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COPYRIGHT 2001 Cox, Matthews & Associates
In poetry, fiction, memoir and analytical nonfiction commentary, black writers have faced up to the impact of HIV in a way few others in our communities have managed to do. Their truth could set us free.
Dedicating her 1997 book, Does Your House Have Lions? "to all my sisters who have lost their brothers to AIDS" poet Sonia Sanchez remembers long nights keeping vigil in hospital corridors and the rattle of her brother's deathbed cough: "All day and night I'm haunted by this cough, I cough/a scream embalms my chest with cough" she writes in his voice. Hoping that his death will come swiftly and without further invasive medical intervention, she prays that "his final days be a monotone/no cuttings no more stabbings of arms and legs/no resident tubes to collect these final dregs."
Sanchez lost her brother to an epidemic that has severely stricken black America. AIDS first got the attention of public health officials in the early 1980s. According to a Center For Disease Control (CDC) report last year, blacks make up over 50 percent of all new HIV infections and account for 38 percent of all AIDS cases. Approximately 57 percent of all women with AIDS and 59 percent of all children with AIDS are black. A 1998 CDC Study also says that by 1996, 40 percent of HIV-positive African American men contracted the virus by having sex...
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