WWHIVDD Collectivity

for Landscapes

Why does this collective answer questions with more questions?

This year, WWHIVDD was awarded a fellowship with A Blade of Grass along with Wild Path and Great Leap—two other very special collectives doing difficult & important work. As a culmination of the processing process, we were offered the opportunity to contribute to Landscapes, ABoG’s online journal.

For my part, I offered a brief introduction to us as a collective, as well as my own answer (in the form of a series of questions) to a series of questions we were asking ourselves. My introduction & responses are pasted below, though I invite you to read the collective’s entire response here.

What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. Our intergenerational and international collective includes folks who work as artists, historians, educators, health care workers, archivists, organizers, and more. Some of us are living with HIV in our bodies, and some are not, but each of us has been profoundly impacted by HIV/AIDS. We, like everyone on the planet, are living with AIDS.

What Would An HIV Doula Do? is also a question, one that we are more interested in continuing to ask—of ourselves, of each other, of our communities, of culture at large—than we are to answer. The work we do with WWHIVDD requires a trust, built over time and through collaboration and conversation, through shared vulnerability, through doula-ing others and doula-ing ourselves.

I did not choose to begin living with HIV in my body; nevertheless, there it remains and likely will for the rest of my life. Being part of this collective is HIV I can choose. And I continue to choose it, because I continue to choose a life asking this question.

– C. (Constantine Jones)

What do I get out of this? More importantly, what do I give? Has what I've given been useful? To whom has what I've given been useful? Why would I spend this much of my energy at work, where I'm paid, if the only compensation for that work is money? Do I not need the money? Who doesn't need the money? Aren't there things worth doing despite getting money? Shouldn't anything be worth doing despite getting money? Why do we all need money? Is money useful in any way beyond the framework of capitalism we've decided, for some reason, to exist in as a species? Is money useful to a blue whale? Will there still be blue whales if capitalism continues? Will there still be HIV if capitalism continues? Will capitalism continue? Why should capitalism continue? Why should I care about anyone else? How can any of us bear not to care about anyone else? Are we not each other? Are we not us? Will we please keep remembering us? Will we please not forget?