In the life story of Herbert Daniel, one sad characteristic
persues him: his restlessness, his lack of composure, brought him to the
limit of death whether it be political, civic or physical. The limit of his
restlessness, the great impulse that made him react to politics and interact
with it, determined his vanguardist eloquence, his marginalization.
His fields of battle, life, this our political life, broke the paths
of solidarity impelled by his grief, his banishment.
And thus it was for the fourth and last time. His truce with fear,
with pain and with exile lasted eight years: from the moment when he had his
political "crimes" extinguished in 1981, until the moment when he became ill,
with an infection typical of AIDS, in 1989.
However, in this same period of truce, he understood that that ilness
was very close to his generation, sensing the possibility of being
contaminated, like so many of an age group that was taken by surprise and
did not know why to practice sex with security.
Herbert Daniel had the clear perception of the permissive dialetic
associated with the disease that accompanied the first news bulletins about
the subject; "gay plague", "gay cancer" and so many other epithets that were
supposed and sold as a divine act of justice for a part of the population
that deserved punishments and death. It was the moment of the blacks taken
from their lands and their culture to serve white slavery, it was the moment
of the Jews in the Second War, came the time of the homosexuals, through the
action of a virus that targeted the most varied sort of sinners,
contemporary representations of Sodom and Gomorra. Hidden enemy, microscopic
and incomprehensible, the virus installed itself in the slightly informed
and ignorant consciousness of many, justifying and catalyzing prejudices and
hatreds fortified with its deadly potential, loaded with a political charge
much more powerful and deadly than the viral charge: the civil death of the
carriers of HIV.
His perception, indignation and solidarity concerning the events that
related cases of AIDS to violent reactions, prejudice and discrimination led
him rapidly to write in 1987 the novel Alegres e irresponsáveis abacaxis
americanos (Happy and Irresponsible American "Pineapples"). This precocious
work addressed the theme of AIDS with the focus of that new and terrible
phenomenon of social reactions to the new menace, the paths of exile,
confronting the construction of the myth, of the cruel foretoken of the
reactions of society, impotent and capriciously poorly informed or
disinformed about a frightening and threatening epidemic.
His eloquence became much more bruising from the moment when he was
seized by an opportunistic infection that brought him to the doctor; there
was diagnosed in a manner improfessional, cold and mechanical, the beginning
of the development of an ilness characteristic of AIDS.
At this moment begins the last exile of Herbert Daniel. The guerilla
of solidarity is born.
His experience of the coldness of a physician was the starting point
for the construction of his solidary reasoning. The experience that he
termed "forty seconds of AIDS", the time that he had to absorb that sad
verification before the indifference of a dehumanized medicine, was written,
published and discussed with exact periodicity in his texts in participatory
newspapers, as in
"Anotações à margem do viver com AIDS" ("Annotations at the margin of living
with AIDS"). .
There follow below some stretches of the text "Quarenta segundos de
AIDS" ("Forty Seconds of AIDS"), published in the book
Vida antes da morte (Life Before Death) that can be accessed in its
entirety on your computer:
"...But I was not unprepared. I was alive. I am alive. The most
horrifying, and I write this page to protest against this, was the absolute
lack of preparation of the doctor who gave me the news. This man, yes.
Illustratious representative of a fossilized medicine, that has more of
terrorism than of science, he is not prepared to deal with people, sick or
not; he is prepared to deal with apparatuses, bacteria, torture and murder...
...I went to find, in an emergency, a "physician" (the quotation
marks serve to avoid affending other worthy professionals, like those who
attended me with such solidarity later). I did not know him, but I had
indications of his "technical competency." Crass error! The technical
competency of a physician is his humanity, not a training of conditioned
reflexes...
...He returned, directed that I dress and communicated to me in three
sentences that I had a pneumonia caused by Pneumocystis carinii, "reliable
indicator of an immunodeficiency." He would give me the medication (which he
did, but in questionable doses), after I had the test to confirm the "other
illness" (as he said euphemistically) that caused me to have the pneumonis...
...(Some days later, in very different circumstances, it was
confirmed that I had AIDS, but the reason for my crisis was a ganglion
tuberculosis. Very probably I never had the pneumonia that he diagnosed.
Very probably he "saw" the P. carinii through the glasses of my
homosexuality, as many "physicians" were doing.)
Horror - was exactly what I felt. I had in front of me a diagnostic
machine, a dehumanized medical apparatus that could, suddenly, catch me in i
ts gears and take me to something much more terrible than AIDS: the
indignity of an empty death, hospitalized, death as a vital experience
stolen from me. I feared above all the future which that monstrosity
foretold to me. I knew that I was going to be subject to a series of
infections, and I feared having, because of that, to remain subject to the
totalitarianism of that medical jargon driven by that rabble of specialists
in dehumanization.
I have AIDS. This is a corporal experience of which I still have much
to tell. But that has nothing to do with the illness that I had there,
before that "physician".
I left that consultation room unhinged. Forty seconds of AIDS! I
escaped. Cláudio, my companion, waited for me outside. My friends waited for
me. Life waited for me. And I freed myself of that horifying discase that
killed me for forty seconds.
I escaped. With the conviction that is needed to liberate other sick
people from this problem."
Herbert Daniel, in the sequence of the text, narrates, some days
after the consultation, during a night of feeling bad that left him
insomniac, how he passed through a moment of intense and profound reflection
that changed him, that awakened him to the real world, of new possibilities
for the challenge of AIDS. In that moment, after a nocturnal and unexpected
communion, he concluded among other precious reflections:
"...The manner in which the AIDS epidemic is being treated in Brazil
is going one day to make part of a museum of human stupidity, where the
beastiary of AIDS has imnumerable installations. The lack of specific
understanding about the disease, associated with the ideas received from
generalist manuals, plus a dose of arrogance, all this has killed many
people. And it was not from AIDS. It was rather from a condemnation to civil
death that touches those who are serum positive or not, that contaminates
the whole Brazilian population.
The absence until today of an integrated national strategy to combat
the disease, substituted by misplaced and impertinent initiatives, such as
terrorist or silly campaigns on television, and lies spoken in an academic
tone, have produced the most monstrous collateral effects. In sum, the worst
of them is civil death, the absence of basic rights to life and health..."
Stretch of music "Aqui e agora" ("Here and now" by Gilberto gil), sung Gilberto Gil
:
Stretch of music "Aqui e agora" ("Here and now") (by Gilberto gil),
sung Gilberto Gil
BIOGRAPHY