I began writing this book in 2013, long before the outbreak of Covid-19 as a global pandemic in late 2019. I have lived through the AIDS pandemic and other epidemics—of tuberculosis, of typhoid, of cholera, of malaria. I had moved from working with the narratives of victim-survivors of state-sponsored torture to researching programs for prevention of gender-based violence (GBV) within HIV contexts. The issues were connected in that they both involved working with communities in contexts of extreme stigma, vulnerability, and resilience.1

The continuity between my work on narratives of state-sponsored torture and GBV prevention further developed my interest in violence in highly intersectional junctures of racially entangled colonial/postcolonial power differentials and gender inequities. Over the past two decades, it also became increasingly clear to me that the extremely capacious human rights written into the South African Constitution of 1994 were unable to protect most people from sexual abuse, and sometimes were even the cause of hostility (Jolly and Jeeves 2010).

The inequities I witnessed came home to roost in normative practices of Western medicine in ways that on occasion made Western medical interventions deleterious to those infected with and affected by HIV in rural South Africa. I have written about HIV in South Africa in the context of the transition from apartheid to a democracy and in my work on healthcare as a human right (Jolly and Jeeves 2010; Jolly 2010), but none of this had really touched on HIV as an environment, rather than an event, or the ways in which the pandemic’s iteration in South Africa literally made me rethink death, not as an end but as a companion community to the living, not bound by human likeness, a concept I investigate in chapter 1.

In the protest days for free access to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), in the urban areas, where stigma was not as great as in rural areas, the Treatment Action Campaign distributed T-shirts (maroon, if I remember correctly) with the slogan “HIV-positive” on them. The idea was to render “I am HIV-positive” unstigmatized, while simultaneously confusing spectators at rallies as to the actual identity of who was positive and who was not, because those of us supporting HIV-positive persons marched alongside them wearing HIV-positive T-shirts too, expressing our refusal to stigmatize HIV-positive persons and demanding that the government provide HAART. The creative fluidity of this move was the beginning of my thinking with effluence.

South Africa, including the countryside in a physical sense, was HIV-positive. Everywhere there was evidence of it: more freshly opened graves than old ones in a cemetery; water contaminated by bodies not buried properly owing to the prohibitive cost of burials for some; giant government-sponsored ads alongside roads sporting awareness messages; the forbidden subject exhibited everywhere in the physical environment; and the leaking of the disease into conversations about whether whites gave Blacks HIV in revenge for the 1994 election of Mandela and furtive conversations in bars about whether or not to test. In chapter 1, I go into the depth of mourning we experienced. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that effluence took on a new, personal, embodied meaning for me in the wake of my HIV work. HIV was effluent: it spread everywhere but was simultaneously too awful to be spoken about; its introduction into the spoken word required careful negotiation in discrete contexts. Yet it acted as Covid-19 is doing now, as an all-encompassing environment, despite attempts to name it as an event or discrete disease.

When I returned from sabbatical research in New Zealand by way of Melbourne in March 2020, in a rush to get back to the United States before the borders of Australia and Singapore closed, I was both horrified and engaged to witness the breakdown of what I call “the bubble,” a phenomenon I investigate in some detail in chapter 3. I am not, I hope, filled with schadenfreude, but it was intriguing to see populations that usually think of themselves as protected struggling to find a way of being, a habitus, in this newly threatening environment. I was bewildered, critical, and enchanted by the array of responses, from a rush on toilet paper in Perth in the early days of the crisis to witnessing a young couple in Singapore airport in full (and I mean full) level-4 containment suits, strolling hand in hand through the duty-free section of the international departure area, in a flagrant display of commodified protection, a topic I revisit in chapter 2. In the business lounge (a business ticket was the only way to get back before the borders closed, and happily Penn State reimbursed me for that reason), families (though mostly men) involved in migrant labor in the global sense explained how they were being sent home, no matter how long their contracts were. Everyone was whispering into cell phones about how long each of them may have been exposed to the virus, what to tell the kids about why Dad was coming home early, and in between times, wiping cutlery and plates with alcohol-based sanitizer before plopping another set of snacks on a plate or cracking open a Perrier. When we got to Newark Liberty International, nothing had been sanitized . . . but also there was nobody there. To our chagrin, with all the shutdowns, we couldn’t get coffee between Newark and State College, and so we drove to State College on empty, as it were, after the overnight flight. These were different signs of a “positive country” from those of South Africa I had experienced before, but I was clearly back in positive country.

