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Circulation in the City Through the Tradition and Prescription of AIDS.
Part One: Reinaldo Arenas
[This is a draft of a work-in-progress.
Please do not circulate or cite without the author’s permission.]
“Yo tengo SIDA”. “I have AIDS”. This was the premise printed unto t-shirts by
Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby and distributed in Buenos Aires during 1995. To
seriously wear this shirt grew to be a matter of assertive showing and not merely saying
transparently that someone, individually, had the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
The circulation of AIDS became as simply literal as possible and the shirts were a basic
reminder of the suggestive force behind the cultural representation done by an artist in the
1990s. The person dressed in the shirt did not necessarily had AIDS or even the HIV that
leads to AIDS. This was the principal axis of Jacoby’s campaign: the syndrome moves
through the city without people necessarily acknowledging that they have it or are
developing it within their bodies. AIDS radiates in a city reaching more people and more
urban corners, but nevertheless the respective information is always slowly treading
behind. If we indeed follow this artistic proposal of AIDS, the shirts will constantly
amount to a lesser number of people living with AIDS, the number of cases will be
smaller than the actual figure, and its distribution amongst a city will not even
approximate a tangible reality.
AIDS becomes a problem of the city for the constitution of the city is founded upon
circulation, which is also central to the contagiousness of the syndrome. Therefore, both
the city and AIDS focus on the same issue, that is, their complex and inconstant
movement. Urban foundations and subsequent development enterprises are modeled upon
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degrees of fluidness within the urban space. Under this umbrella, the tasks are comprised
of two main knobs of circulation: increase and decrease, where maintaining a steady flow
is the result of successful combination of public policy of these two actions. Increase and
decrease function as units for measuring the success of a city. For example, policy for
decrease looks to reduce crime, poverty, corruption, infant mortality, disease,
analphabetism and so on. Increase, on the other hand, is for policy tied to a standard
governmental cabinet composed of education, healthcare, housing, transportation,
commerce, justice and defense. Taxes are one of the few issues in which both increase
and decrease policies are constantly emerging. The prerogative for urban planning thus
relies on dealing with the expansion, or reduction in some cases, of these city functions in
relation to its population. The city operates on the changes that circulation almost
imposes on the city itself. The same can be thought of AIDS, where reduction of
circulation is the main goal of research on AIDS. Decline in AIDS would translate as a
drop in the contacts with HIV-infected blood through sex, drugs, or mother to child. To
study AIDS in any discipline becomes an inquiry on its circulation and our attempt to get
a firm grasp on its related discrimination, stigmatization, reduction of cases and
improvement on AIDS policies.
The city functions by rethinking its circulation and its objectives of increase and
decrease. This daily urban action works by networking different components of city life.
Urban planning and policy, in all its aspects, dialogues broadly with culture because the
fabric of a city cannot elude its strong ties to the intellectual debates that take place from
a cultural or academic standpoint. It is certainly clear that specific networks are stronger
and more visible than others. Sasskia Sassen amazingly exposed this point by delving
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into the magnitude and magnificence of financial networks in The Global City. If one city
had its own recombination of networks, it was enlightening to observe the reloading of
such networks between cities as well within a clear-cut developed world. Sassen’s project
on New York, London and Tokyo works visually in a horizontal line, where these cities
become closely aligned in terms of their respective latitudes.
If we challenge such a powerful image vertically, the combination of cities might
establish a different political, economic and cultural dialogue while proposing to study
another permutation of urban networks. Latin America, or what has become the Latin
American and Caribbean market, generates its own uneven web, in which politics and
economics are the most perceptible yet different networks. The evident relegation of
culture as part of networks in a city and between cities imperatively asks for a
reconsideration of this issue as a vital one to discussions on the urban. The cities of
Buenos Aires, São Paulo, San Juan, and New York can be observed as one of these
interconnections within Latin America. These cities are some of the major points of
circulation for their respective geographical regions of the Southern Cone, Luso-Brazilian
territory, the Caribbean, and the continental United States. These four cities are central
points to circulation as they are cardinal to migration, finance, and culture. When these
cities are visually aligned, they propose a suicidal longitude, four cities between thirty
degrees of longitude. Other main Latin American cities, like Caracas, are located between
these thirty degrees of separation, and if the longitudinal extremes were enlarged cities
such as Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá and Miami could be considered, but it is also
significant for that these cities are very important for air traffic, the main means of
circulation for people. New York is the westernmost point of the suicidal longitude at
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73.58º West while São Paulo is at the other end at 46.38º West, passing by San Juan at
66.08º West and Buenos Aires at 58.30º West.
Longitudes and latitudes, used in maps and trips as indispensable for circulation, are
modes of reading a place with the certitude that you will end up at the same place after
coming back to the matching coordinates. Understandably, longitudes are imaginary,
invisible lines, but also very close to tangibility in atlases and air control towers. Not
represented by points like cities and towns, latitudes and longitudes are composed of an
array of points that systematize space and become yet another organizational structure.
Nonetheless the rationale behind using a longitude or latitude to observe the
underpinnings of a network relies precisely on its functional power as a system and its
concurrent frailty as it is based on an agreement of imperceptible lines. Networks of
AIDS participate in this paradox: it works as a structured organism, but it is indiscernible
to the eye. AIDS mechanism is known, cases are filed, deaths are quantified, but it is still
unstoppable as a working network. This is a problem of circulation and by itself it is a
problem of the city.
The sluggishness of research data regarding AIDS vigor – of people either living with
AIDS or dying from any AIDS-related illnesses – is sadly unavoidable, as studies cannot
expect to develop at the same rate as AIDS itself. In the end, the numbers are a certain
kind of representation that looks back upon AIDS with two possible goals: to
determinedly establish facts and statistics for a specific period, group or geographical
region, or to use such substantial details in manner of a prescription. The former is the
study of the tradition of the disease. The notion of tradition is indispensable for any
serious inquiry on AIDS for the following reasons: tradition is the exchange – passive or
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not – of ideas and information; tradition is continuity, or the lack thereof; tradition is
poetics, for its embedded character not only in culture, but in politics and economics as
well; tradition is, in the end, the exchange, the continuity and the poetics of circulation.
The first goal of research on AIDS focuses on the inescapable urge of organizing the
recent past of the syndrome. The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) exemplify this by closely arranging the number of the living and the dead since
the public disclosure of the syndrome in 1981.1 It falls upon the CDC to observe the
tradition of AIDS in the United States. The tradition of AIDS, through the institutional
eyes of the CDC and many other governmental and non-governmental organizations, is
dubiously composed of statistical charts and management of information. The problem at
hand regarding this information is not the figures per se, but its administration. The first
year of public admission of AIDS in 1981 noticeably serves as part of the beginning of
the circulation of the syndrome. In June 1981, the CDC confirmed the troubling detection
of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among five gay men from Los Angeles, California.
The diagnosis of this type of pneumonia hesitantly led to a dysfunction of the immune
system. A month later, in July, the New York Times exposed that 41 gay men in New
York and California had a rare cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. By August 1981,
more than 100 people had either the unusual pneumonia or cancer, or both. If people
were getting sick, and if people were dying, it was nearly necessary to visibly define the
distinction between the healthy and the unhealthy. In 1981, gay men became the
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“In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for
biopsy-confirmed Pneumocytis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles,
California. Two of the patients died.”
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unhealthy category, losing their sexual orientation to the name of this health problem
known as the Gay-related Immunodeficiency (GRID).
