Sida y poesía en la temprana España democrática: El caso de Aníbal Núñez

Abstract

This article explores the presence of HIV/AIDS in the Spanish poetry of the 1980s and the early 1990s. The emergence of HIV/AIDS as a literary topic in Spain followed a much slower pace than in other Western countries, to the extent that, during the time frame studied in this paper, poetic responses to the crisis were extremely rare. Moreover, these responses did not adopt an activist approach when representing the epidemic, nor did they openly denounce the discrimination suffered by people living with HIV/AIDS in Spain. Instead, these texts depicted the disease and its consequences in an oblique and metaphorical way. In the first half of the article, I describe the Spanish poetic corpus of HIV/AIDS, arguing that its indirect approach to the epidemic reflects not only a particular aesthetic choice (namely, that of the neo-baroque), but also a specific sociopolitical background that prevented the emergence of activist approaches to the crisis in Spain. In the second half of the article, I study one particular collection of poetry that illustrates the aesthetic and epistemic characteristics of the Spanish poetry of HIV/AIDS: Cristal de Lorena (Lorraine Glass) (1987), by Anibal Nunez (1944-87).