In 2011, I was sitting around a campfire inside a boma,2 at a comfortable but affordable game reserve on the Pongola River in the northernmost district of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I found myself wondering about the isiZulu servants who made up our beds and kept us fed. We looked at the fauna and flora and had massages, while the servants, even if they were housed on the reserve, traversed the boundary between game sanctuary and impoverished surrounding areas to go about the business of living. At that time, the Pongola area, just south of the Swaziland border, had an HIV prevalence rate of 39.3 percent (South Africa National Department of Health 2012, 32). What, I wondered for the umpteenth time, did it mean to be driven around, mostly looking at megafauna, while these servants—who have an embodied intergenerational knowledge of white apprehensions of Blacks as baboons—were at our beck and call?3 What kind of beings are animals, human and nonhuman, in positive country?

This nexus of humans, nonhuman wildlife, and disease has followed me all my life. I lived for three years as a child in the same medical residence as Steve Biko did: he was there at the same time. The Black medical residence, Alan Taylor, built as an army barracks in World War II in the ill-named Happy Valley, south of Durban, is now infamous for its pollution.4 This sojourn preceded our move to the only mission hospital for thousands of square miles in the center of the independent kingdom of Lesotho. As a child, on the one hand, I had human companions who were never recognized as such at schools and other “White spaces” because they were amaZulu and Basotho, the generic “Blacks” of the apartheid era. On the other hand, I had nonhuman, animal companions: horses (the only way to get around in Lesotho, including to remote clinics), dogs, cats, and even Henry Bolognaise, a black-tailed kite who had a massive cage in our kitchen at Alan Taylor Residence, where he recovered from a broken wing and was then, finally, rehabilitated back into the wild by the Natal Parks Board of the day. (He was actually Basotho too, if birds have nationalities: he was brought to us by a herd-boy in the Mokhotlong district of eastern Lesotho when we were camping, and Dad splinted his broken wing with a kebab stick. We then smuggled him into South Africa via Sani Pass.) The nonhuman animals struck me as much more dependable in their interactions with humans than most humans around me as they interacted with each other.

I had a long way yet to go, however, before I could express the interdependence of us humans, nonhuman animals, and what we call our environment as I experience it. Even as I sat on a rock in Lesotho overlooking the King’s grazing grounds as a thirteen-year-old, I knew the rock would be there long after I was gone, and I found that comforting. It would forever know I had sat there. I come back to the rock-as-witness in my final chapter. I couldn’t have explained this to my family, who were legitimately busy curing people, and my classmates at boarding school in Bloemfontein would have thought I was utterly mad. Having an effluent eye can feel like being mad, without access to narrative concepts that make it make sense, as we shall see.

First, however, a note on methodology. Narrative is the primary subject matter on which I bring the effluent eye to bear. Fictional works and the histories of their contexts of production form these narratives, where relationships between narratives of history and those of fiction are seen as mutually constitutive through the making of genre. Viewing stories in conjunction with the histories of their genres is an excellent way to trace the entrenchment of colonialist-capitalist anthropocentrism, the context of human rights and its decolonial alternative, human right-making. The subjects of narrative discourse, fictional or nonfictional, are always in a radical sense invented: they manifest the discursive complicity of how we conceive ourselves semantically, and how we locate ourselves as subjects within discursive acts that themselves are co-constitutive of material and extramaterial frameworks.

