In my life: youth stories and poems on HIV/AIDS: towards a new literacy in the age of AIDS

Abstract

This article comes out of an HIV and AIDS prevention and education project with young people in two townships in the Western Cape of South Africa. As part of that project, a small anthology—In my life: youth stories and poems on HIV/AIDS—was produced and distributed locally as well as in several districts in other provinces. The avid consumption of In my life by local youth in Khayelitsha and Atlantis but also as far away as Durban in KwaZulu‐Natal speaks to the power of a youth‐to‐youth connection. In the article I examine some of the ways in which literacy is changing in the age of AIDS in an area of the world which has been ravaged by the AIDS pandemic.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canadian Society for International Health, who made it possible to conduct the Soft Cover project and produce In my life. She would like to thank Anne Schuster and Abigail Dreyer for the key role they played in the writing workshops, and she would also like to acknowledge the participation of Shannon Walsh in all aspects of the Soft Cover project.

Notes

1. Anne Schuster and Abigail Dreyer facilitated the writing workshops.

2. In a follow‐up set of interviews with the young authors conducted in July 2006, I was once again struck by the importance of the publishing of In my life. Lindeka, for example, talks about how she still meets young people in Site B of Khayelitsha where she lives, who say ‘I know you. I read your story’.

3. For a further discussion of young people as cultural producers using visual methods to address gender violence, see Mitchell et al. (2006) ‘Speaking for ourselves’.

4. See, for example, the work of Cope and Kalantis (2000) and Barton et al. (2000).