TB-AIDS Diary by
Linda Troeller
Joseph Rubenstein
Professor of
Anthropology
The Richard
Stockton College of New Jersey
Pomona, New
Jersey 08240
Linda
Troeller’s “TB-AIDS Diary” is a tense document; it explores unsettling material,
and its results are properly un-settling.
Together, the photocollages make up an acutely personal work of art, but
they may also be understood in a wider, anthropological sense.
That is, they attempt to understand self through a conceptualization of
the “other,” a “stranger” who, without this kind of scrutiny, becomes all too
commonly branded and further unknown.
In the early
1930’s Troeller’s mother contracted tuberculosis, and this project is the
outcome of their communication about the experience, which included a
recuperative period in a sanitorium.
Later, when the parallels became inescapable, Troeller repeated the
procedure with the mother of an AIDS patient.
In each case she was deeply affected, angry really, about the way society
seized upon an attribute (in this case a disease) and, in Erving Goffman’s term,
“deeply discredited” or stigmatized the bearer.
The process of communication and of constructing the photocollages was
facilitated by the existence of artifacts; snapshots and diaries kept by two
mothers as ways, perhaps, of remembering a humanity that was being slowly
stripped away. These private totems
allowed Troeller a way into their lives, and a way out.
Stanley Diamond writes, “What the other is, if that makes any sense at
all, is inaccessible; his acts speak for him.”
Troeller’s art consisted in interpreting the acts; like an archaeologist,
she was able to unearth buried emotion from these visible signs.
That Troeller could do so confirms her (and our) empathic humanity.
There are similarities, but also important differences between the
“careers” of those who develop tuberculosis as opposed to AIDS.
Each, though, eventually succumbs to the stigmata; in the case of TB the
mark is almost tribal and is associated with the working class (19th
century aesthete overtones notwithstanding); AIDS, society would like to
believe, demonstrates a weakness in individual character, homosexuality or
addiction being the tangible proof.
The cough, the needle, the stereotypical gay man are the convenient metaphors of
daily language that serve to say, “He is not quite human.”
Troeller ties TB and AIDS together through an understandable
preoccupation with body, and many of the photocollages are concerned with its
fate. Invasion, decay and
humiliation are recorded. Both
diseases can fester before society is forced to respond.
The symptoms disclose themselves privately, at first known only to the
victim, and in several images Troeller depicts what must be the horror of
discovery; coughed-up blood, nightsweats, lesions.
The powerful, final emotional link appears with the knowledge that AIDS
patients, in their depleted state, are also contracting tuberculosis.
The progress of each disease is such that the public, eventually, cannot
avoid its touch. The persistent
wheeze, stained garments, and a scarred, ravished body are not easily disguised.
The wish is to dismiss the shamed from sight.
In the spring of 1933 Troeller’s mother left by train for a New York
sanitorium. Following a diary entry
of June 10, Troeller repeats a warning by her mother’s doctor to the effect that
if she should spit blood into her handkerchief on the trip she was to throw it
out immediately lest she be discovered and removed form the train.
Correspondingly, fifty years later, the mother of a man with AIDS wonders
into her diary, “My son isn’t physically strong anymore.
Will he be forced to go to an AIDS quarantine zone?”
This is our worst fear and one of the state’s saddest inventions:
the asylum. Exiled to a
controlled retreat, TB/AIDS victims are like the aged, the criminal, the soldier
or the monk, in that they are known only through the one dimension of their new
identity. This is the fate of the
thoroughly stigmatized. They are
left to a bureaucracy in the company of others so identified, each individual
act now planned to accomplish the aims of their “total institution.”
Perhaps it is too much to ask that we “normals” walk among the sick and
dying. It may take a special
cultural or personal constitution.
In one of the photographs Troeller reminds us that in traditional Zulu society
when one of their own had died, everyone would go down to the river to be
cleansed. Her plaintive question:
“Who is not unclean?” We all
die a little at the death of another, and we all desire to be re-born.
Similarly, Mary Douglas also reminds us that Catherine of Sienna
reproached herself for her aversion to the wounds she was tending and, saint
that she was to be, drank a bowl of pus in communion with the afflicted.
Throughout the entire TB portion of the “Diary” a saint-like figure
appears in the center of each collage.
This woman (a model and not a tuberculosis patient) seems to absorb, like
St. Catherine, the defiling elements of the disease.
A party from the graphic requirements of continuity, she seems ritually
required to purify Troeller’s mother in a place where spirit is subsumed to
hygiene. In this sense Troeller is
profoundly Christian in her art; where in this faith as Douglas notes, “rules of
holiness disregard the material circumstances and judge according to the motives
and disposition of the agent.”
There is another way to disregard the material circumstances of
tuberculosis and AIDS, and that is to understand our reaction to them as part of
a larger symbolic system. It is
true that both diseases are transmissible, and that our fear of them is the
outcome of modern scientific thinking about bacterial and viral pathology.
Beneath this rationale, though, lies a deeper fear of formlessness, of
those disreputable elements that must be contained to protect social structure:
Douglas again:
Obviously our ideas of
dirt are not so recent. We must be
able to make the effort to think back beyond the last 100 years and to analyse
the bases of dirt-avoidance, before it was transformed by bacteriology.
