Dr. Rosemary Jolly is a professor of upper year English at Queen’s University who has been recognized both in Canada and abroad for her research on HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa. She is currently the professor and executive member of the Southern African Research Center at Queen’s as well as the principal investigator on a Canadian Institutes of Health research program on gender based violence and the spread of HIV/AIDS in rural KawZulu/Natal. I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Jolly speak at a dinner in September2009 and was intrigued not only by her work and background but by the novel perspectives she offered on interdisciplinary humanities-based research on HIV/AIDS. Her discussion of dissident writing, state-sponsored torture, crisis counselling and sexual education clinics reflects the disparate ways in which individuals understand and relate to institutions, which are often imprinted with the values of their creators, creating a set of uniquely gendered, racialized or sexualized experiences.
She was kind enough to grant Inquire an interview, the transcript of which follows:
I: If you could begin by telling us a little bit about yourself, your work, background, education and experience.
Dr. J: I was born in South Africa and educated under the apartheid government. I did all of my schooling prior to tertiary education in South Africa. I sat with other white kids in classrooms where I think my largest class was fifteen and my smallest was two because only two of us did Latin. The point of that is far more money was spent on educating us as whites than any of the rest of the population and I was very aware of that as both of my parents worked with other populations: Indian populations in Durban, black populations of all kinds. My father’s a doctor, my mother worked in getting people’s English up to standards where they could undertake education in the tertiary system under apartheid as people of colour. So I was very aware of that discrepancy. In 1981, when I was between university and school, my family was harassed by the apartheid government to the extent that we had to leave the country. So we came to Saskatchewan and I did my undergraduate degree there and then I came to Toronto where I did a Master’s on the black South African short story because black writing was almost completely censored under the apartheid government, so no one could look at it within South Africa. Later I did a Ph.D on Afrikaner dissident writing. I always had a focus on violence and so I finally developed a career in which I dealt not only with fictional narratives but people’s narratives of violence. I worked with individuals who were victims of state-sponsored torture to understand their stories and when the AIDS epidemic blew into full force in the late 90s and early 2000s, I began to work with people with HIV/AIDS, with a special focus on issues of gender and race.
I: What incited your interest in the HIV/AIDS pandemic? How did you begin your work with them, coming as you did from an English background?
Dr. J: I had written on narratives of individuals who had been victims of various kinds of violence, including state-sponsored torture, which also included very gendered forms of violence: rape with objects, torturing of men’s testicles and various other forms of abuse. These are highly intimate stories; they’re not necessarily published but are collected orally and only under certain kinds of ethical conditions. You collect them in order to understand the real damage violence and loss caused under apartheid. So by the time the AIDS epidemic came along, I knew that I had a facility, interest and some experience in working with highly marginalized and vulnerable populations to understand what their experience was even if it was highly stigmatized. I had some sense of how to get people to talk in ways that benefitted them, first of all, but also benefitted us in terms of understanding where vulnerability lay and therefore how we could prevent such things from happening and how we could support victims of this nature. When the epidemic came along and the approach from the US and allied religious groups was abstain, be faithful and condomize, I had a very clear sense of how South African women of all races had very little control over the conditions under which they had sexual intercourse, if any at all. That struck me as an insane idea and I decided I needed to work with victims of gender abuse to understand how the epidemics of gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS were collaborating to make a nasty picture.
I: So what kind of work did you engage in upon going to South Africa and working with individuals there?
Dr. J: First of all, we went out there and quite nervously started to interview people because in those days (early 2000s) it wasn’t very common to interview people in the rural areas about gender-based violence. The project had a seed going back to 1998 but it was very hard to conceive of how we were going to get people to talk about these issues. We started working with women’s organizations and organizations working with AIDS orphans and many of the caregivers were almost dying to speak about their experiences to someone who was objective and was not part of the community. In fact, we were privileged in the sense we were inside outsiders: we had a lot of knowledge about South Africa, particularly about the part of Kwazulu-Natal we were working in, but we were also not next door neighbours who were going to gossip with anybody so that’s how we started getting stories. At the time we started getting stories, we realized that although the government advertised places where, for example, raped women could go for services, there were no actual services other than in Pietermaritzburg which for many people was several hours away. It was unethical to ask people for their stories without providing a service so we partnered with Rape Crisis Lifeline in Pietermaritzburg to start funding and find existent spaces to develop places for rape crisis and trauma counselling alongside doing our research.
I: What kind of stigmas did you find were endured by individuals within South Africa?
