Abstract

SWEDISH AUTHOR HENNING MANKELL (b. 194-8), well known for his crime novels about police inspector Kurt Wallander, has a deep devotion to Mozambique. Mankell first visited Africa in 1972, and since 1985, he has lived in Maputo for part of the year. One of the results of this dedication has been his long standing work in trying to raise international awareness of the severity of the African AIDS epidemic. When Jag dor, men minnet lever (2003; I Die, But My Memory Lives On, 2004) was published in a second English edition in 2005, it was provided with a foreword by South African archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Turn as well as an afterword by Samuel Worthington, head of Plan USA, one of the world's leading organizations dealing with AIDS issues. There, thus, is no doubt about the sincerity of commitment to the AIDS problem or about the way his commitment is perceived by the educated world community. Desmond Turn writes: Thanks to [... Mankell's] efforts, memory books and Project AIDS have done an enormous amount to raise awareness of the epidemic. By encouraging parents to recall their life stories, not just for their children, but also for humanity, Helming Mankell has given a great gift to the world. (viii) Strong words, not least considering from whom they have come. Against this background, this article will explore in what sense the African characters in fiction are still portrayed as being Other (in the sense often stressed in postcolonial theory, cf. Dearie 356). For this purpose, novel, Kennedys hjarna (2005; Kennedy's Brain, 2007), will be analyzed. Like many of novels, Kennedys hjarna is a crime novel, although it is not part of the celebrated Wallander series (1991-2002), and the mystery is not the main objective of the novel. However, Kennedys hjarna is also characterized by a strong, righteous anger over the injustices in the world and in that sense still resembles the Wallander novels. In Kennedys hjarna, Mankell portrays how powerful Western pharmaceutical companies exploit poor, black Africans by using them as guinea pigs in order to develop a cure for AIDS. The readers of the novel are undoubtedly expected to take a stance against the corporations and their scientific and economic approaches. In a seminal article on Mankell in Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia (2008), Andrew Nestingen observes that Mankell's novels are a discourse on solidarity and they attempt to force readers to think through solidarity's ethical and political (232). Solidarity is also a fundamental issue in Kennedys hjarna (a novel not included in Nestingen's study), and both dimensions mentioned in this quotation are therefore relevant here. But does focus on solidarity automatically imply identification with AIDS victims? Is his critique unproblematic, or is his novel perhaps--despite its good intentions--still suffering from the Western perspective, thereby unintentionally furthering the alienation of Africans as Other? It is an ethical impossibility to overcome the distance to the Other completely, but to what extent might this gap be bridged? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this article. In Kennedys hjarna, Louise Cantor, a Swedish archeologist, finds her son, Henrik, dead in his Stockholm apartment. She refuses to believe he has committed suicide and suspects he was murdered. Like Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code (2003), Mankell uses the humanities scholar as detective by enabling Louise Cantor to employ her skills and research methods as an archeologist to gather, put together, and interpret the pieces of the puzzle. Following in the footsteps of Henrik, she travels around the world: to Australia, Spain, and finally to Mozambique. During her journey, she learns that Henrik had another, completely different life that she knew nothing about. She also discovers that he had been infected with HIV, and finally, in Mozambique she encounters a foreign and frightening world filled with unfamiliar things she cannot understand. …

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