Silent Speech in Phaswane Mpe's HIV/AIDS Writing

South African writer Phaswane Mpe (1970-2004) is often canonized and memorialized as a brave truth-teller who broke the silence on HIV/AIDS in the context of government silence and denial. And yet Mpe's writings-including poetry, short stories, a novel, and scholarly criticism-contemplate illness as a problem for truth and representation in works that linger in silence and ambiguity. This article analyses the tension between silence and speech in Mpe's creative writing in response to HIV/AIDS. Using Mpe's works as an illustrative example, I trouble the desire to read illness narratives as forms of truth-telling and silence-breaking. The desire for the transparency of speech in a global archive of illness narratives also informs a colonial politics of representation that instrumentalizes literature as ethnographic evidence. Mpe's writing on HIV/AIDS refuses a demand for authenticity by holding the embodied experience of disease at a slight remove from the reader in order to register the forms of spiritual and epistemological crisis that epidemic and social loss produce. My contention is that the political stakes of this writing lie not in Mpe's ability to render a public health crisis with verisimilitude, but in the capacity for writing to provide solace and sublimity faced with death. Through an analysis of Mpe's fiction and poetry, this article proposes a methodology for reading the politics of illness narratives across globalized space which attends to the world-building potential of creative expression as a radical practice that resists incorporative models of aesthetic intelligibility.