Dr. J: In the first place, I worked mostly with women and it was very clear to me that being a woman in and of itself is a kind of stigma in South Africa. That is to say that the levels of equality we have in Canada do not exist in South Africa at all. So when you talk about sexual reproduction, women’s bodies, anything intimate at all to do with women was very much a censored topic. Additionally, people who have been sexually violated are not helpless victims in this respect. They know if they talk about their victimization, through the mechanization of stigma, they will not be perceived as people who are control of their future destiny and require support to help them enact their wishes. Instead, they will be perceived as poor helpless victims who can never do anything for themselves every again or are perceived as having brought this upon themselves. This is a double stigma that is terrible. The third stigma, and of course all of these can affect a single individual simultaneously, is the stigma of HIV/AIDS. In the early days when we were working in SA, there were no effective anti-retrovirals. Secondly, when they started to come out in Canada in the form of AZT, they were not available through state sponsored programs in SA. So in effect it was a death sentence and diseases that bring death upon us have always been stigmatized. Sexually transmitted diseases in particular have always borne stigma, just as syphilis did in Europe prior to the development of arsenic salvarsan treatment and penicillin. So working with all those three stigmas together can be overwhelming not only for the victim survivor but for those who are attempting to prevent these things happening in the future and attempting to support those who have already been victimized.
I: What kind of support did you receive or conversely not receive from either the Canadian or South African government?
Dr. J: I did receive small support at the beginning from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research who were at that stage really trying to build a global health program and work towards funding interdisciplinary teams. CIHR had figured out that a health structure in which we separate all the specialists helped technically but didn’t really address the socio-economic and gendered conditions under which people got ill, the social determinants of health. I was fortunate in that I hit that particular wave. I have to say I think that wave is in danger in the CIHR at the moment. We are facing a difficult situation: we’re in poor economic times, and while in the past the CIHR stretched out its hand to social scientists and humanists, they now appear to be moving back to more bio-medical related funding and not focusing so much on the social determinants of health. The difficulty with that is there’s a diminished pool of money for those of us doing preventive work of the kind that my team and I are doing. I refer not just to global or interdisciplinary research, but to Canadian research that would look at the socio-economic determinants of health within Canada from a humanist and social scientist perspective which focuses on the human experience of disease and how we feel when stigmatized with a disease. There’s a good chance that’s going to slip off the plate and in these hard economic times they’ll be a swing back to the ideology of “all we have to do is keep the organism alive” wherein the quality of the organism’s life is not a matter of interest.
I: On the topic of interdisciplinary teams, could you speak to how those formulated, what areas the members were drawn from and how you feel the interdisciplinary setting has benefitted not only your research but the individuals you work with?
Dr. J: I’m very fortunate because I have a fabulous team that I work with now. But on my way to developing this team, there were a few things that became clear to me. First of all, in an interdisciplinary setting, you have to be prepared for the translation and commitment that goes towards making sure each discipline’s language is heard and understood and that their concerns are valued. After that, when real interaction takes place between these disciplines on intellectual and research levels, that commitment is huge. If anyone is looking for their quick publication or is putting career aspirations of a high academic profile ahead of that disciplinary commitment, it won’t work. It has huge rewards but it’s time-consuming and not everyone is cut out for it. In terms of the rewards, I now have a team that has hung in there. We explain things to each other – I am developing a beginning competency in statistics and I didn’t even do Grade 12 math. I now understand a lot more about the importance of biostatistics. I am encouraging the Ph. Ds who come from the sciences to teach me how to do them. On the other hand, I am able to offer forms of language, experience and cultural understanding to the scientists on the team. The two skill sets meet under the rubric of public health, which has always been highly interdisciplinary. My superb colleague in public health, Dr. Stevenson Fergus, is a truly gifted interdisciplinary scholar. I’m still somewhat of an oddball in that, as humanists still remain quite far behind in engaging with this kind of work. But humanists work with how people feel and express those feelings through language, whether it be bodily or textual. So that’s what I bring to the mix. And it’s very exciting because we have students who are not disabled by disciplinary divisions. They’re putting pieces together in ways that are amazing.
I: What advice would you give or information would you provide to students who are pursuing a more interdisciplinary field of study, especially who are interested in becoming involved in global issues like HIV/AIDS?
