AEGiS-Chicago Tribune: Authors donate works to fight HIV/AIDS

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Authors donate works to fight HIV/AIDS

Chicago Tribune - November 21, 2004
Jessica Reaves, Tribune staff reporter

South Africa has changed in nearly every conceivable way since 1923, the year Nadine Gordimer was born there. Most of those changes--independence, the end of apartheid--have been triumphant. Others, like the scourge of AIDS, have left the country devastated, forever changing the face of Gordimer's homeland and so many of its neighboring countries. Passively watching the plague progress, Gordimer found, was unconscionable, and so the Nobel laureate rallied her fellow writers, plotting an attack on the disease with the only weapon at her disposal: words.

"I've always had such admiration for the way others in the arts, specifically musicians and singers, were giving their time and talent to raise money for . . . people living with HIV and AIDS," Gordimer recently told the Tribune. "I thought it time writers did something of the same with their particular talents."

The talents in question belong to writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Woody Allen, who, along with 18 others, contributed stories to "Telling Tales" (Picador, $14 paper), an anthology, Gordimer said, "of marvelous possibilities, variety and fullness." The publisher's profits from the sale of the book are to be directed, through the Treatment Action Campaign, to the support and care of families in southern Africa affected by HIV and AIDS.

The stories in "Telling Tales" are not about HIV and AIDS. They are, as Gordimer put it, investigations of the "drama of war and of sexual love, the comic and the poignant, fantasy, satire and seriousness." They are intensely personal stories, some riotous, some heartbreaking.

Gordimer approached this project with short-story writers in mind. "I was looking for an anthology of stories that would attract a wide public," she said. "I wrote to 20 people, some of whom are my personal friends, others simply writers whose work I admire and enjoy." She asked each of them to contribute a story, on any topic, without the usual fee or royalty. "The response," she said, "was immediate and generous."

Writers, Gordimer said, have always been closely tied to various social causes, and this anthology allows some of the world's most celebrated voices to contribute to halting the AIDS pandemic, a responsibility Gordimer, a lifelong resident of South Africa, feels acutely. "One naturally has particular concern for what is threatening one's own country, or people, or continent. But given the spread of the disease," she said, it's clear no one is immune. "We are all living with AIDS."

While Gordimer seems proud of the work she has put into the book, and has great hopes for its success, one senses that above all she's still slightly awed by the outpouring by her fellow authors. That generosity of spirit clearly speaks to some fundamental sense of social responsibility, and of human interconnectedness, within her.

"As the great Albert Camus wrote," she said, " 'The day when I am only a writer I shall cease to be a writer.' " Gordimer, it's clear, has nothing to worry about on that front.

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