PAPER:Seeing AIDS in Aceh: Sexual Moralities and the Politics of (In)visibility in Post- Reconstruction Times.” Indonesia

ANNEMARIE SAMUEL WORK ON HIV AND WOMEN IN ACEH

FIRST:

Samuels, Annemarie. 2016a. “Seeing AIDS in Aceh: Sexual Moralities and the Politics of (In)visibility in Post-

Reconstruction Times.” Indonesia 101 (April): 103–20.

SECOND:

Samuels, A. (2016). Seeing AIDS in Aceh: Sexual Moralities and the Politics of (In) visibility in Post-Reconstruction Times. Indonesia, 101(1), 103-120.

“This Path Is Full of Thorns”: Narrative, Subjunctivity, and HIV in Indonesia

MY SUMMARY.

I am interesting to know the term ‘subjunctivity’. The writer emphasizes to understand a contextual, conflict, and complexities from ONLY a case of HIV-positive women (Tabinda) in Aceh through ethnography, diary notes of Tabinda, and Tabinda’s story. Some principles in subjunctivity leaving some opened multiple tactics “may express a desire for alternative outcomes and the imagination of multiple possibilities (pp 97).

I learn how Annemarie Samuels wrote an interesting narratives and rich explanation from one story; Tabinah, an HIV-positive woman, who is embedded with multiple dimensions in her life- three times marriage, spirituality power, husband’s power, adherence on ARV or stop it, discrimination, poverty, and family history about marriage.

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the active fostering of subjunctivity in processes of narrative worldmaking. Drawing extensively from the narrative of an HIV-positive woman in Indonesia, I show that by subjunctively leaving open multiple narrative trajectories and future possibilities, individuals may navigate the ethical complexities of their lives and maintain relationships with the world and others while staying true to the things that really matter to them. I suggest that although entertaining a range of possible future trajectories may involve constructing several alternative narrative plots, most of the time there is no plot to be followed, and not determining future parallel plots may be more helpful in balancing conflicting ethical demands. By not imagining clear beginnings and endings of narratives yet actively retaining narrative possibilities, values that may seem incompatible in the present may then all be kept open for future moral striving. [narrative, subjunctivity, ethics, HIV]

Abstrak Dalam artikel ini, saya berfokus pada pengembangan aktif subjunktivitas dalam proses pembuatan naratif. Dengan contoh narasi yang komprehensif dari seorang wanita pengidap HIV positif di Indonesia, saya memperlihatkan bahwa dengan membuka banyak lintasan narasi dan kemungkinan masa depan secara subjunktif maka individu dapat menentukan arah kompleksitas etis dalam kehidupannya dan tetap memelihara hubungan dengan dunia dan orang lain, serta tetap setia pada hal-hal yang penting bagi dirinya. Saya menyarankan bahwa meskipun memikirkan berbagai kemungkinan lintasan masa depan mungkin akan dapat melibatkan beberapa plot naratif yang beragam, namun selama ini mungkin juga tidak ada rencana yang dapat dilakukan. Tidak menentukan plot paralel di masa depan mungkin akan lebih membantu dalam menyeimbangkan tuntutan etika yang bertentangan. Dengan tidak membayangkan awal dan akhir narasi yang jelas namun secara aktif mempertahankan kemungkinan naratifnya, nilai-nilai yang tampak tidak sesuai pada saat ini mungkin akan terus terbuka di kemudian hari sebagai bentuk usaha moral di masa depan.

CONCLUSION

Anthropological studies of the subjunctive elements in narratives have shown that people may retain multiple narrative perspectives on the beginnings and futures of their life trajectories to make sense of the difficult situations in which they find themselves (Garro 2003; Good 1994; Good and Good 1994; Mattingly 2014; Whyte 2002). Drawing on Tabinda's narrative of struggle with illness, marriage, and poverty, I have argued that narrators not only actively employ subjunctivity to give meaning to experience, but also to navigate relationships of value in the world in acts of narrative worldmaking. The subjunctive character of narrative performances may help to stay true to multiple things that really matter, even though these things may present conflicting moral demands. Although entertaining a range of possible past and future trajectories may involve constructing different parallel narrative plots (Mattingly 2014, 124), it may also leave these possibilities plotless, indeterminate, and open to the options available in the process of balancing values and social relations with the world and others. By not imagining clear beginnings and endings of narratives yet actively retaining narrative possibilities and even embracing the mysterious, values that may seem incompatible in the present—such as, in Tabinda's narrative, a good marriage and pursuing health care, or being a good mother and having a stable household—may all be kept open for future moral striving.

In times of AIDS, people around the world may hold on to different interpretations of the illness that strikes them as well as a range of options for treatment, nurturing hope, desire, and optimism amidst conditions of uncertainty, anxiety, and pain (see, e.g., Whyte 2002; Wood and Lambert 2008). An HIV diagnosis itself may not offer certainty—something the people involved may indeed not all strive for (cf. Pinto 2012). Diagnosis, in Tabinda's narrative, is one event of contestation that she frames both within the parameters of biomedical discourse (calling into question the validity of the blood test) and outside of it (referring to a divine whispering as a potentially more reliable source of knowledge). Arguably, a future positive test result may similarly not foreclose other diagnostic possibilities (cf. Whyte 2002, 180). It is Tabinda's active investment in these options that gives “creative potency” to her narrative experience (Good 1994, 153).