It may at first appear unfair to characterize tuberculosis and AIDS as
dirt. But to the sufferer,
avoidance is the social experience of his or her disease.
Think of an “untouchable” in India.
Or think of Troeller’s mother who writes, “People are afraid to have you
over for dinner, “ and of the AIDS patient who didn’t go to his sister’s wedding
because “He knew the Kaposis sarcoma on his face would be all the guests would
see.”
Dirst, and by extension, any disease, is really “matter out of place.”
The man or woman with AIDS, for example, no longer belongs with the
polite company of dinner parties or weddings.
They are dangerous; disorderly, and they must be put in their place.
Douglas writes;
A polluting person is always wrong.
He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which
should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone.
Until a place is found for the polluter they
remain hazardous and on the margins of society.
Finally, Troeller’s mother was ritually separated from everyday life,
labeled, and sent to the sanitorium to be cleansed or, and we are glad this did
not happen, to die. If she would
have died, sadly, in the anonymous asylum, we would have accepted this as her
risk of transition, before the final stage of public re-incorporation back into
our world as “healthy.”
Troeller’s photocollages explore the difficult, ambivalent status of
transition. The presumed danger to
us is ritually controlled by all that we define as medicine.
But to her mother it was a frightening passage, and although she was
blameless she was made to feel like an outcast, forever, it seems, charged with
this unwanted power. A few years
ago, Troeller accompanied her mother to a retirement village, and the
now-elderly woman was sure that if the officials found out about her
tuberculosis history they would reject her application.
The AIDS series presents a different scenario. Unlike the TB collages,
there is not healing angel. No
return to everyday life. Troeller
again uses a model, but he is posed in very different and often contorted
positions. He is not helpful to the
sufferer and in one powerful image seems to be suffocated by a snake.
The AIDS photographs are difficult to decipher and there is no easy flow
to the images. The TB series
appears almost peaceful in contrast.
The personal experience of tuberculosis or AIDS, along with the sanctions
visited upon those who must endure each disease, is summed up in the moral or
ethical response by society. E.E.
Evans-Pritchard writes that among the Nuer, because of their complicated rules
of sexual relationship, it was not always easy to tell whether incest has been
committed or not. However, if they
developed a skin disease, the issue of their transgression might be settled.
It is possible to argue that the epidemic of AIDS and, to a lesser
extent, tuberculosis when it was rampant served to settle certain ethical issues
and galvanized public opinion against groups whose behavior or very existence
was an affront to general thinking, but toward whom moral indignation was, in
certain quarters, under reconsideration.
The outbreak of AIDS has re-focused a longstanding concern and set back
the homosexual rights movement many years, and there is renewed support for the
“lock ‘em up” treatment of drug addicts.
Again, TB and AIDS, while analogous, are not equal “offenses.”
Although contagion theories may support moral values, the fact is, as
Douglas notes, “pollutions are easier to cancel than moral defects.”
In the case of TB, purification and reversal is relatively easy to
accomplish; on the other hand, AIDS at present is incurable and society is
reduced to managing its effects before death.
This leads to a different ethical response.
Today, at least, tuberculosis, as a moral offense, is more likely to be
forgiven because, I would argue, the hygienic model prevails and the disease is
under control. In the 30’s, when
Troeller’s mother contracted TB, less was known about its etiology and as a
result it was still under the sway of tribal (i.e. class) stigma, and was
morally repugnant.
AIDS, because
it cannot safely be subsumed under the medical model, remains morally contagious
and less likely to be forgiven.
Even more, AIDS is perceived to be a disease of sex and drugs, of homosexuals
and addicts, and there is no advantage for society at large in reducing the
gravity of the offense. It is
dangerous in and of itself.
TB pollution is cancelled through a medical ritual; causes and
responsibilities are less important than treatment and return.
AIDS pollution cannot be cancelled; causes and responsibilities are very
important. Society asks that the
victim confess and renounce his or her past.
This, at least, locates the origin of the offense and allows blame to be
affixed.
Finally, then, the tension in the “TB/AIDS Diary” is a reflection of
Troeller’s differing artistic strategies for absorbing and representing the
danger of the other through the materiality of the diseases.
In the TB series Troeller has connected with part of her mother’s
history. The purifying calm results
from receiving her mother’s pollution into herself (the model in the photograph
is all loving, all welcoming), ingesting a danger that was kept away from her as
a child and only dimly acknowledged while growing up.
In the photographic frame Troeller has staved off the madness of the
unknown by accepting the dissolution of the body.
She is publicly mourning, and this is her ritual.
In the AIDS series, sanity is not easily won.
Here Troeller employs magic and not a fully worked out ritual.
Through talismans and masks she conjures the ravages of the disease to go
away, to be supplanted by something more beautiful.
But underneath it all is the reality of AIDS portrayed by the tortured
model, sad in his half-opened bathrobe, the very picture of helplessness.
Until we can bring to his death the passion Troeller has brought to her
photographs, he stands mad and incomplete, waiting for his ritual.
REFERENCES CITED
Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive:
A Critique of Civilization, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New
Jersey, 1974.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:
An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Praeger Publishers,
New York, 1970.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, Oxford
University Press, 1956.
Erving Goffman, Asylums:
Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates,
Doubleday Anchor Press, New York, 1961.
Stigma:
Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Prentice-Hall Publishers,
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1963.