Ophelia’s Journey: A Voyage Through The Hinterland Of HIV And AIDS.

Several weeks ago, my sister lent me a book, a signed first edition a friend gave her. The friend Rose is a Zambian, and the book is an autobiographical tale of her younger sister, Ophelia, who lives in Sweden and is HIV-positive. Ophelia wrote the book with the help of Swedish journalist Agneta Larsson. Since I always have so much to read, it was inevitable that I would pick up the book on a whim - something I did a couple of days ago. In a few hours, I devoured the 250-page book - it is a straightforward, engaging, if not exactly palatable, story. There is so much death and dying in the book, but there is a certain felicity and humaneness of tone about the writing that the momentum of reading it never slackens.

Ophelia arrives in Sweden in the early 1990s. She is several weeks gone, impregnated in Zambia by a young man called Mark, who left her for the young woman he was double-dating with Ophelia. Mark is a player; besides these two girls, he also sows his oats as promiscuously as possible. Ophelia discovers that Mark has infected her with HIV, and she is distraught and disconsolate. The story fans out from this revelation. In the beginning, instances of the all-too-human weakness which may have led her to contract the virus are revealed. Apart from Ophelia’s inability to be angry with Mark - she even met up with him again during a visit to Zambia - she also displays self-regarding (not in JS Mill’s sense) and a dangerous lapse of courage when she meets a young dreadlocked DJ, Stefan, after she has been diagnosed as a carrier of HIV. She and Stefan fall in love and move in together, and for months, Ophelia does not admit to the young man that she is HIV positive. She tells him at last, but luckily, the test reveals that the guy is negative, and they go ahead to have an HIV-free child together.

Although she cannot tell some of her nearest and dearest for years, Ophelia gradually begins to accept her condition, and finally, she becomes a tireless HIV/AIDS campaigner. She works with an NGO called Noaks Ark (Noah’s Ark). Apart from her relationship with Stefan, the book has many personal stories. Her deathless love for the man who infected her with HIV. Her experiences as an HIV-positive (black) person in Sweden. The overt and demure prejudices against carriers of the virus, despite Sweden’s sheen of ultraliberalism and renowned pedigree of progress. There are also the psychosomatic side-effects of the antiretroviral drugs, mood swings verging on out-and-out folie, physiological derangement, and how these affect her relationships. She writes about how she, in depressive doldrums, opens the door of the car her Swedish husband is driving at full speed and threatens to ease herself out - with her two children in the car.

Whatever one may have known about HIV/AIDS, it still boggles the mind to read the passages that treat how the malady called AIDS devastates lives in the part of Africa where Ophelia comes from and beyond. Almost half of Ophelia’s kin carry the virus. It kills a sister-in-law, a big brother, a father, several cousins, friends, and acquaintances. Despite broader administration of antiretrovirals, almost 100,000 Zambians died of AIDS in 2005. Today, nearly a million Zambian children have been orphaned by the disease.

The relative prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has always been a vexed, even ticklish, question. How does one, anyone, write about the virus and the disease without bringing up the ‘S’ word: Sex. The alibi of poverty was once used, but as Ophelia and Agnetta point out in the book, the freedom that comes with comfort and wealth often leads to casual risk-taking in Africa. Here is a quote: “In ‘A study of the association of HIV infection and wealth in sub-Saharan Africa,’ (2005) Vinod Mishra... demonstrates a connection between HIV and high-income, well-educated city-dwellers. This group travels widely, and ‘risk behaviour’ is common, particularly among men in extramarital relationships with multiple partners or acting as sugar daddies to young girls.’

This is true not only in southern African countries like Zambia. In West African countries like Nigeria and Ghana, upward- or turbo-charged mobility often translates into unguarded self-indulgence, if not whitewashed demi-debauchery. For instance, even if stories about men living in the diaspora coming over restive and frisky when they visit their ‘home’ countries are exaggerated, there is no doubt that a certain amount of thoughtless indiscretions happens. I can also write, without naming what journalists would call ‘sources,’ that a few of those deeply taken with this kind of cross-continental amatory ‘networking’ has come a cropper in the way of being infected with HIV.