Yet, Tabinda's narrative also shows that although subjunctivity may provide a mode of narrative that helps one attune to the world while staying fidelious to what really matters (cf. Zigon 2014a)—this is by no means an easy process. Keeping open multiple narrative possibilities, including those of mysterious or otherwise spiritual intervention, also means retaining the anxiety of uncertainty and the possibility of failure. Yet, sometimes, it is the indeterminacy offered by the subjunctive that may help people to go on in the face of adversity and aspire for a better life.

IMPORTANT QUOTATION

Narrative and Subjunctivity

In his analysis of ritual and theater, Victor Turner accorded an important place to the subjunctive mood, “the mood of maybe, might be, as if, hypothesis, fantasy, conjecture, desire,” which he considered to be dominant in the liminality of ritual. While for Turner ordinary life “goes on in the indicative mood,” liminality is “a storehouse of possibilities and “a striving after new forms and structures” (1986, 42). Studies of the subjunctive mode in narratives put subjunctivity more squarely in the everyday. Jerome Bruner (1986; 1990) was famously concerned with the ways in which narratives create meaning through ordering experience, but he also pointed out that narratives work through “subjunctivizing reality” by “trafficking in human possibilities rather than settled certainties” (1986, 26). Further, literary scholar Frank Kermode (1979) observed that a plurality of interpretive possibilities is inherent to all narratives, even though interpreters often assume and hope for a one‐on‐one, realist, and coherent connection between a story and the world. Anthropologists show that the subjunctive may be an explicit characteristic of narratives (e.g., Good 1994). The uncertainty, the “might‐be,” of subjunctivity may be unwanted, a result of unequal power relations (Pinto 2012) or haunting rumors (Samuels 2015). At the same time, rather than settling on one realist account of the world, those who tell stories may also be highly committed to leaving possibilities open, employing what Good and Good (1994) have called “subjunctivizing tactics.” Such tactics may express a desire for alternative outcomes and the imagination of multiple possibilities (Good 1994, 155; see also Mattingly 2014, 122–49).-pp 97

The subjunctive mode, then, is an essential part of an everyday life characterized by possibility, uncertainty, and nonlinearity (Garro 2003; Mattingly 2010; Ochs 2012; Throop 2014). Through subjunctivizing tactics, people may make sense of their uncertain, incoherent, and nonlinear experiences, not by providing coherence but by actively sustaining multiple possibilities.2 At the same time, narratives do much more than making sense of experience. Adding to approaches that prioritize meaning‐making as the primary accomplishment of narratives (e.g., Garro and Mattingly 2000, 1; Kleinman 1988), we could think of narrative worldmaking as the ways in which people use narratives to create, sustain, intensify, or neglect relations with the world and others (Zigon 2012), the ways in which narratives not only index but also create the world (Ochs 2012), and the intersubjective narrative practices through which people create possibilities in everyday life (Mattingly 2014). More than a mostly retrospective effort to make sense of experience, narratives effect a present “being‐with” others and thereby actively make and remake the world (Zigon 2012; see also Samuels 2016b).-pp 98

o understand the important narrative plurality that the subjunctive mode lends to navigating relations of value, I turn to recent work by Jarrett Zigon (2014a) on attunement and fidelity and by Steven Black (2015) on morality and performance. Zigon argues that through attunement people continuously adjust the multiple relationships through which they are entangled with the world and others. It is through attunement that these relationships gain significance (even if they are “negative”), and therefore, through attunement we become and maintain ourselves as subjects in a world of value. Furthermore, Zigon (2014a, 24) maintains, by means of enacting “fidelity,” the always already‐attuned subject “remain[s] true to its singular life‐trajectory,” through the ethical maintenance of relations with others and the world. In other words, people ethically work on the things that matter to them, for which they have concern, and in doing so they can maintain fidelity to who they are as beings‐in‐the‐world. Pp.98

The ambiguity of the choir performances allows audiences to read between the lines and therefore offers, Black argues, “a way to embody multiple public discourses about morality at the same time” (2015, 261).-pp 98

While dilemmas of disclosure and secrecy play a similar role in the lives of many HIV‐positive people in Aceh, I am primarily interested here in how the performances studied by Black can be a way to maintain multiple narrative possibilities, in the subjunctive mode. Performance, in this sense, is not limited to on‐stage activities such as those of the choir, but it can include all kinds of narrative expressions, including poetry, but also text messages, letters, and conversations. I concur with Black that certain narrative expressions help to actively sustain ambiguity instead of providing coherence and therefore to manage possible moral conflicts while remaining true to the multiple values that underlie these conflicts, in Zigon's terms remaining “fidelious” to them. It is exactly the subjunctive mode of narratives that helps people to manage such moral dilemmas without necessarily resolving them.-pp 98