As the numbers kept climbing, by 1982 the CDC started using a new name, AIDS,
because the syndrome seemed uncontained exclusively by the gay community. The initial
year of the public circulation of facts and speculations on AIDS had served to persistently
localize the issue. The geography was New York and Los Angeles, the targets were gay
men, and the sentence was probably imminent death. The CDC faced a challenge when
the target was opened into other groups as well, but it quickly established the new
circulation of AIDS among the infamous 4-H group: homosexuals, heroin users,
hemophiliacs, and Haitians. From the beginning the categories deemed problematic, but
served two main purposes: stigmatization and containment of circulation. Stigmatization
was not the CDC’s explicit goal; it was more of an expected by-product. The force of
stigmatization has transcended the initial tainted groups, as the case of pregnant women
in Africa. By 1998 pregnant women could prevent HIV transmission to their unborn
children by taking AZT, but one of the leading actors in the African AIDS arena, South
Africa, decided not to pursue the drug deeming it as unaffordable. The issue brought to
the forum that HIV+ mothers should not breastfeed their newborns and the use of formula
by these mothers was read as the public disclosure of their HIV status, and thus the
stigmatization of as an HIV+ mother.2 The public announcement of AIDS was believed
to be a well-built warning: AIDS is infectious through exchanges and circulation. These
fluxes of contagion took place by flows of body fluids. The blood, as the carrier of
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South Africa’s rejection of AZT for pregnant mothers was also observed as an example that
would create a sort of domino effect for other African countries that followed this country’s
policies on AIDS.
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circulation in the human body, served as transporter for AIDS. Blood contacts during gay
sex, blood transfusions3, or intravenous drug use, was at the center of AIDS and thus at
the heart of stigmatization. This blood was tainted and its container, the body of any 4-H
member, was carefully pinpointed by the CDC and consequently discredited. The CDC
should not be furiously seen as the main culprit in imposing chaotic terror the beginnings
of AIDS as it examined what was believed to be a fatal disease and acted accordingly as
the traditions of diseases before it.
When Giovanni Boccaccio faces the 14th Century, the circulation of people in
Florence is disrupted due to the Black Death, and a hundred stories are exchanged within
the confines of a quarantined cluster. Extreme diseases, it seems, calls for extreme action.
Boccaccio opts for enforced isolation in Il Decameron; the CDC selects the 4-H as the
AIDS epicenter. Boccaccio presents a narrative and the CDC works on the numbers. This
reference participates of an ample tradition of diseases and their historical, scientific and
literary discussions. Where I have thought of Boccaccio, the European circulation of
diseases stems from the Athenian plague in Sophocles’s Theban Plays and Euripides’s
Helen to Albert Camus’s Mediterranean cross into Algeria in La peste. If we shift the
anticipated perspective from Europe into Latin America, from the conquest to the
founding of nations, contagious and challenging diseases abound menacing democracies
and dictatorships indistinctly. It seems that when disease becomes a threat, it turns into a
political concern.
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In this sense, blood screening becomes another aim at blocking the circulation of AIDS. The
Red Cross, for the sake of screening, still in 2004 prohibits “men who have sex with men”, for
example, from donating blood.
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If one goal of research on AIDS is to trace its tradition, the second one, not necessarily
a consequence of tradition, entails a prescription. At this point, the notion of AIDS as
threat becomes fundamental. By 1982, the CDC had made public its definition of AIDS,
claiming its active and required involvement in the study of the new syndrome. A year
later, the House of Representatives criticized the CDC for its secretive control of research
data and its delay in prioritizing AIDS. The external or self-imposed pressure on the CDC
was headed towards sharpening AIDS as a clear and present danger. 1985 proved pivotal
for this task: the CDC revised its AIDS definition by including a list of diseases that
would indicate the presence of AIDS. It was also in 1985, that the World Health
Organization (WHO) along with the CDC insisted on screening blood donations to
prevent the circulation of the virus, not known as HIV at the time (Human
Immunodeficiency Virus), but as the HTLV-III / LAV.4 The year closed with a warning
directed towards health care workers, possibilities of transmission from pregnant mothers
to their children at birth, and the testing of applicants for the U.S. military service. The
prescription was set in motion even when particular details had been ambiguous. The
vague cloud that surrounded AIDS throughout the 1980s resulted in an enraged increase
of cases and deaths, with one basic piece of confirmed fact, that is, the blood as means of
transport for the virus.
The development of research as prescription emerges from the constant evolution of
the threat, as health and medical institutions revise the increased number of cases. The
meticulous study of blood as a key factor in the circulation of AIDS enabled a
prescription that consisted of the deterrence in blood traffic: HIV-infected blood leads to
4
HTLV-III / LAV stands for Human T-Cell lymphotropic virus type III / lymphaedenopathy-
associated virus.
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HIV, which can turn into AIDS.5 Even though AIDS itself and its constitution as a
syndrome was a characterization in progress, the prescription was geared to contain
networks of infection. In the AIDS equation, control of circulation equaled being in
command over both the virus and the syndrome regardless of the unsatisfactory
knowledge of any possible attempt at a reliable cure. The act of prescribing primarily
arises from medicine and scientific research, but a powerful institution such as the CDC
tries to mesh the medical prescription with historical tradition. The Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and the HIV / AIDS surveillance reports are examples
of two CDC publications that oscillate between tradition and prescription, providing
comprehensive numbers of AIDS lives and deaths and strongly proposing new sets of
actions regarding the circulation of AIDS within the geographical restraint of the U.S.
and its territorial spread.6 Finally, if the prescription was concisely dealing with the
circulation of AIDS within local communities, it depended on the tradition of AIDS for
the numbers that would support such prescription. Simply put, the consistent growth of
AIDS put tradition and prescription in an intense dialogue where numbers and newfound
facts were supposed to pave the difficult road for reducing in the 1990s the AIDS
mayhem of the previous decade.
1990, as the beginning of a new decade, was also the beginning of the end of the
century. After struggling throughout nine years of incessant research, 1990 was a round
number for hopes of decline, but it ceded to political desertion and widespread lack of
5
The passing from HIV to AIDS is merely a numeric count. The drop of CD4+ cells under 200 or
if CD4+ cells are less than 14 percent of the total number of lymphocytes indicates the presence
of the syndrome.
6
This territorial group consists of Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Pacific Island
group of American Samoa, Palau, Micronesia, Northern Mariana and Marshall Islands.
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information. In the spring of 2003, a close friend disclosed his HIV+ status to me.
Chances were, he clearly pointed out, that I knew more people living with HIV, but that I
was just distantly unaware of it. By the summer of 2004, a second friend gave me the
same news. This time my reaction was significantly different and reminded me of the
vast scope and indispensability to reconsider AIDS not only through the admirable work
of NGOs such as UNAIDS or the Global Fund for AIDS and Malaria, but by insisting on
its closeness in our own cities. The number of AIDS cases had steadily increased over the
earlier years of the 1990s, but the appearance of protease inhibitors in 1995 and the
configuration of the triple therapy cocktail in 1996 helped in the numeric decline of
people passing from HIV+ to AIDS. Again, policy along with medical progress had
achieved a program of decline, that is, a slowdown in circulation of AIDS while
maintaining more people on the HIV+ side. The CDC released the following figures of
total AIDS cases for 1990, 1995 and 2000, respectively:
-State of New York:
8,399 → 12,399 → 6,204
-Territory of Puerto Rico:
1,730 → 2,594 → 1,349
These statistics work vitally in relation to culture. The boom of AIDS in the early 1990s
impatiently generated a cultural production politically concerned with the urgent need for
action and divulgation about AIDS. Culture put forward the discussion that politics did
not. The play Angels in America proposed what America itself was denying: AIDS was
outstandingly circulating in our cities and therefore affecting the creative process.
Intellectual communities were already immersed in the discussion of AIDS before strictly
political nuclei caught up. This is not to say that intellectual dialogue in unconcerned
with politics, but exactly the opposite: it seems to generate political ideas that eventually
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find a niche within policy-making. Thus the study of AIDS is the precise recognition of
how its presence has altered the circulation of blood, culture, politics, medicine and
economics within a landscape described as urban, rural or anything in between.
