5 - Love in a Time of Adversity

Summary

‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is as strong as death’

The Bible, Song of Solomon 7: 6

‘You are a beautiful person, Toloki. That is why I want you to teach me how to live.

And how to forgive.’ ‘You are the one who will teach me, Noria’

Mda 1997: 151

This chapter narrates the love story of two HIV positive people, Ntombikayise Dladla and Olwethu Njabulo Bhengu. Depicting how they came to desire one another and how their courtship negotiated the discovery of the affliction they held in common, it suggests the implosive presence of HIV and AIDS within a relationship, and yet indicates how they upheld their wish to embrace life. Despite being ill, they insisted on the completion of drawn-out marriage negotiations. Neither Ntombikayise nor Njabulo came from wealthy families. The completion of a marriage held the possibility of respected personhood in the face of poverty and illness, notwithstanding the sometimes repressive contours of marriage. They came to live life in an acute way, apprehending the closeness of death: an apprehension that marked a journey through fear, through an initial compulsion to allocate blame – at least on Ntombikayise's part – into a place of mutual respect and care.

Ntombikayise's and Njabulo's story is one in which illness and the building of a particular kind of union were inextricably intertwined. In facing their illness openly, and in appearing in public together to speak of it, they came to reshape, to some extent, commonly held ideas of masculinities and femininities. Ntombikayise's and Njabulo's story is atypical of an area where many men insisted, both conceptually and often in practice, on a differential standing between men and women in their negotiation of intimacy. I relate it, however, because it suggests ways in which partnerships may become stronger through adversity, rather than dissolve. It indicates an amplification of each person's sense of self over time that is reminiscent of Foucault's emergence of the ethical subject through care of the self: ‘the self taking itself as a work to be accomplished’ (Davidson 2005: 128, Foucault 1986). It is a story that, although marking changes in each individual, demonstrates the importance of interdependence between people.