Reading for Ruptures: HIV & AIDS, Sexuality & Silencing in Zoë Wicomb's ‘In Search of Tommie’

Summary

Although Cape Town is one of the epicentres of the HIV/AIDs pandemic, it was not until 1999 that Capetonian writers took on this devastating subject. Ten years later, in her only story featuring HIV infection, Zoë Wicomb weaves the taboo subject into ‘In Search of Tommie’ a story of last days and the search for identity and meaning. It is the first story by a South African author to represent the life of an HIV-positive gay black African man (from Langa). HIV is silenced in the story, not only in the sense that it is not spoken about out loud, particularly by the protagonist TS himself, but also in the sense that between the differently related characters: TS and his mother, TS and his half-sister, TS and his sometime boyfriend, Joe, the word is not used. In two other texts from Cape Town, Rayda Jacobs's novel Confessions of a Gambler and Derrick Fine's non-fiction Clouds Move, HIV has a very different volume and significance. For the purposes of this article, both Jacobs's and Fine's texts feature as points of comparison to demonstrate the level of silencing of HIV/AIDS in South African literature, especially in relation to the cosmopolitan Cape in which they are all set. In addition to a comparative reading, this article also focuses on the differences between depicting gay characters in fiction and non-fiction.

In ‘In Search of Tommie’ TS alludes to his illness while narrating the story of his ‘vark’ (pig) father, Tommie, who left his mother and had another child in England. TS shares his father's name but refuses the identification until his story returns to him in the form of a semifictionalised autobiography written by an English woman who could be his half-sister. Allusions to T.S. Eliot and other literary references are thrown into the story by his latter day boyfriend or partner Joe who provides TS with part of his identity as a moffie and leads him to contact his potential relative, Chris, in England. It is only through TS and Joe's relationship that TS is able to contact Chris in the UK after reading her book as suggested by his ex-boyfriend.