The Return to Life: Ethics of Resurrection in La Condenación o Jeremías aún no ha muerto de SIDA by José Vicente de Santis, No dejes escapar la ira by Miguel Ángel Fraga, and Un año sin amor. Diario del Sida by Pablo Pérez

Abstract

This paper focuses on three authors who have narrated their experiences of living with HIV: the Venezuelan José Vicente de Santis, the Cuban Miguel Ángel Fraga, and the Argentine Pablo Pérez. These authors have experienced their illnesses at different times in the 1990s and in other cultural contexts. Therefore, their experiences regarding access to the medication and social perceptions of the disease are also different. However, the three writers have in common the struggle for survival and the deployment of an ethic of resurrection. The article analyzes how HIV-positive people have narrated their permanence in their communities in the first person. How do these authors think of themselves as social subjects after being considered by family and society as dying? The works that the article examines become both esthetic and ethical challenges that raise questions about how to live and narrate the experience of having HIV and engage the reader with questions about how to normalize this disease and reintroduce survivors in social spaces.

Keywords

• hiv-aids, diary, testimonial narrative, memoir, resurrection, lazarus syndrome, ethics, seropositive