The tradition of the humanities, as sadly seen by many, still seem to be a dialogic
space outside the realm of the political, the social or the economic. The complexity of
this situation is not my starting point, but one set of conditions under which studies on the
city operate. The brief statistics presented above reflect exactly this point. As the number
of cases increase, intellectual and cultural cloisters visibly devote more attention to
AIDS. Thus culture, by contrast, reacts to policies of increase and decrease. Because the
American early 1990s was a period of sluggishness in AIDS policy, culture counteracts
by augmenting the issue. By the mid-1990s, political intervention, by means of medical
advance and its drug production, put into active gear a policy of decreasing the threshold
between HIV and AIDS.7 This detonates a numeric reduction of AIDS cases and its terror
alert level. The Wall Street Journal was one of the crystallizations of this notion of
understating AIDS and in June of 1996 attacked the “campaign of distortion and
exaggeration of HIV risk” supposedly devised by the CDC and C. Everett Koop, a former
Surgeon General of the United States.8 By 1997 the United States reported the first
7
The American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had launched by 1995 a series of drug
approval that included nucleoside analogs, non-nucleoside analogs and three protease inhibitors,
which impede the reproduction of the virus at the protease enzyme.
8
As a response to the letters to the editors from the CDC and Everett Koop, Michael Wright from
Scientific Social Research stated in the Wall Street Journal that there were “other scientific
articles demonstrating the extremely low risk of HIV transmission by means of vaginal sex. If
CDC officials were unable to draw appropriate conclusions from the available evidence, they
should be held accountable for their incompetence. If they knew from this evidence (the more
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overall decline in AIDS deaths and in 2000, the CDC was able to report a total of 42,156
AIDS cases versus the 74,180 total for 1995. The drop in numbers strengthens the notion
that AIDS is a lesser threat.9
The increase in policy and mainly in drug distribution intercepts the circulation of
AIDS and affects its relation to the production of culture in a twofold manner. First, the
appearance of AIDS in culture diminishes and production is substantially less concerned
with bringing up AIDS to any intellectual forum. Simply put, culture stops generating
representations of AIDS. The outcome of this progression slowly disintegrates the
momentum that AIDS had gained as an issue with the political neglect at the beginning of
the decade. The political response that through its deficiency had prompted cultural
interventions began to undermine the intellectual core that brought it up initially.
Secondly, and this is perhaps a less expected corollary, the intellectual circles that were
previously empowered by initially opening a dialogue on AIDS begin to shift their
interest towards other issues.10 To sum up both interrelated consequences, the increase
and amplification of policy and research on AIDS takes place by modifying the
production of culture concerned with AIDS and simultaneously alters intellectual
configurations.
likely hypothesis), then they should be to account for the extraordinarily dishonest, deceitful and
expensive scare they have orchestrated.”
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For the sake of clarity, the approximate 12 percent decrease was in the number of deaths, while
simultaneously the number of people living with AIDS was increasing.
10
UNAIDS suggests in its 2002 “Report on the Global HIV/AIDS epidemic” that this change of
concerns, at least within the category of men who have sex with men, is not only related to
medical advances, but also to a decline in prevention and the possibility of less effective
prevention campaigns.
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Nevertheless, policy is not the only driving force for this decline. Many intellectuals
concerned with the overwhelming increase of AIDS died after either exploring AIDS in
their works or bringing it to the discussion arena through other means. It is perhaps
accurate to affirm that their interest on putting AIDS on the front burner waned with their
respective deaths. Within Latin America, perhaps the figure of Cuban writer in exile
Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) condensates this predicament. His suicide in 1990 after
being diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 was followed with the posthumous publication of his
autobiography in 1992, Before Night Falls, and its subsequent film adaptation directed by
artist Julian Schnabel in 2000. The film surely had to confront a marketing crossroad
while devising whether Arenas, and thus the film, was going to be sold by underlining his
homosexuality, his status as a Cuban dissident, or some sort of AIDS martyr via Tom
Hanks in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. On the crest of the waves created by Wim
Wenders and his documentary Buena Vista Social Club, it was only expected that Fine
Line Features would take the nostalgic road of a pre-Castro Cuba and the subsequent
disillusionment after the Revolution. The autobiographic text only makes very few
references to AIDS and its metaphor of the plague and therefore it became more
malleable in filmic language, where the Arenas character is not even allowed to commit
suicide but is killed by his longtime friend, Lázaro Gómez Carriles. The stories of both
the musicians from the social club and the writer in the film culminate in success by
finally arriving in New York, even for death. His suicide enlarged his prominence, but
inevitably flattened his work, like for many other artists, where Before Night Falls
became the centerpiece. From such an unmerited viewpoint, the last sentences in his
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autobiographic text read nearly as a much-needed marketing ploy, “Cuba will be free. I
already am.”11
To consider AIDS as a network to study urban circulation within a city or between
configurations of cities is neither trivializing nor metaphoric-charging for the
overwhelming issue itself. It indeed looks to carefully raise the discussion to a wider
context and not necessarily wrap it under disciplinary state relations or national allegories
where artists with AIDS become a full trope of bodies unmasking the diseased status of
national, imperial or even global politics. Susan Sontag has become one of the main
defenders in this task of stripping metaphors from meaning by compellingly insisting on
studying AIDS or cancer as a medical concern. But this conscious process of dismantling
illnesses of their respective metaphors in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its
Metaphors turns into a metaphor itself. To take AIDS at face value, as just a syndrome
would be quite unobtainable, and even undesired if achieved. Her argument for
eliminating unnecessary and harmful metaphors based on AIDS is crucial, but then again
AIDS consists not only of the syndrome by itself but also of ailing people and dying
friends. Sontag’s indirect reply came through her beautiful exposure on war in Regarding
the Pain of Others, by being firm on the impossibility of feeling someone else’s pain.
This ontological claim, in which the precise body in pain is the only one that can
experience it and assert it as such, functions as secondary theoretical support for her
previous texts, but still falls short of suggesting any sort of framework for a followthrough. The “war on AIDS”, quite popular these days along with other ongoing wars, is
11
The original in Spanish reads: “Cuba será libre. Yo ya lo soy.”
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perhaps the boldest of these metaphors. But once agreed that AIDS is not worthy of war
and its tradition of metaphors, it still becomes reloaded if re-entering the arena of debate.
The Jewish-American playwright Tony Kushner crystallizes this problem when he
changed from AIDS in Angels in America to the Taliban organization on the aftermath of
the 1998 American attack of Afghanistan in Homebody / Kabul. Kushner indirectly
brings to the forum the two issues of war and AIDS without confusing or combining
them. The disturbing events on U.S. lands on September 11, 2001 highlighted again
Kushner for the inherent connection between politics and culture. The premiere of
Homebody took place in October of 2001 in New York, as Afghanistan had become the
brand-new focus of America’s “war on terrorism”. The play presented a British father
and daughter searching in Taliban-controlled Kabul for their wife and mother after the
bombing orchestrated by President Bill Clinton. Kushner’s eye for timely cultural
intervention in politics showed what politics in itself had blatantly dismissed. American
concerns in Afghanistan slowly disappeared in the background in a much similar manner
in which Ronald Reagan had overlooked AIDS during his presidency. American wars,
from the Civil War to Operation Freedom, have proven successful a mode of studying
because its wars are the reiteration of its strength and the indestructible circulation of its
military – and eventually political and economic – power. With Michel Foucault, these
power relations became indispensable as a mode of inquiry, and were subsequently
squeezed by varied approaches to power, from culture and philosophy to sociology and
political science. Foucault’s legacy fortified an intellectual tool that tracked power and its
institutions from the inside, where ideology was transparently present but without a
messianic voice that was able to study power relations from an omnipresent perspective.
