WOMEN RE-DEFINING
THEMSELVES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIV AND AIDS: INSIGHTS FROM TENDAYI WESTERHOF’S UNLUCKY IN LOVE

WOMEN RE-DEFINING
THEMSELVES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIV AND AIDS: INSIGHTS FROM TENDAYI WESTERHOF’S UNLUCKY IN LOVE

ANNA CHITANDO

8
Women Re-defining
Themselves in the Context
of HIV and AIDS: Insights
from Tendayi Westerhof’s
Unlucky in Love
Anna Chitando
Introduction
In a literary landscape that has been dominated by male voices,
Westerhof’s auto/biographical text subverts several assumptions,
principally the unstated underprivileging of female agency. She fur-
ther performs a sacrilegious desecration through a triumphalist nar-
rative of a taboo subject: HIV and AIDS and openly celebrating her
personhood, even though mired in divorce and disease. This chapter
focuses on Westerhof’s Unlucky in Love (2005), a novel about a woman
who marries and divorces. Rumbidzai (Rumbi for short) is a mother of
four. She is HIV positive and strives to make her life meaningful in an
environment that is characterised by oppressive masculinities. This
chapter attempts to resolve what has been left hanging by Tagwira
with regards women’s vulnerability to HIV and AIDS, their survival
strategies, as well as their attempt to reconstruct positive identi-
ties. Theoretically, this chapter is informed by the critical works of
African womanists and feminists such as Grace, Saadawi, Gaidzanwa
and Moyana. Saadawi (2007) insists that women must refuse to suc-
cumb to patriarchal dictates. In a recent chapter on Saadawi, Zucker (2010) has brought out Saadawi’s determination to empower women.
Firdaus, a key personality in Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, murders
a man and recovers control of her destiny. Zucker comments on the
novel:
In Woman at Point Zero, El Saadawi shows us what a human
being will do in spite of cultural sufferings to feel some degree
of personal power and freedom. She has woven a multi-generic
tale of a woman whose life embodies an inter-gendered outlook;
Firdausi has suffered as women do in her culture and has grad-
ually assumed aspects of masculine power generally off-limits to
Egyptian women. Indeed, her coming to power results from her
re-authoring her life against the gendered constraints of her soci-
ety. Firdaus earns her own money and decides how to publicly
spend it. She selects the job that avails her of a better lifestyle and
chooses with whom she will or will not have sex. And finally, she
acts out her rage at the appropriate target.
(Zucker 2010:248–249)
This powerful passage demonstrates that, when cornered, women are
willing to “murder” patriarchy in order to re-define themselves and
recover their agency. Gaidzanwa (1985:14) questions male author-
ity that only feels that “motherhood is respectable and held in high
esteem as long as it goes with or is preceded by socially approved
wifehood”. How men prescribe inferior roles that women have to
play in society is also underscored by Moyana (2006), whose anal-
ysis of the portrayal of women in some of Mungoshi’s short stories
shows that women are supposed to be underlings in society. Moyana
goes on to show that, against this phallocentric logic, some female
characters are determined to defy patriarchy and that it is these
assertive women who create the basis from which it is conceivable
to imagine that women can challenge the multiple sources of their
oppressions. Ngoshi and Pasi (2007) add that the agency of people
affected by HIV and AIDS must be framed as subjects, not objects.
These perspectives on women struggling to realise their freedoms
in a context of HIV and AIDS and the male-induced stigma are
used in this chapter to unravel how black women fight for their
voices and to be heard in predominantly patriarchal and capitalist
society

Palgrave Macmillan

2014