Blog

As HIV/AIDS continues to spread across the globe, one project,"Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica," commissioned by the Pulitzer Center, aims to show the full lives of people who face the disease daily.

Poet Kwame Dawes, who has written several books and is achampion of the arts, traveled to the place where he was raised and listened to the stories, shared in the lives, and witnessed the resiliency of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. The result is a multimedia project that combines Dawes' poetry and reporting with music, video, audio, a website, and an upcoming performance at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The poetry derived from his travels is featured in the collection, Hope's Hospice.

With Books on the Root, Dawes elaborated on his journey, the people he met, the face of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, and how he was able to articulate it all through poetry.

Books on the Root: How did "Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica" come about? And can you talk about your role in the project?

Kwame Dawes: About two years ago, I got a call from Jon Sawyer from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, who told me that he was collaborating with the Virginia Quarterly Review to do a long form article on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. I made it clear that I was not a journalist and I would come at the story as a writer--as a poet. Jon said this is what they wanted and they felt strongly that I would be the best person for the job. He also told me that as part of the project, there would be an effort to create an interactive website around my correspondence work--my essays and reporting via video and audio. I saw a site that the Center had produced on Haiti, and I found it engaging and fascinating.

BOTR: Why use art to bring attention to this issue?

KD: I am sure there are many good reasons why art can bring a powerful level of attention to issues of all kinds. But I am not so sure that the making of art can effectively be driven by the desire to bring attention to an issue. There is a fine distinction between the two things. I did not set out to write poems to bring attention to the issue of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. I wrote these things as a way to work out what I thought about the experiences I was having as I discovered so much about the disease. I wrote the poems because I found poetic moments in the lives of the people I met and the stories they told me. I wrote the poems for the same reason I write any poem. I write to harness language so that it can capture the thoughts and feelings that come to me as I engage the world around me. My greatest desire was to ensure that I did justice to the images, the ideas, the feelings that I experienced as I met people and grew to be moved by their lives, and by the way Jamaica started to look to me. The poems are about the way rain changes the texture of the island in the last months of the year, as much as they are about the stories I found as I did this work.

Once the poems were written, it became possible for us to start thinking of them as tools, as a way to make people think about these experiences differently. It began to make sense to see the poems as a way to humanize the lives of those I was writing about. Poetry offers the detail of emotion and thought, the detail of space and the detail of image. The best poems are not always making a case. They are simply seeking a truth about experience.

Read the entire interview.