Narrative in the Time of AIDS: Postcolonial Kenyan Women's Literature

Abstract

Confessions of an AIDS Victim (1993) and Chira (1997) portray AIDS in postcolonial Kenya as a painful social experience that blurs and shifts cultural values until the search for a new normative and narrative community becomes inevitable. In the midst of such turbulent change, the possibility for dissent and subversion grows, but so does the desire to integrate split subjectivities into a meaningful narrative with a clearly defined moral center. The protagonists in both novels respond to the advance of a potentially terminal disease with the need for a clear sense of right and wrong. Hybrid identities return once more to the reliable and deceptively stable boundaries of religious or experiential authority. The relationship between identity and authority, however, remains precarious, and the ambiguity applies to both the moral authority that the characters long for and the narrative authority that legitimizes such longing.