Naturally, Ophelia’s Journey is sympathetic to all those who suffer from HIV/AIDS, but there is something about the naiveté and helplessness of the African women in the book which makes them stand in contrast to the men. The Lothario who gave Ophelia HIV continues to play around; Ophelia’s father only shrugs off the fact that he is positive; an HIV-positive man rapes a young early-teen girl he gave a lift, entrusted to him by her mother who is kept in the hospital because her HIV has become full-blown AIDS. In parts, the book reads like a kind of post-Eden dystopia, a cursed world in which God piles it on with: ‘Go and be fatally mortified with your flesh.’

In retrospect, I think it was a good thing that I read Ophelia’s Journey. Written in 2007, the book puts into perspective the causes, effects, and moral and physical costs of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Being a personal story, the life of someone I do know by a triangular connection, my mind cannot help itself returning to the story over and over again and asking questions which the book goes a bit far in answering.

At the very least, it is clear that a lax sexual lifestyle has a lot to do with the spread of the disease, just as poverty and rank carelessness. This is not to imply that African men are particularly or morbidly priapic or that the women are any more or less carnal than women elsewhere. The problem is that of attitude and style. For instance, if you refused to put the buffer of condoms between you and your multiple partners and knew full well that there was the risk of contracting HIV, then you should not be surprised if you found you were positive. And though women have to struggle against the odds in the presence of a man who may want to pay any price to raise the stakes for ‘raw’ sex, it behoves women, too, to exercise more responsibility and a sense of self-worth - that is for those who can, because the day has not yet come that I would preach to anyone about how they want to live their lives.  

Someone like Ophelia learned her lesson in a hard and costly way. However, aside from having the courage to publish her story, Ophelia is also doing an excellent job raising awareness about the problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa. She has even spoken on the same occasion as Bill Clinton, Richard Branson and Jamie Foxx, and she met the late President of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, who lost a son to AIDS in the 1980s (something she was proud of).

There is a woman in the book who impresses me a lot. Emma, Ophelia’s mum. The matriarch subtly bestrides the story with her foursquare presence, strength of character, authority, self-confidence and generosity. She mothered twelve children, and when her heavily philandering husband died, she became stronger still; she began to take AIDS orphans into her home in the village, feeding and caring for them. There is the story of how the sixtyish Emma and the younger wife her husband brought in 20 years after they married were being prepared to be ritually ‘cleansed’ of their husband’s spirit by one of the dead man’s nephews. Emma set her face against this leviratical practice, which would have finally seen her being ‘inherited’ by a far younger relative of her husband’s. She came up with the ruse that she - and the second wife - was HIV-positive (she was not) and that if anyone slept with her, he would be infected. Thus, the wise old lioness was able to tame the ardour of the young cub who wanted to overreach in the name of tradition and who could just as well be a conduit for any kind of disease (Oh, I remember Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel, although now it is Lioness and the Idiot).    

It was worthwhile reading Ophelia’s Journey, and for anyone who wants to better understand the problem of HIV and AIDS in Africa, this book will be useful. But when I tried to buy a copy of the book on Amazon (UK), I drew a blank and realised that if you googled the title, the book would not exactly jump out at you. Ophelia’s sister explained to my own sister that the book may not have widely circulated because it was not published to be sold - it was meant to be given away as a salutary awareness-raiser, especially during Ophelia’s lecture circuit.

Ophelia’s Journey is a testament to the fact that an unexamined life would willy-nilly become unworthy to the person who lived it. For her part, telling her story, educating people about HIV/AIDS, and helping and offering support to those who suffer from the disease is one way in which Ophelia is following the Socratic maxim that I salted up above, which is why she lives and finds life worth living. Writing about the book is a labour of love, but considering its distribution's contingent nature, you may or may not actually get to read it.