I argue that such narrative open‐endedness, enabled through narratives’ subjunctive qualities, is a prominent way of worldmaking in troubling circumstances. Before turning to Tabinda's narrative, the next section will briefly sketch the context of my research on HIV/AIDS in Indonesia and the contours of my relationship with Tabinda.-pp 99

THE STYLE OF ANNEMARIE SAMUEL WRITE  A NARRATIVE
Lowering her voice almost below the level of whispering, she shared another concern with me, asking how she could know who had infected whom with HIV……

Tabinda's story contained a range of subjunctive elements. She clearly expressed uncertainty about the beginning of her illness and her possibilities for treatment. Also, she was ambivalent about the relationship with her husband and uncertain about her daughter, leaving open the ways in which these relations could possibly develop. Finally, her faith opened up the possibility of divine intervention: God might answer her prayers in ways she could not yet expect……

On one occasion, she told me she had learned a lot from being poor, and she described the beautiful aspect of her poor life in the village as the opportunity “to take a walk with the children to the field on a Sunday morning,” tuning in to an Indonesian middle‐class discourse about the rural poor being honest, uncorrupted, and close to nature….

Islam offered another crucial narrative framework through which Tabinda interpreted her suffering. Often, for example, she would say that she left everything up to God. When positive things happened, she pointed out that her prayers had been heard. Beyond being a cultural interpretative framework, however, being a good Muslim and pursuing a pious life was one of Tabinda's ethical life projects, together and intersecting with her continuous desire to care for her family and have a stable family life.7….

The moral dilemmas that such conflicting demands created (see Zigon 2007) were apparent throughout Tabinda's subsequent stay in the capital, where she seemingly had to choose between health and marriage. However, as we will see in the next section, by actively sustaining the subjunctive elements in her narrative engagement with the world, she managed to keep success in both fields within her range of possibilities. ……

“A Stable Family”: Between Medicine and Marriage

Over the next weeks, I often waited for hours with Tabinda to see one of the hospital's lung specialists who could treat her tuberculosis

Tabinda's main worries, however, concerned her marriage and her children. She kept expressing deep sadness about the loss of contact with her daughter. 

 But even though her husband started to demand money from her, Tabinda kept trying to appease him and avoid a definite choice between health and marriage.

When I asked Tabinda why she would stay with her husband instead of going home to her parents, she answered, “I always wanted to have just one marriage (berumah tangga, lit. to have a household) [in my life].” And, “I care for him. I cared for the first one too, but I couldn't handle it anymore.” A few weeks later, she revealed that she had had one more husband, who had been stealing, lying, and spending all her money, but whom she had repeatedly run away with against her parent's wishes because she “loved” him, “cared for him,” and “wanted to have a family.” Clearly, having a family and a stable household was one of Tabinda's main desires, something she kept striving towards and which she therefore tried to carefully balance with her wish to get treatment.

She now seemed committed to make the third marriage a success, but the need to take care of her own health against her husband's wishes again jeopardized this desire that was so complexly shaped by gender, religion, and nation, as well as by her own life trajectory. 

Tabinda described this event that “shattered” her family as a formative period in her young life, which seemed to have crucially influenced her future complex relations with her parents and perhaps her own repeatedly stated desire to have a “stable family” (keluarga yang baik).

In Banda Aceh, Tabinda lost consciousness several times, and when I visited her in the hospital, her optimism had vanished: “I think too much,” she said, “this struggle has already lasted so long. Yesterday I thought it would be over.” But it was not: a new drug combination helped her to recover yet again, though physical recovery did not end her social problems after she went home. At the end of the month, Tabinda texted me that she was ostracized from the community, with people moving away from her when she entered the mosque to pray. Her faith kept being crucial in facing the challenges: “I surrender to God. My heart cries, but I still have faith. I ask God [for help]. Even though this path is full of thorns and burned by continuous fire, I won't let [this] break my spirit, which is full of mysterious desires, Anne, yes, this is just how my life is.” Although I never found out what “mysterious desires” she alluded to, I noticed how she not only presented her struggle as a narrative, a difficult “path” on which faith helped her to keep going, but, like in her letter, it was also the poetic language itself through which she narratively created that path. In addition to making sense of life, her narrative thinking and writing were poetic acts of worldmaking, creating a path rather than merely describing it.9

abinda texted me that she had broken up with her husband, gone home to her parents in North Sumatra, and stopped taking antiretroviral drugs. When I called, she said that she did not believe anymore that she had “that illness,” or, she said, at least it had not been proven. More important than medication, Tabinda argued, was “self‐change” and “worship”:

I was created by God, and I believe in God. The lab results [of the HIV test] were not correct. Or maybe they were correct, but… [she pauses]. I don't have that illness, I am normal. Perhaps medication can make people better but it has to go together with worship. It is a balance, do you understand?