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This undertaking managed both the observer and the observed side of the panoptical
view; he could not prescribe what power was and how it worked from the outside, but
needed to engage with power in order to open it as a thinking apparatus.
This poses a consequential risk because, if AIDS is to be read as a mode of studying
circulation within geographies, its related discussions need to intimately follow the
circulation itself and not symptomatically define it. The circulation of AIDS in culture
should not only be carefully analyzed, but questioned, for culture is intellectually
embedded in the increase and decrease of policy-making. The multifaceted combination
and recombination of discourses that AIDS, as a syndrome, has fomented, suggests that
where we are now is not such a good place. The reasons for our slow pace in progress
with AIDS are many-fold. The pharmaceuticals remind us that AIDS is a research and
drug issue while policy-makers insist on AIDS as a development problem. For
intelligence agencies, it has become a national security issue. President Bill Clinton
passed a law in 1993 that prohibits HIV+ people from coming into the United States.12
The group of “aliens who are inadmissible” is a mixed bag of terrorists, drug traffickers,
people with Nazi ties, and people living with HIV. The law, accompanied by the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1996, prohibits the Immigration and
12
“Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, aliens who are inadmissible under the following
paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States: (1)
[On] Health-related grounds (A) In general [,] any alien who is determined (in accordance with
regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable
disease of public health significance, which shall include infection with the etiologic agent for
acquired immune deficiency syndrome.” U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act, 1996, title 8,
chapter 12, subchapter 2, part 2.
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Naturalization Service (INS) from granting residence to any HIV+ applicant.13 The
actions of the Clinton administration clearly engage with a quantifiable aspect of
circulation: migrations. The explicit ban at the point of entrance into the United States
supports a visible tactic that tries to limit the invisible circulation of the AIDS. The task
of policy, looking beyond undertakings of increase and decrease, seems to also make
tangible or visible the asymptomatic character that HIV might exhibit for years. With
such objective, the American Disability Act of 1990 (ADA) included both asymptomatic
and symptomatic HIV as disabilities that affect “major life activities”.14 Where cultural
discussions led, policies followed.
A bloom of cases, medicines and policies in the mid-1990s trailed the visibility
reached by creative clusters of culture in the early 1990s. The culture looking for an HIVfriendly President after the Reagan and Bush negligent years found a voice in Bill
Clinton, but irony poured over the expectations. After the immigration restrictions, the
Clinton administration sided in 2000 with a ruling from a federal appeals court that
barred HIV+ prison inmates from participating in educational, recreational and religious
13
The result of the HIV test can be waived if the applicant has a family relative residing in the
United States that agrees to function as a “sponsor” or if a traveler is attending an event or
visiting to obtain a medical treatment.
14
The case of dentist Randon Bragdon v. patient Sidney Abbott put AIDS in the U.S. Supreme
Court for the first time after the dentist refused to fill a cavity in his office and agreed to do so
only in the premises of a hospital in Bangor, Maine. Abbott sued for discrimination under the
ADA of 1990 and the definition of HIV as a disability was scrutinized, both for the definition of
HIV as a “physical impairment” and the composition of the phrase “major life activities.”
Abbott’s side chose reproduction as the “major life activity” that could not be performed due to
the “impairment” and the Court of Appeals supported the position, which was also agreed on by
the Supreme Court. The judgment was vacated by the Supreme Court and returned to the Court of
Appeals, but locked in the definition of HIV as a disability under the ADA of 1990.
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programs with HIV- prisoners.15 The reproached inaction of previous administrations had
led to the study of the tradition of AIDS and its subsequent prescription during the
Clinton years. The year 2000, initially projected as a decisive moment from the
perspective of 1990, had become a political turn back. That same year the successor of
Nelson Mandela in South Africa’s presidency, Thabo Mbeki, declared his doubts and
distance from the standard views on HIV as the cause of AIDS and possible treatments
for the syndrome. His questionings on the tradition and prescription of AIDS, seen as one
of the most serious setbacks in the trajectory of AIDS in Africa, presented a necessary yet
deplorable intervention in the act of examining the process by which AIDS has been
institutionalized. Mbeki’s premise –in which HIV might not lead to AIDS–, although
misguided and problematic, insisted on revisiting the beginnings of the syndrome.
If the tradition and prescription of AIDS is going to shift into the treatment and
prevention of the syndrome, then the basic core that has guided AIDS discussions in the
past decades must at least be thoroughly studied. The problem resides on selecting the
medical and research component of AIDS instead of the institutional forces that steer
most aspects of the syndrome. One of the basic developmental catch-22 of AIDS dwells
between poverty and the syndrome: AIDS generates poverty (or at least protracts it) and
poverty exposes more susceptibility to AIDS. The challenge to tradition indirectly
suggested by Mbeki was nevertheless taking place. Cuba had radically quarantined HIV+
patients in national sanatoria since the 80s removing the stigmatized individual from any
public social interaction. The Cuban solution, exceedingly drastic and condemnable,
maintained a small number of infections and indeed questioned the tradition of AIDS
15
The Supreme Court declined the appeal of the Davis v. Hopper case, No. 98-9663 (initially
known as the Onishea case), and the exclusion of HIV+ inmates from these activities continued.
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throughout the rest of the world. This extremist attack on tradition, although beneficial to
the Cuban management of contagion, needs to be revaluated, as the extraction of citizens
is not a viable solution for AIDS. On the other hand, the Brazilian challenge to
pharmaceuticals and their patents proved fertile although it was deemed also as excessive
in the beginning. Beginning with President José Sarney, Brazil tackled AIDS without
being able to alleviate its general national economic crisis. Brazil’s acceptance into the
World Trade Organization (WTO) was conditioned to the passing of a law that
recognizes medicine patents and any drug in circulation before the inception of the law
stays without a patent. Unafraid of possible retaliations from other and more powerful
countries, Brazil defied the tradition of AIDS that has been stabilized by the
pharmaceutical industry. The local production of generic drugs that compose the triple
cocktail lowered the cost and made the drugs available to virtually any HIV+ person.16
The boldness that characterized Brazil national AIDS program emerged from political
consciousness and its high regard of intellectual and cultural dialogue. The American
tradition of AIDS, initially propelled by cultural debates, was let to its own political
devices reclined on a partisanship change after the Reagan and Bush years. Tradition and
prescription prevailed over prevention and treatment, once again. Abstinence-only
programs achieved popularity under George W. Bush’s endorsement, but indeed were
underway for many years. In 2003, the American presidential State of the Union address
brought up AIDS as a foreign issue of the developing world, where Africa was to become
16
Tina Rosenberg explores this issue in “Look at Brazil”, where she discusses that in the case of
other drugs that hold patents in Brazil, the pharmaceuticals were basically forced to lower their
costs due to Brazil’s aggressiveness and the future danger of Brazilian generic production of the
patented drugs. In 2001, for example, Merck agreed to lower the prices for two drugs, fearing a
break of patents by the Brazilian government.
20
the main beneficiary of United States help, primarily for plans of self-restraint. This was
to becomes the latest “work of mercy”17 from the United States, whose role in the
interpretation of maladies has become vital to the containment and spread, increase and
decrease, of the epidemic. The tradition of AIDS and its detachment from prevention –
such as unrelenting sex education or condom distribution– and treatment – for
intravenous drug users or needle exchange programs– has prevented the United Stated
from properly reducing HIV infections and thus the numbers have increased periodically.