Dr. J: I would say two things. First, keep a profile of what it is that’s important to you. And at the same, what it is you want to be taught that will encourage you to think or learn in different ways. Stay loyal to what grabs your heart because that will see you through the fidelity and dedication that’s required to do interdisciplinary work. You really need to believe very hard in what you’re doing because it’s time consuming and you will have to battle departments and make cases for example, for certain courses to be taught or counted. And unless you keep reminding yourself of your commitment, that’s difficult to do. The second thing is to get a mentor or a set of mentors. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a professor. They’ll wonderful, because they have more power than undergraduate students, but speak to other students who you think are doing interesting work. With interdisciplinary studies, you cannot sit in a study and just develop an idea. You need to talk to others because the glue only comes when people from those disciplines are collaborative so get mentors and others around you who are interested in thinking outside those boundaries. Finally, no matter how brilliant someone is, don’t try to solicit them for interdisciplinary work if they have a disciplinary frame of mind. Never put them down if they’re embedded in their discipline and doing brilliant work – some people aren’t cut out for interdisciplinary studies. There are people doing great research in individual disciplines and if they’re comfortable and don’t want to move from there, then don’t force them.
I: I know that you mentioned in an interview with the Journal your hope that Queen’s would develop an African Studies department. What changes would you like to see in the university, not only to speak to your own research and interests, but in general terms, dealing with the school becoming more global?
Dr. J: I’d like to answer that question in two ways. The first one is through an experience and the second will be more direct. It must have been five or ten years ago: a young man took my seminar on South African literature which focuses on race and gender. He didn’t say very much and gave all the bodily signs of being angry during the first seminar. I though I’ll leave this, I just need to see how this develops. In the second term, he came to speak to me and said “I now see what you were doing. I felt very uncomfortable in your class for a long time and I still feel slightly uncomfortable. But I now know that you were making a space at Queen’s that was comfortable for people of colour, women and particularly women of colour and it took me a very long time to figure out that my discomfort was directly related to them being comfortable in your classroom”.
Dr J: And I think his comment speaks to a very real problem. Learning, true learning, is not a comfortable experience for any of us because you get tugged out of your frame of reference when you really learn something. When what is at stake are questions of identity like race and gender that relate to our bodies, how they function, our desires and the most intimate things that make us who we are, the stakes are very high. I would say that Queen’s has historically not attended to that inequity. There needs to be more places on campus where it is slightly more uncomfortable for people who come from dominant, white culture. And when I say white culture, I don’t only mean people who are white. There are a lot of upper middle class people who may not be white who can in a sense not feel and pretend they’re never going to feel the targets of racism because at Queen’s, you can hide in an upper middle class cocoon. It’s not directly connected to how a person looks. And so those are the things that we need to discuss and change. I think that VP Patrick Deane leaving is a loss in that regard because he had a strong sense of that need for change and it does require someone senior to not just talk the talk but walk the walk. We have a long history here at Queen’s of talking but not walking.
I: What advances would you like to see Queen’s make?
Dr. J: In terms of things that could concretely change, African Studies is always a bit of a debate because of those of us in the field, we know that talking about African studies is like talking about American studies – are we talking about Mexico, Canada, the US? So it’s this double-edged sword where you would like to have African studies to raise the profile but on the other hand, you’re in danger of allowing people to think Africa is an easily containable entity easily studied within a continental framework. We do need a framework that recognizes Queen’s historical strengths in African research. We have a very strong South African research center. David McDonald and the global development program have very strong roots in Africa, especially South Africa. It goes back to the 1940s at Queen’s, when Professor Arthur Keppel-Jones, an internationally recognised southern African historian, taught at Queen’s while escaping from looming apartheid in South Africa.. The difficulty with Queen’s is that when our strongest programs do not align with the provincial funding priorities of the day, they are not developed and supported to their full potential. We have strengths developed over decades, and sub-Saharan African studies is one of those. The faculty this strength has attracted to Queen’s are in history, global development studies, English, gender studies and environmental studies; they are superb teachers and researchers. . And we trained African graduate students in significant numbers, until the foreign fees waivers for international students were terminated. I think the other thing I would say is we need a more integrated strategy around racial and global equity and empowerment at Queen’s with regards to the curriculum. I think that, to use Judith Butler’s terms, race is a kind of unspeakable at Queen’s. It’s no good to say we’re going to undertake all these initiatives with the undergraduate population aimed at inclusivity, raising awareness about politicized issues and then have a curriculum that doesn’t support students in exploring these forms of inequity. Perhaps Principal Woolf’s academic plan will address how to integrate this need to attend to the curriculum. We need to support and highlight classes that address racial and class differentials, and grow those initiatives. Further, we need to talk across our divides in intimate, not posturing, spaces.
Interview conducted by Lauren Samson
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