see if promises of funding were followed through with, or allocated appropriately, as one thing that has been consistent in other accounts is statements by researchers on the ground that the money was never there, or came too late and too little.

He also tends at times to use judgmental language in discussing the spread of AIDS in the gay community, referring at one point to “strange and bizarre sexual practices.” This despite his comments elsewhere in the narrative about the need for and indeed, the history of, non-judgmental decision making in public health, where the populations served are often those stigmatised by public opinion. He speaks against homophobia expressed against the gay community, while, perhaps unwittingly, sometimes shows glimpses of such attitudes himself.

On the other hand, Engel devotes, relatively speaking, more attention to the issues facing the black and Hispanic communities, where IV drug use was a significant risk factor, than some other chroniclers, and directly references the solidarity shown by some lesbians, who were in many ways one of the population groups at least risk of contracting the disease.

I also found somewhat troubling his tendency to dismiss the potential for HIV infection “escaping” into the general heterosexual beyond the risks to the partners of IV drug users. As research into how patterns of sexual behaviour has shown, a shift toward more concurrent relationships among the non-IV using heterosexual population could tip the balance far more easily than he suggests. Given the known fact that HIV infection is greater among the black heterosexual population in America, it would be interesting to know if this is indeed due to greater IV drug use and a greater tendency to deny homosexual behaviours among men, as Engel suggests, or if the black population in America, like that in Africa, is more likely to follow a pattern of concurrent sexual relationships.

When Engels turns his attention to the global presence if AIDS, his reporting echoes the kinds of misinterpretations of behaviour that other writers have noted. He focuses on the “highly sexualised” nature of African societies and the “promiscuity” and “insalubrious sexual mores” of African peoples as reasons for the prevalence of HIV infection among heterosexuals in Africa, touching briefly on the issue of lower rates of male circumcision and failing to mention the different patterns of sexual relationships - concurrent rather than serial relationships - found among heterosexuals in Africa and America. As in his descriptions of sexual practices among some elements of the gay community, I had the feeling that he was engaging in a degree of sensationalism, and overlooking the historical conditions that led to the situations he discusses, from dislocation of family life to poverty and lack of medical care.

Engel also looks at the development of the HIV epidemic in Asian countries. He identifies IV drug use, and heroin in particular, as the most significant pathway of infection, with sex tourism and prostitution also playing a role in certain countries, most notably in Thailand.

Engel dies make two very useful points in his summary. The first is the importance of educating and empowering women in the ongoing struggle to contain AIDS. If women - and especially sex workers, though Engel does not make this point explicitly - are able to negotiate safer sex with their partners, then the spread of HIV in the population at large is virtually stopped. Unfortunately, doing this on a global scale is an enormous task involving the eradication of many widespread attitudes toward women and sexuality in culture around the world.

He also reminds us that HIV is a fragile virus, and can be stopped by a few simple behaviours - safer sex (including universal use of condoms except between fluid-bonded sexual partners), safer injection drug behaviours, and screening of donated blood products. Again, to bring this about isn’t easy, especially among poor IV drug users, although decriminalisation and safe injection sites would be a start.

All in all, I was disappointed with the book. Despite calling itself a global history of the epidemic, relatively little attention was paid to Africa or Asia, and almost no information provided about the spread of the disease in Europe or in Central and South America. The issues in the Americas of HIV infection in indigenous populations were completely ignored, and you’d think HIV never reached Australia based on this discussion. There are other flaws as well, which I have noted above. I can’t recommend the book, even as a general summary of the epidemic in North America.

Reni Eddo-Lodge: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race

In 2014, British blogger Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a post on her blog entitled “Why I’m No LongerTalking to White People about Race.” In it, she expressed her frustration and exhaustion at trying to explain even the basic facts of living as a person of colour in a white supremacist society, at dealing with white fragility and hostility. I remember reading the post, which circulated very widely in social justice circles, and thinking quite a bit about it.

Now Eddo-Lodge has written a book in which she talks a great deal, and with great passion and patience, about race, and called it, with some irony, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. One welcome aspect of the book for me is that so much of the current work on racism and white supremacy is coming from an American perspective, but this is s problem that crosses borders and has a long and bitter history in all white-majority countries and the countries that have been colonised and exploited by them.

Eddo-Lodge begins with a brief history of racism against people of colour in Britain, providing background I’d known little to nothing about. And much of which, she notes, she herself had known little about before beginning her research.

“Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance, but until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them. I had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police. But I didn’t ask why this was the case. It made more sense to me once I understood that innocent people had died, that homes were broken into with scant evidence for searching them, that teenagers and young adults were frisked in a ritual of humiliation. It makes sense to me now how animosity could brew in that environment, and why some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.

But I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.”

Eddo-Lodge goes on to discuss issues of systemic and institutional racism, white privilege, white feminism, and intersectionality within the context of the British experience. And she explains these issues with great clarity, making this an excellent introductory book for beginning anti-racist activists, and particularly white people struggling with understanding these concepts and explaining them to others. Her words could easily serve as a handbook for every white person who takes up the task of speaking to white people about race, and I’m grateful that she has done this work.

Marjorie Lou and Sana Takeda: Monstress Vol 2 - The Blood

The second volume of Majorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s graphic narrative, Monstress: The Blood, continues with the orphaned refugee Maika Halfwolf’s search to uncover the secrets of her long-dead mother. Maika, with her Arcanic companions, the foxchild Kippa and the feline nekomancer, Master Ren, have persuaded an old comrades of her mother’s to take her on a voyage that follows her mother’s journey to a dangerous and mysterious island known as the Isle of Bones. Meanwhile, the various great powers are searching for her, because they suspect she has the weapon her mother used to end the last great war between them - though they have no idea of what that weapon might be. And others are trying to stop her from reaching her intended destination.

The story remains complex and interesting, with Maika as a most unusual protagonist. Her position as a survivor of multiple abuses, including being made the host of a vast and violent intelligence that drives her to seek blood, makes her a walking contradiction, victim and predator. The multiple quests - her seeking to understand her mother’s actions and the thing inside her, while the great powers of her world seek her, fir the thing she carries, offer further conflicts.

The artwork continues to be breathtaking in its complexity, beauty and impact. When I read the first volume, I had not done a lot of reading of graphic novels. I’m still not a big fan of them, but some, like this one, have definitely captured my imagination. This is compelling storytelling, in a visually stunning form.