The tradition and prescription of AIDS currently isolates cultural and intellectual
clusters from political and economic enterprises, and has propagated more confrontation
than dialogue. The result has been horror tactics and strategic scares. From very specific
cultural and intellectual perspectives, terror alerts have resurged in its intent to reclaim
certain space within the realm of cultural memory. Their goal is to combat our own
forgetfulness and to bring AIDS into the spotlight. While these aspirations are legitimate
and essential, a process of cultural frightening counteracts these objectives. The use of
terror, as in the early years of AIDS, is part of the tradition of AIDS that believes that
political intervention will result from imminent threat. These terror techniques have an
unfortunate stronghold within the political arena and have made its way into cultural
discussants.
Coincidentally, a culture of terror has not overtaken intellectual debates but has
challenged notions of tradition and prescription, as a reminder that AIDS condensates
17
President George W. Bush stated: “We have the opportunity to bring that hope to millions. It's
an opportunity for this nation to affect millions and millions of lives. So that's why I've laid out
the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. I called it in my State of the Union a work of mercy, and
that's what I believe it is.”
21
politics and culture, economics and medicine, policies of increase and decrease, and
travels and mobilizations. The study of AIDS needs to delve into its interaction within
cities, not exclusively but because the circulation of culture proves indispensable to this
task for the debate and dialogue that can take place within intellectual communities.
II. Circulation and the Art of Suicide: Reinaldo Arenas
The suicide of Reinaldo Arenas in 1990 opens the second decade of AIDS from a
Latin American standpoint. In the previous decade, however, the writer generated a
strong oppositional voice against the regime under Fidel Castro related to his poetics of
writing and creative process. With his death and subsequent publication of the novels El
color del verano o Nuevo “Jardín de las delicias” (The Color of Summer or New
“Garden of Delights”) and El asalto (The Assault) in 1991, and of his autobiography,
Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls), in 1992, only the latter was highlighted while
his fictional narratives were definitely relegated to a far secondary position. This
excessive flattening process of the trajectory of an artist is the gloomy result of
combining academic and marketing interests by means of finding a masterpiece, or
defining one work of art as the condensation of an artist’s poetics. After this course of
action takes place, it will become quite uphill to discuss the artist’s path for all his work –
and possibly all his life— is compressed within that career-making piece. Antes que
anochezca became all of Reinaldo Arenas for its reconfiguration of Arenas’ life in both
non-fictional and fictional terms along with its deep-rooted admiration for a country and
a government that had basically forced him unto exile.
22
Once outside Cuba, Arenas is a writer intercepted by his travels and eventually by
AIDS. His texts made it out of Cuba and into publishing before he makes the first stop in
Miami. Miami, a stronghold of Cuban exiles, holds minute interest for Arenas. He
particularly insists that Miami and its Cuban community are as oppressive for him as the
island itself. Without a home, Arenas sets his eyes in another city, New York. Thus New
York becomes starting point and destination for him. This new city becomes his
operation command post, his inspiration for writing and activism. It is also his docking
port and closing statement, where he faces the inevitable tribulations of AIDS at the end
of the 1980s.
Arenas becomes a vital figure to revisit the circulation of AIDS within the Latin
American 1990s because his influence on culture expanded throughout the decade mostly
by means of his autobiographic text. This amplification of Arenas came with a prize paid
by the perhaps slowly increasing interest in exploring the generation from the Mariel
exodus of 1980. Such understandable significance should have developed into a kind of
revival of his other works that were a product of the same conditions of production as the
autobiography. Antes que anochezca were not his last words as a writer as he strived to
finish El color del verano and then write the short introductory and closing notes that
frame the autobiography. To enter and discuss Antes que anochezca as a project that
dialogically interconnects politics and culture calls for a discussion of the tradition and
poetics that Arenas had explored in his other texts since the autobiography cannot be left
in quarantine from the practices observed in these additional writings.
23
In order to delve into Arenas’ poetics and politics, I propose to take the brief note at
the end of the autobiography as the opening door to look at his work as a multipart
composite imbued by the artistic struggle to manage politics and culture.
Queridos amigos: debido al estado precario de mi salud y a la terrible depresión
sentimental que siento al no poder seguir escribiendo y luchando por la libertad de
Cuba, pongo fin a mi vida. (343)
Dear friends: due to mi uncertain health and to the dreadful emotional depression
that I endure by not being able to carry on writing and fighting for Cuba’s
freedom, I put an end to my life.18
This sentence and the rest of the letter was also made public through newspapers and it
exposed the interlocking manner in which Arenas could not use his position as an
intellectual to question and debate politics. The solution found to escape this problem and
his ailing body due to AIDS was suicide, where this act turns into his own way of
interrupting his own, private circulation of AIDS. This consequence of a body circulating
with AIDS comes from a shared dialogue between a person not infected with HIV and
HIV as a virus itself. That is, the contagion affects both the circulation of the newly
infected person and the HIV conglomerate. Whenever the HIV+ person participates in
any activity that leads to passing the virus, then this person reshapes the second’s person
circulation within a given space. Simultaneously, this exchange also restructures the
circulation of HIV as a whole set of an expanding virus that had its own general platform
aside from the + individual. The study of AIDS therefore concerns those instances in
which its circulation is curtailed or there is intent of truncation. Arenas, through his life
18
Unless noted, the textual translations are mine.
24
and writings, helps this inquiry through his suicide, his personal way of disrupting
circulation. Thus with Arenas, suicide cuts through his AIDS and his ideas on suicide in
his texts contribute in examining one specific moment in which the circulation of AIDS is
halted.
In Celestino antes del alba (Havana, 1967), his first and only novel published in Cuba,
the mother throws herself down the family’s well when she discovers that her son,
Celestino, has started to excessively write poems in every surface found. This is the first
time of a series in which the mother resorts to this strategy, but ends up constantly
reappearing. For the mother, suicide becomes and unperfected art that cannot be
thoroughly performed. One character criticizes this form of abandonment by
commenting:
¡Qué desgraciada!: hacer eso y dejar a su hijo rodando por el mundo. ¡Yo no le
veo ningún mérito! Lo que merece es que la desenterremos y le digamos:
“Cabrona, cómo te atreves a matarte si tienes un hijo. ¡Cabrona!” (58)
What an ill-fated woman!: to do that and leave her son tossing around in the
world. I don’t see any merit in it! She deserves for us to unbury her and tell her:
“Bitch, how do you dare to kill yourself if you have a son. Bitch!”
This functions indeed as a reversal of the suicide, for if the mother has decided to cut her
life short in the well, the other character forcefully resurrects her. The mother is not one
single entity but a series of mothers that take place in different activities. When one of
these mothers dies, another one appears:
-Se murió tu madre- dijo el coro de primos.
-¿Qué madre?...
25
-Tu madre, la que regaba las matas de guanina y decía que eran sandovales.
-¿Y la otra?
-La otra hace tiempo que se tiró al pozo.
-¿Y quiénes nos quedan ahora?
-No lo sabemos, pero es posible que todavía te queden algunas madres por ahí,
regadas.
-Díganles que no vengan. (171)
-Your mother died- said the chorus of cousins.
-Which mother?…
-Your mother, the one that watered a plant, but called it by another name.
-And the other one?
-The other mother threw herself down the well a long time ago.
-And whom do we have left now?
-We don’t know, but it’s possible that perhaps you still have some mothers
around, scattered.
-Tell them not to come.
The complexity of Arenas’ proposal relies on not converting death and suicide into the
ultimate escape. The art of the fugue is not entirely accessible at least by these means.
The characters are endlessly searching for an escape, for a way of shortening or stopping
the circulation, just to eventually discover that perhaps such finale is just an impossibility
and that their rummaging for breaking away from the circulation of life is not feasible in
their own hands. The alternative of intervening with the circulation of life would be to
permit eternal circulation, where there is the opportunity for life or lives to continue even
26
if the body dies. Attentive of this wary prospect, the characters are more afraid of
perpetual life because eternity is the point of no return. For them, not having the remotest
chance to escape becomes the ultimate punishment since it limits their interest in trying to
curtail their circulation.