A common way to render authority in critical texts is to overlook, or overwrite, the discursive complicity of how the authors view themselves semantically, how authors enact their authority through their writing, positioning themselves within narratives that themselves constitute material and extramaterial formations. This has its primary origin in the perceived subject–object split that drives Cartesian thought and its much-touted objectivity. The pieces of memoir I insert here are part of my methodological approach, one that intends to bring into view the fallibility and risk of this author’s (my) engagement with subjects who do not command the benefits of normative human rights. I combine fictional and historical narratives within the ambit of a critical, effluent eye that is also occasionally avowedly autobiographical, so that my complicities may become apparent to the reader.

This is risky business, especially where inserting oneself into the story can be viewed as taking place and space and voice from the communities, marginal to normative human-rights life, in which I have lived and worked. But the desire of a reader or listener to read or hear an unmediated voice of the other through the work of a critic speaks to fantasies of knowing an original native, of getting through to an “authentic” otherness, as though one can write with an invisible hand. Postcolonial identifications of the exotic understand this desire properly as an essentialist, imperialist fantasy. Any unmediated access to the other is always such a fantasy.

At issue is the assumption of effacement of author, of the privileged self, as a virtue in multicultural, diverse interactions. This is in the first instance contradictory: why would the best approach to establishing intersubjectivity, the relations between different subjects, be denial of one of those subjects? In any event, denial of subjectivity is a ruse: the presumption that one can deny one’s being and the implications of one’s values is the other side of the coin faced by the liberal gesture of inclusion, in which one “grants”—that is, assumes one is in a position to “give”—the minority subject rights, a space to speak, a voice. What is truly challenging in interracial, inclusive, gendered, and other forms of intersectional interaction in the colonialist-capitalist world is not a faux intersubjective communication based on an impossible negation of self or the instantiation of the liberal self as the generous accorder of space, rights, voice. It is the fraught business of genuinely intersubjective communication across radical difference, which cannot take place without risk, error, and subsequent recalibration.

I learned this from women I worked with in Soweto in the 1990s. I wanted to work with abused women there who would have been considered working-class within the harsh constraints of apartheid economics, who would be now in their nineties by age cohort: teachers, nurses, educated women who were the unacknowledged powerhouses of their respective families. The women were quite obviously and understandably tired of researchers “coming from the university to get their stories.” Using a mutual friend, the author Miriam Tlali, as an intermediary, they invited me to write a life narrative of my own, which they would use to decide whether they would enter into a working relationship with me. They did not want credentials, which in the first instance I gave them and they rejected; they wanted from me what I had asked of them. So I sat down to write about myself with as little credentialism and academic authority as I could muster, no doubt faltering here and there. As I have noted previously, they responded sympathetically to parts of my narrative that they viewed as testimony to a somewhat difficult life. I was astonished, because I never thought, as a racially privileged, antiapartheid, white South African, that I had the right to view my life that way. These women were treating me to the status of a subject, the status that had eluded them most of their lives. This is when I learned that intersubjective communication across radical difference is not a zero-sum game, a question of denial of one side or another, but an opportunity plagued at times by mistakes, messiness, and misunderstandings, followed by recalibration and assessment, all along the way. Another set of fellow travelers who taught me this were all the doctors I met during the HIV work who had lived as students at Alan Taylor when I was there as a child. Our reminiscences over its space, air, and architecture were marked by a kind of hysterical, comedic, and intimate sharing of its awfulness. (We all remembered cement blocks and curling linoleum floors, decades past their due date.)

Bear with me as I explore this radical reciprocity in the context of an effluent eye, one that seeks to trace nonnormative subjects across species boundaries with a view to human right-making, as opposed to human rights. I define these terms in the following introduction. For now, suffice it to say that I am ecstatic that the gift of growing up weirdly, encountering a range of subjects not considered as subjects within the makings of the international, anthropocentric human-rights regime, let alone the sovereign state, has enabled me to develop the effluent eye.

