Finding Beauty in Pain: working through pigment and blood in the works of Hervé Guibert, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Caio Fernando Abreu

Abstract

This study focuses on issues of race and AIDS. I bring these issues together to think about how they have both been understood through similar processes of stigmatization and shaming, and to analyze the narrative responses created by writers in order to handle the grief associated with the weight of such stereotyping, and to create beauty out of ugliness. The literature of AIDS and the long history of racial stigma emerge in response to such grief,and the act of writing becomes an act of mourning for the writers I study (Léon-Gontran Damas [France], Caio Fernando Abreu [Brazil)] and Hervé Guibert [France]). All three write from an acute state of bereavement which propels them to push against marginalization. They embrace their minoritized selves, and reconstruct their diseased and racialized or outcasted bodies along terms that help them honor their differences rather than reject them. My two objectives with this dissertation are: first, to show how Damas, Abreu, and Guibert reject the external gaze and push against monolithic ideas of what it means to exist in a corporeal and spiritual sense; and second, to focus on questions of reception and appreciation, and on the impact the writing has on their readers.