Arena’s first novel is the beginning of a poetics of suicide, where circulation is a
reappearing matter not only through characters that must repeatedly concoct loopholes,
but also by way of the texts and their respective manuscripts. After winning the first
mention in the Cuban national contest for novel in 1965, Celestino antes del alba
(Havana, 1967), began to clandestinely circulate within Cuba and international literary
markets. The problem of piracy began to bear a resemblance to Jorge Luis Borges’
poetics of the copy, where even the texts in their autonomy try to provide answers to the
act of escaping. For Arenas, the circulation of his texts would become yet another set of
questions for the literal circulation and distribution of culture. Like his exploration of
suicide and circulation of characters, the pushing motive consists of traveling through
varied approaches to at least temporarily interrupt the circulation, either of pirate copies
or literary characters. Arenas’ search finds its niche in a series of five novels titled la
pentagonía, loosely translated as the five agonies.19
The second agony, El Palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas (Paris, 1975; The Palace of
the White Skunks), opens with death playing with a bicycle rim. The novel was initially
published and translated into French with the subsequent publication of original Spanish
19
Emir Rodríguez Monegal insists on eliminating Arenas’ concept of the pentagonía based on the
notion that the three first novels –Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanquísimas
mofetas, and Otra vez el mar– function as one voluminous text. In his dissertation, Miguel Correa
retakes the problem and favors Rodríguez Monegal, discarding Arenas’ insistence on the literary
fabric that brings together the five texts.
27
version in Caracas during 1980. Four sisters, Adolfina, Onérica, Celia and Digna, face the
tribulations of daily life with their parents while living the last days of Fulgencio
Batista’s government. Celia’s daughter, Esther, has committed suicide, but insists in
entering the text as one of many narrative voices:
Y, precavida, alzó el vuelo. Fue aquel su triunfo, el mayor, -el único- a que puede
aspirar un suicida. (134)
And, carefully, she took flight. That was her triumph, the greatest, -the only onethat can be desired by a suicide.
Among the voices of these female characters emerges Fortunato, Onérica’s son, who has
become an older version of Celestino from the previous novel. Sometimes he wants to
follow Esther in her suicidal steps, but falls short from doing so by deciding that the
people around him, his family, should be the ones committing suicide for the agonies that
they live respectively. To fight against everything and nothing simultaneously, Fortunato
imitates everyone in the family. Their lives become his own life, by setting himself on
fire like Adolfina or turning into Polo, the moody and volunteered mute grandfather. As
an actor and interpreter, Fortunato also becomes Esther and once again questions suicide:
[. . .] y como ella razonó, no sin terror, que la muerta voluntaria es el único acto
puro, desinteresado, libre, a que puede aspirar el hombre, el único que lo salva,
que lo cubre de prestigio, que le otorga, quizá, algún fragmento de eternidad y de
heroísmo. (242)
[. . .] and as she reasoned, not without terror, that voluntary death is the only
untainted act, apathetic, free, that can be desired by man, the only one that saves,
28
that covers him with prestige, that gives him, perhaps, some fragment of eternity
and heroism.
Fortunato’s escalating interest in suicide becomes an exploration in time and existence,
where the circulation of the body in time can only be corrupted, if only temporarily by
suicide. El palacio is composed of sixth independent agonies and the last one is preceded
by an epigraph that describes how Fortunato is hanging himself every morning and has to
be wakened up consequently. This repeated circulation of characters, returning for
subsequent deaths, seems to conjure Mikhail Bahktin and his reflections on the carnival.
Upon Bahktinian scrutiny, life and death not only interact, but also do so indiscriminately
enjoying this corrupting contact. The festive excess and overindulgence proposed by
Bahktin as a mode of reading works by François Rabelais is indeed insufficient to
approach Arenas’ work. In his texts, Arenas becomes quite playful by means of his
humor and joie de vivre, but it functions as the silver lining for frustration, as another
intent of the art of the fugue. The beauty of Bakhtin lies on the moment where binary
oppositions are suspended, where the delicate force of celebration flourishes without
ceding to deeper disturbances such as the ones proposed by Arenas in El palacio. Suicide
turns out to be an instrument of short-lived disruption, where the end of life seems more
like a suspension, a deferment.
Deferral is the opening of the third novel in the pentagonía, Otra vez el mar
(Barcelona, 1982) where images are proposed, but immediately retracted. The impressive
blue sea is initially yellow and not how it was viscerally described the first time. Waves
may affect the color of the sea, but it turns out not to be the waves but maybe just mirages
in the water. Otra vez el mar becomes a text of oscillating doubt, where the adverb
29
“maybe” is plastered over the narratives as a cautionary disclaimer. A nameless woman,
Héctor’s wife and mother of their son, narrates the first part of the novel. She describes
the six days of their vacation by the sea with incessant detail while being overpowered by
two events, her encounter with the never-ending sea and the relentless suspicion of her
husband’s affair with a young man in the next cabin. The irresistible sea experienced for
the first time after eighteen years –of living in an island, as she remarks— holds the
potentiality of suicide, a hesitation on life:
Y si me inclinara sobre estas aguas que fluyen sin rumbo, también prisioneras, si
poco a poco, me inclinara sin violencia; sólo un suave precipitarse; después un
lento balanceo… Flotar, quizás un rato, sumergirse despacio. (33)
And if I lean over these waters that flow aimlessly, also prisoners, if little by little,
I let go without violence; just a slow descent; after slowly balancing myself... To
float, maybe for a while, to get submerged slowly.
The sea becomes a dilemma for her as it represents her questions concurrently with the
answers. By asking herself about the meaning of the sea and her interaction with the
waters, she cannot help but charge it, turn the sea into a metaphor permeated with
responsibility and control. The poetics of the sea are also her politics of the sea: the desire
to stay and the willingness to leave. The sea must bring her calmness, but her anguish
also stems from it The end of her narrative shows the death of her misgivings about her
husband; the young man next door washes up ashore, but it does not provide her with a
definite answer about her husband’s recent days. She challenges the significance of the
sea because she cannot bear its weight. It causes her grief, for the young man is dead, but
it also soothes her impending worries.
30
The double implication of the sea is also seen through the eyes of Héctor and his
narrative in the second part of the novel. The waters that surround the island function as a
means to escape and its obstacle at once. Héctor criticizes his wife for not understanding
the sea. As a poet, he is the only to penetrate the reality and beauty of the sea by
combining prose and verse in his part of the text. From his perspective, access to the sea
is only granted to him and to his writing. The unsolvable contradiction of the sea –
torment and quietness for her, getaway and impediment for him – spins over a dual
opposition constructed between the two characters. She carefully notices that the same
conversation has repeatedly taken place so insistently that she cannot determine who is
the speaker or the listener anymore. One character begins to unfold unto the other. The
wife vigilantly follows Héctor’s traces in the diminished hope that she will be able to
enter his creative and literary world. Her version of the sea does not appear to enter in
contact with his; if both characters pursue any sort of escape, it apparently consists of two
separate plans. He solely wants to read and write, to ponder about the sea while she does
not know how to be part of his daily world, or even if she desires to do so. At the end of
the novel, when Héctor is returning to Havana from the six-day vacation by the sea, he
reveals that he has been by himself throughout the entire trip. He calls himself Héctor, he
dares himself, and he broadens his views on the sea. Otra vez el mar is the defying of
one’s own circulation. Arenas doubles the main character, openly providing gender
complexity, and vigilantly lets Héctor – and his wife – question the immense relevance of
the sea. The character becomes a double circulation of him, a counter flow, not the
relation of an ego and his alter. The counteraction needs to tackle Héctor’s thoughts on
the sea and this can only be achieved by letting only one of the characters, the wife,
31
confront suicide. In this novel, the art of suicide solely belongs to the wife and her
character becomes an inquiry into Héctor’s life by providing an entirely separate
narrative that at the end works counterclockwise upon the male version of the narrative.