Among the companions it is my pleasure to acknowledge are my siblings, Ann Jolly and John D’Aeth, who keep me attuned to the realities of infectious-disease surveillance and global “peacekeeping,” respectively, in the face of state governance structures, and remind me of the value of our shared, uncanny childhood. I thank my intrepid companion on weird journeys since 1978, Philip Grobler, from kicking lampposts in Bloemfontein in the seventies to attending concerts in Fez this year. To the ridgebacks, Thabo and Woza, and their cousin, the labrador Ebony (who tolerates Woza’s entirely mystifying fear of water), thanks for being sanity-making. Researcher friends of the HIV years, Alan Jeeves and Nomusa Mngoma: you were there and remained with me throughout. I am grateful to Derek Attridge, David Attwell, John Coetzee, Dorothy Driver, and the much-mourned Margaret Daymond and Margaret Lenta, for your unwavering ethical commitments in fierce times, and your generosity with my younger, often graceless self.

Thanks to the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State, particularly the elegant, sharp, loving, and enduringly generous Gabeba Baderoon, who midwifed this book; to Dorn Hetzel, for all the dog walks and talks through good and bad times; to Imran Jardine, for saffron tulips, food, and comfort; to Charlotte Eubanks, for her persistence in all things “yummy,” including trust and our friendship; to the Bodymapping colleagues Antjie Krog, Courtney Kiehl, Molly Appel, and Hyunji Kwon—what a journey! To Sarah Clark Miller, Jill Engle, and Mark Brennan, of the gender-based violence prevention research cluster, thanks for your affection and patience. To the magnificent Carey Eckhardt and the inestimable Patrick Deane, without whom I would not have come to Penn State, my utmost gratitude. To the delightful Department of Comparative Literature colleagues, graduate students, and faculty alike, much thanks. Thanks especially to Bob Edwards, whose support during the writing was endearingly unrelenting; to graduate-student colleagues Hanan Al Alawi, Tembi Charles, and Amy Omolo—you teach me all the time. To Alex Fyfe and Ivana Ancic: you are phenomenal researchers, supporters, friends. To Victoria Lupascu, for your advocacy in times of others’ illness, bravo! To Julie Salverson, writer and theater-for-engagement expert extraordinaire (“the half has not been told”), and Yazir Henri, whose ethics of violence and testimony keep me grounded in the post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission decades, you are both amazing.

To our Lake of Bays summer-loving family, Joe, Kelly, Ryan, Courtenay, Dillon, and Otis, to friends Sean and Arlene Dwyer, and to Trish for cottage hospitality, I can only say that childhood friendships of one’s partner are priceless. To my Australian hosts, Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock—insights the 2009 Canberra trip gave me made their way here; and to Jeremy Martens, the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Forrest Hall at Perth, all at the University of Western Australia—I finished the book while with you. To our Covid-19 family, the Karako-Besettes, how could we have coped without family dinners? To Rick and Robin, our global South kin—thank you. And to our Cape Town family—Gill Jordan, best of caregivers to the infant Rose and substantive editor most expert (what a combination!), Gerry, Pippa, Nan on the other side and Heidi—the summer days at Spinnakers are perfect: I would never have paraglided off Lion’s Head without your prompting! For all the horses that have borne me and with me over the decades, from Nyane and Mohale in Mantsonyane to the beautiful beings twirling at Next Level Horsemanship in Center County, Pennsylvania, I am so grateful. To Chris Whynot and Josh Figlin, for working on my “hard-wiring” for decades: I couldn’t have, would not have, persevered without you both.

I acknowledge the financial support of the Weiss family. It has been my privilege to have held the Weiss Chair in Literature and Human Rights and its generous resources for a decade. To Doug Armato, who believed in this book when some thought I was mad/bad; to Rosemary Hennessy, who was instrumental in making it work; and to anonymous reviewers and MBK, the most meticulous of copy editors, my thanks. Finally, to Henry Bolognaise: In the effluent world, you are soaring, riding the winds over the Drakensberg, where boundaries are simply irrelevant.