Author(s): Japheth Peter Muindu

Abstract: Increased intellectual interest in the body at the level of lived experience has heightened awareness of bodies as vulnerable entities with the potential to sicken and suffer. Examining the body through artistic responses to the AIDS crisis gives a glimpse of the tensions and connections between the conceptual -theoretical body and the material-lived body for AIDS crisis underscores the embodied experience of reality and is therefore subversive of its constructions in discourses power relations. Corporeal representations of AIDS (disease) in literary fiction tends to problematize this social construction as texts engage in exposing inherent fallacies and stereotypes prevalent in social political and economic milieu of the texts through articulating the existential tensions concomitant with the illness. This papers sets out to analyze the mediation of existential disruption by characters in the two novels under study. Through Foucaultian concept of the care of the self and de Certeau’s heterological thinking, the paper advances the thesis that Carolyne Adalla’s Confessions of AIDS Victim and Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom provide spaces for the diseased subjects to pursue a quest for existential meaning to transcend the disruption and meaningless wrought on their lives by AIDS.

Keywords: Disruption, epiphany, alterity, apocalypse, existential meaning.

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.55.1