El color del verano o Nuevo “Jardín de las delicias”, Arenas’ fourth installment in
the pentagonía, also participates in this multiplication of characters. Using the trinomial
Gabriel- Reinaldo-Tétrica Mofeta, the narrative voice finds different names to his
proliferation of perspectives on a full-blown carnival during the celebration of forty years
(1959-1999) of Fifo’s regime. Contrary to the perhaps unforeseen disclosure at the end of
Otra vez el mar, the narrative articulations in El color del verano struggle to distinguish
their task as narrators and break away from their respective circulations within Cuba:
Gabriel is the good son, always returning home to his family; Reinaldo is the incessant
writer; La Tétrica Mofeta is the public gay figure.20 This providential configuration is on
the incessant lookout for means of disentangling itself: to polish the art of suicide is to
obtain the almost faultless escape, for the fine skill of suicide thrives, as seen, on
perfecting a disruption in circulation. These three voices, or three depictions, do not
pursue self-immolation as previous characters, but demonstrate practices of escape
20
While visiting his mother in Holguín, Gabriel examines his own divine trilogy: “Y sobre todo,
mira, mira, no me he traicionado a mí mismo. No soy una persona, sino dos y tres a la vez. Para ti
sigo siendo Gabriel, para aquellos que leen lo que escribo y que casi nunca puedo publicar soy
Reinaldo, para el resto de mis amigos, con los cuales de vez en cuando me escapo para ser
totalmente yo, soy la Tétrica Mofeta. Tú tienes una escoba, yo no tengo más que la
desesperación.” (115, my emphasis) “And above all, look, look, I haven’t betrayed myself. I’m
not one person, but two and three at the same time. For you, I’m still Gabriel, for those that read
my writings that I can’t almost publish I’m Reinaldo, for the rest of my friends, with whom
sometimes I escape to be entirely myself, I’m the Tétrica Mofeta. You have a broom, I don’t have
anything but desperation.”
32
through the poetics of the writer, finally drowning as the island breaks away and leaves
its current position on the map.
The self-immolation battled in El color del verano gets rerouted between the narrator
and his mother in the last text of the pentagonía, El asalto (Miami, 1991). The only goal
of the narrator is to find his vanished mother and exterminate her, as he fears that he will
become like her –or exactly her– if brutal action is not immediately taken. This male
voice is part of the revolutionary movement called la contrasusurración, the counterwhispering, that fights those who literally and figuratively whisper against the revolution.
The mother, never to be seen but always on the move, operates on the increasing speed of
her motions. Her means of escape rely on the sleek quickness to avoid her persistent son.
Speed becomes her way of debating circulation because, for her, the allure is not the
mechanisms of escape per se –multiplication, doubling, reappearances, copies–, but the
pace that such mechanisms can attain. In Speed & Politics, Paul Virilio begins from a
similar standpoint, claiming that speed has become a system to question the combination
of power and knowledge. Virilio proposes to shift from the fundamental strength of the
spatial construction of power to the time in which movement takes place. The disruption
from space to time, and from power to motion, puts forwards the conception of
movement at the foundation of knowledge in antagonism to power.
The mother is inevitably at the core of knowledge in El asalto and her clout is inherent
in her ability to dominate the map of the city. The urban spaces have become the negation
of the city and are known as the non-city with its non-parks, non-benches and non-nights
to the inhabitants and the narrator, who must find his mother within this negation of the
map. Simultaneously, the whisperer mother creates a map and its subsequent circulation
33
within the city, and meanwhile the counter-whisperer son generates a counter-map with
its own counter-circulation. Speed is now the knot of the problem of the city: the faster
the mother’s traces are drawn upon the map, then, it is more imperative for the son to
advance even further. A different aspect of the art of suicide takes place because if the
son is not able to reach his mother (and destroy her), then he will become the mother and
cease to be himself. While the mother is sharpening the art of the fugue, the son needs to
hurriedly combat her mischievous ability slip within the map of the city. Self-destruction
is not seek by the narrator, in opposition to characters from others texts. In fact he is
facing the art of suicide and searching to circumvent it within a ostensibly endless map
that the city offers him. El asalto is a story of the city and the circulation of people within
it, but it becomes the story of countering the city from a narrative voice centered on speed
and longing for his mother. The final meeting takes place and the son discovers that his
mother is the great leader of the counter-whispering and consequently battles her with his
enlarged phallus. After the mother finally recognizes her son with her last grasp of breath
and bursts into pieces,21 the son at last reaches the end of the city, the shore, and lies on
the sand. The closing of the pentagonía observes the circulation of people: the rural
spaces of Celestino antes del alba and El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, the urban
countercurrent in El asalto, the practices of travel in Otra vez el mar, and the island that
rebels against the map in El color del verano. These texts and their respective
multiplicities compose Arenas’ art of suicide, where circulation ceases to be purely
circular but more a matter of interferences and corruptions within maps.
21
“Ella, soltando un aullido, estalla lanzando tornillos, arandelas, latas, gasolina, semen, mierda y
chorros de aceite.” (140) “She, letting out a scream, bursts, throwing screws, washers, cans,
gasoline, semen, shit and streams of oil.”
34
III. Circulation and multiplicity
The art of suicide exposes a vital problem for circulation: an apparent truncation, a
mirage of escape. Suicide has been biblically condemned but aesthetically inflated by art.
Suicide has been a passport to hell, but also a seemingly special force that has elevated
artists to a realm sometimes ethereal, to which Sylvia Plath, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ernest
Hemigway or José María Arguedas are perhaps some clear-cut examples for their specific
writing generations. Thus, thinking of circulation as a problem with multiple entries, I
find it pertinent to question these means of access into circulation and generate inquiries
about the changing aspect of circulation and its relation to suicide, for circulation cannot
take place unequivocally at all times.
For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the insistence on multiplicity and permutation
in Mille Plateaux crystallizes a system distanced from linearity and imbued in varied and
complex combinations and subsequent reconfigurations of organized thought. But beware
of the trap because multiplicity can become unidirectional. In a basic mathematical
computation, the number 12 proves to be a product of various multiplications –1, 2, 3, 4,
6, 12 (excluding decimals)–, but the different combinations lead to the same result. These
are all multiples of 12 and indeed there is a multiplicity involved, but this supposedly
simple example of multiples paves the way to a linear solution. Everything will lead to
the number 12. Deleuze and Guattari, well aware of this inconvenience, suggest the
system of the rhizome as an alternative because it works counter to incrustation and
unequivocal order by drawing lines that are rewritten constantly and thus are impossible
35
to be redrawn identically during the second time. The problem for circulation becomes
the same one faced by the rhizome: change and irregularity.
Working from the standpoint of circulation, the use of a map is inevitable, as is for
Deleuze and Guattari because they can make use of it without falling into any sort of
linear entrapment. The map becomes an indispensable tool to deal with change and
irregularity, as it turns into the surface on which the rhizome is constantly retraced and
where circulation between coordinates get reconfigured. Coordinates in maps hold a
double character based on their respective axes. A 1,2 coordinate remits to two
apparatuses (the x and y system, or latitudes and longitudes, which interact in the same
way) that work both independently and conjunctively since either part of the coordinate
can be multiply combined, again, maintaining distance from a linear progression. This socalled linear trap is highly dangerous for it might be conducive to another problem, the
circular ruin. Fear of the line might turn into devotion to the never-ending circle. To
abstain from this unending issue, the plateau, as a geological metaphor, works beautifully
for Deleuze and Guattari as it provides degrees of unison and contact –not linearity–, and
levels that avoid the inconclusiveness of the circular ruin. In relation to this proposal, one
of the appeals of the rhizome and circulation stems from their character as a system, that
is, not a supposed amorphousness that amounts to any sorts of disparate connections. The
embedded quality of the plateau permits the multiplicity desired from the rhizome and
circulation, while the map is the tool for the visualization of such task.
