‘Eat squid not fish’: poetics, aesthetics, and HIV/AIDS in Tanzania

Abstract

This paper explores and compares musico-poetic perspectives on HIV/AIDS in Tanzania during the early stages of the epidemic (1990–1995). Popular song, poetry, and theatre constitute the raw data of an analysis that highlights epistemological misunderstandings and disjunctures between (1) biomedical discourses about the disease as forwarded by non-governmental organizations and public health officials, and (2) local discourses that ground the epidemic in intensely social concerns. This requires us to query the deployment of popular culture in activist agendas, the underlying assumptions about ‘popular culture’ held by culture brokers in these endeavours, and the role of aesthetics in assisting or arresting attempts to appropriate art forms for ideological purposes. This essay adds to the literature on cultural confrontations in AIDS interventions, and extends it by considering how aesthetic form can impose semantic limits.