My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

Guiana was there (“a Guianese girl”: she was expressing prejudice here, life in Antigua is better than life in Guiana; people will come from Guiana to do the work that Antiguan people like my brother will no longer do). After the girl left, she got answers to questions she had not really meant to ask; she had not come prepared to ask these questions, it occurred to her to mention them only because she saw the girl. My brother had been having unprotected sex with this woman and he had not told her that he was infected with the HIV virus. He did not tell her, because if he told her he thought she might not want to have sex with him at all. The social worker then went home immediately and brought him back a box of one hundred condoms. But my brother told her that he could not live without sex, that if he went without sex for too long he began to feel funny. He was unmoved when she asked him if he would like to have that done to him, someone infected with the HIV virus and knowing it having sex with him without telling him; perhaps he thought that is exactly what had happened to him. He was unmoved when she asked him if he would like someone to treat his sister (me) the way he had just treated that woman (“What if that had been your sister?”). He agreed to use the condoms in the future when she told him that HIV infection was dose-related, that is, the more of the virus you get, the more virus you have received, the quicker it kills you; if he wasn’t telling people he was HIV-infected, perhaps they were not telling him if they were infected also; using a condom was not only to protect other people from him, it was also to protect himself from other people.
    My brother told me that he could not go two weeks without having sex, he said it made him feel, and he lifted his shoulders up and then let them drop down; he looked sad, he looked defeated, but that did not stop me from saying cruelly, Every man I have ever known has said the same thing, two weeks without sex makes them feel funny. He had been trying to tell me that there was something unique about him, that he was an unusual person, a powerfully sexual man. Powerfully sexual men sometimes cause people to die right away with a bullet to the head, not first sicken and slowly die from disease. When we saw Dr. Ramsey for his checkup soon after we had this conversation, I told Dr. Ramsey in front of him about his sexual behavior and the risk he posed to other people and to himself; he truupsed and repeated that he could not go without sex for more than two weeks. He said he did not believe he had the HIV virus anymore and he demanded that Dr. Ramsey test him again. Dr. Ramsey reminded him that he had asked for a new test a few weeks before, after he had been released from the hospital and had gone for one of his checkups and had then said that he did not have AIDS and had been tested again and the results were positive. I now said that I would not pay for a new test, I was convinced that he was HIV-positive, so convinced that I had gotten myself into debt trying to save his life. He promised that he would try to be more careful, but as we were leaving, Dr. Ramsey said something which led my brother to know that as a hobby, he, Dr. Ramsey, served as a producer of many well-known Antiguan calypso singers. My brother got very excited when he heard this and said that he was a very good singer himself, such a good singer that when he sang women who heard him removed their clothes (“Me nar joke, mahn, when me sing, gahl a take ahff she clothes”).
    And I began again to wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman. It must have been a person like this, men like this, men who are only urges to be satisfied, men who say they cannot help themselves, men who cannot save themselves, men