El color del verano is resolute on challenging the map on which the rhizome and
circulation work. The map, as its starting point, accepts no changes. The Mercator
projection is widely used, but broadly distorts the spaces near both poles. Once the
36
projection is obtained, it becomes hardly possible to challenge its distribution, and thus
spaces may be smaller than they appear. One main map projection is required to trace the
circulation between cities and to propose rhizomes, and the multiplicity of circulation
operates from that set visual provided by the map. El color del verano begins with “La
fuga de la Avellaneda” (“The Escape of Avellaneda”), a short theatrical piece with
historical characters, mostly writers and cultural authorities both in Cuba and in exile that
must convince writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda to stay in the island after being
resuscitated by Fifo, Cuba’s political leader. Trying to escape from Fifo by boat,
Avellaneda encounters a varied group of people, most notably José Martí, who decides to
not help Avellaneda as her boat is sinking in the middle of the ocean. The stage directions
consist of setting both Cuba and Florida and the waters between them, where
Avellaneda’s hardships mainly take place. The sea, as in Otra vez el mar, portrays an
overwhelming image for the characters, but in contrast, in this text the sea is not the point
of reference to which Héctor and his wife constantly allude. El color del verano is the
challenge to the map because the sea, in its constant mobility, becomes the space of the
short play and for the entire novel eventually. The characters, after the wild Boschian
overload in his painting “The Garden of Delights”22, and following Bakhtinian excessive
carnivals, are able to tear the Cuban island from its tectonic base and take it to the open
22
“¡Tenía que llegar al Museo del Prado! Contemplar las obras maestras. Ver el Guernica; ver
sobre todo, el gran tríptico de El Bosco –el gran apocalipsis que le serviría de modelo para pintar
las calamidades que padecía y todo lo que le rodeaba–. No había otra solución.” (El color del
verano 146) “I had to get to the Prado Museum! Contemplate the masterpieces. See the Guernica;
see above all, the great triptych by Bosch –the great apocalypses that served him as a model to
paint all the calamities that he suffered and everything that surrounded him–. There was no other
solution.”
37
seas. This moment of rupture is the crisis of the map, where Cuba ceases to hold its
coordinates in the map and thus any possible system of circulation that involves Cuba
enters a perilous zone.
The question at hand is whether the island, losing its geographical location on the
map, ceases to be that island and becomes another entity. The notion of an imagined
community, Benedict Anderson’s seductive theory on the novelistic genre and its
anchoring ties to the geo-political environments, will surely come under scrutiny once
Cuba shreds its geological foundation unto an unknown destiny, where the Caribbean and
tropical island might discard its previous geographical identity. The shattering of
geography on the map, the alteration of latitudes and longitudes, becomes a sort of
geographical suicide. The underlying difficulty for this proposition lies on whether the
map would seek to self-destruct itself since the main objective of the map and its
projection is to stabilize location and position. Once this goal is altered, the map’s
function ceases to exist since the location of the island, the literal location of politics and
culture, is adrift. Baruj Spinoza, by means of his rationalist Ethica, ordine geometrico
demostrata in the 17th century, is instrumental for such questioning, as his philosophical
system relies on the logical purity and absolutism of geometry and mathematics. Initially
for Spinoza, the facts of individual existence appear quite certain because it stems from
God (also known as Nature or Substance) and thus his infinity will only allow existence
and love for such.
As a given, God is at the center of infinite existence, and every subject exists to
preserve this existence. Therefore, under the claims of logic, if the subject can only
safeguard existence, it would be impossible (and illogical) to attack the premise and
38
commit suicide. In other words, Spinoza does not allow for suicide to even merely exist
as a principle because nothing can work against the infinity of God. He proclaims two
possibilities for a so-called suicide: to be forced by another subject, or the kill oneself –
Seneca is his example– in order to avoid the worse of two evils. In both cases, suicide is
not an awry experiment of freewill but coerced by outside forces, and therefore only an
illusion of suicide. Spinoza’s loophole for the potentiality of suicide only takes place
when the body and the imagination are affected by external conditions that make the
subject stem away from God’s infinity. Only under these altered circumstances the body
will desire self-annihilation, only an affected body will produce the logical reasoning
under which Spinoza is willing to admit suicide.
The island’s exodus in El color del verano is the challenge of the map, that is, one of
the challenges of circulation. The art of suicide in the texts of the pentagonía insist that
Arenas operates on Spinoza’s ambiguity, on the alteration of conditions of circulation,
but not necessarily on the infinite substance that concretizes its base. The island and its
inhabitants are not forced to leave or guided to evade Fifo. For Arenas, there is a shift in
circulation and that is where the impending suicide is located. The characters –multiple
mothers in Celestino, Fortunato in El palacio, the supposed wife in Otra vez el mar–
insist on reappearing from their suicides while perfecting the art of fugue, the art of
corrupting the flow of the body. El color del verano addresses this problem of exchanges
and escapes, but contemplates the spatial map on which circulation is cautiously read.
The island keeps moving and sinking on what will be a new map, and the sea becomes
the means by which this new circulation of the island is finally achieved.
39
The art of suicide, one could argue, shifts the conditions of circulation by a variety of
means such as the ones exposed in Arenas’ texts. But these changes in circulation,
composed of disruptions and corruptions, also distress the composition of the art of
suicide. Émile Durkheim is the main supporter of the latter. Under his sociological eye in
Le suicide, Durkheim emphasizes the collective moral and social force that prompts a
subject unto suicide. For any increase in collective misunderstandings of a given society,
the more likely that such moral confusion will result in suicidal acts. Durkheim strikingly
falls back on the use of the map, but eliminates the prospect of local and unpredictable
circumstances instead of remarking its possibility for the multiplicity of circulation as in
Deleuze and Guattari. One of his uses of the map examines the potential contagiousness
of suicide within a given city and its encompassing district. Durkheim reads his maps and
states that the highest rate of suicides are held in a variety of places notwithstanding their
distances from major urban centers where suicide was prejudged with a higher
percentage. His interpretation proposes that the conditions for suicide do not vary
between cities and that suicide responds to general collective problem existing within
similar configurations of people in France. Suicide, for him, will be committed in the
history of society due to malfunctions in the collective fabric of society and not in the
individual cases of major urban centers and their respective individual cases: “Existe pues
para cada pueblo una fuerza colectiva, de una energía determinada, que impulsa a los
hombres a matarse.” (311)23 Durkheim’s collective force, as seen in Arenas, indeed
engages in the conditioning of the art of suicide, but art will ferociously reply back,
influencing the circumstances that facilitated its construction.
23
“A collective force thus exists for all people, with a certain energy, that pushes certain men to
kill themselves.”
40
In terms of circulation, the map has proven its multiple corollaries. The study of AIDS
concentrates on questioning and challenging ways of circulation –of bodies, texts, blood,
culture, policies–. Arenas’ suicide in 1990 is certainly not the closure of circulation, but
an art of suicide. Traced in his poetics and examined in his novels, the art of suicide
becomes a potential mode of reading Arenas and the complexity that arouses from his
provoking texts. The intermingling of politics and culture are at the nucleus of the
circulation in the maps of Reinaldo Arenas.
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