Memory Book as a New Genre of Illness Writing: How a Ugandan Mother Wrote about HIV

Abstract

Abstract A memory book is a therapeutic document and personal testament – a workbook written, most commonly, by a HIV-positive caregiver or parent for their child, about the family’s background and the parent’s life experiences, to guide the child in the parent’s absence. In Uganda, memory projects first emerged in 1998 as public health outreach for people with HIV. They encourage writers, often agrarian widows with limited literacy, to deliver their messages to their children and the world. While reports have focused on the psychosocial support the projects provide to the beneficiaries, the content, and modes of representation in individual books, have received little attention. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of the words and images in one memory book, written in English by a subsistence farmer with seven years’ schooling. Using the frameworks of narrative therapy and illness writing, it examines how this reticent writer represents, obliquely, through textual gaps and contradictions, her painful memories of her child’s abuse by her husband and her co-wife and the difficult experience of living with HIV. This article argues that memory books as a new genre of illness writing can help less literate, less heard people with HIV write their stories in their own words and can help us, the readers, understand their experiences and lifeworlds from their perspectives.