16 pages • 32 minutes read
The Virus
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Background
Historical Context
In the summer of 1981, physicians from New York and California began reporting cases of unusual infections among gay men in major cities. The patients suffered from rare life-threatening diseases that could not be easily explained. By 1982 when similar cases appeared in other countries, it became clear that this was a new medical condition, which the Center for Disease Control named Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. In the next several years, scientists gradually identified the virus causing AIDS, which became officially known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in 1986. By then, AIDS had spread in all regions of the world with over 38,400 known cases. By the end of 1990, that number grew to 307,000 cases. The first HIV medication was approved in 1987 but it was highly toxic, and its benefits were limited. It was only in the late 1990s that safer and more effective medications gradually transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable, chronic disease (“History of HIV and AIDS Overview.” 2019. Avert: Global Information and Education on HIV and AIDS).
Today HIV patients in the developed world have access to a whole range of medications which can keep the virus undetectable and the patient healthy and not contagious. However, the disease continues to devastate poor countries in Africa and Asia, where the access to medication is far more difficult. At the end of 2020, there were an estimated 37.7 million people living with HIV, over two-thirds of them in Africa. In that year, approximately 680,000 people worldwide lost their lives to AIDS, bringing the overall number of casualties since the beginning of the epidemic to over 36.3 million people. HIV/AIDS remains an uncurable disease. There are ongoing efforts to develop a vaccine but it has proven exceedingly difficult. Prevention and treatment are still the best tools in fighting this illness, the ongoing tension of which is illustrated in the poem (“HIV/AIDS.” 2021. World Health Organization).
Biographical Context
By the time Jericho Brown tested positive for HIV in 2002, highly effective and relatively safe antiretroviral medications had been developed. However, the stigma of having HIV was still very strong, and HIV patients often suffered from a sense of shame, having internalized the prevailing social assumption that people with HIV, especially gay men, have brought the disease upon themselves through unprotected sexual behavior. Brown, who had a hard time coming out as a gay man in the first place, was initially terrified by his HIV diagnosis and hid his HIV status.
In an interview for POZ Magazine, which is dedicated to the lives of people affected by HIV/AIDS, Brown describes his state of mind soon after becoming infected: “I had felt like there was something in me that I could put into somebody else, and that thing was a stain, and therefore, I needed to stay away from folks.” Gradually, as he learned that a person with undetectable viral count in their blood cannot transmit the virus, and as he became more comfortable revealing aspects of his life in his poetry, Brown opened up about being HIV positive and wrote about it for the first time in his second collection, The New Testament, published in 2014.
In the same interview, Brown explains his feeling of responsibility to address HIV/AIDS in his poems:
I was able to write about HIV because I thought of it as a responsibility. It becomes my responsibility as a poet to tell the truth, and as long as there’s something I know I’m keeping from the page […] if I’m not addressing it on the page, in my poems, then I’m not facing it myself and being honest about it. When I finally started writing about that, it changed my mind about it, and I began to understand that I’m still Jericho Brown—a better Jericho Brown. Suddenly, I was glad. I had survived something that my idols didn’t (Straube, Trenton. “Heart to Heart with Jericho Brown about Poetry, Race and HIV.” 2021. POZ Magazine.).
Thus, the identity of being a person with HIV became the third element, together with the identities of being black and being queer, in Brown’s sense of who he is and the position from which he speaks as a poet. Instead of undermining his confidence and blurring his vision, the virus ultimately strengthened Brown’s sense of purpose and provided him with another subject matter, in addition to racism and homophobia, through which he can explore the themes of vulnerability, victimization, and resistance, which permeate his poetry.
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