HIV Positive: Saints, Sinners, and AIDS protest movements in Fig Trees' Queer Religion

Dominic Wetzel

"Music exalts each joy, allays each grief. Expels diseases, softens every pain. Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague." —John Armstrong, quoted in Fig Trees

"For me, personally, it was ... wrong ... to take medicines because other people couldn't buy life ... it was very simple ... it was a question of ... buying life." —Zackie Achmat, Fig Trees

"Why are you—a faggot and a dyke—glorifying celibate saints? Why are you two bright whites ... fetishizing ... your all-black cast?" —Chorus members confronting Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson, Fig Trees

"Pigeons on the gr-ass, alas(s), a(l)l-as(s) ...." —Wayne Koestenbaum, analyzing Four Saints in Three Acts subtext, Fig Trees

Watching John Greyson's Fig Trees—an experimental docu-opera about AIDS protest movements set to a surreal arrangement of Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thompson's atonal Four Saints in Three Acts—was a transportive experience. Knitting avant-garde opera, pop music, and documentary to form a story of queer social struggle, its agile weaving of desire and the imaginary into its interstices performs crucial work of preserving and distilling queer cultural memory without memorializing or mythologizing away its import. At the same time, the film's playful and transgressive appropriation of religious imagery induces its viewers to rethink and re-appropriate traditional concepts of community, belonging, ritual, and the healing—even political—power of music.

Before MIX NYC's 2009 Experimental Film Festival, I knew little about the film other than reading the short, mysterious blurb in the festival brochure and the emphatic clucking of my friend, the mix director, that, as an activist and singer, it was a film I "shouldn't miss." The blurb reads:

In 1999, South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat went on a treatment strike, refusing to take his pills until they were widely available to all South Africans. This symbolic act became a cause célèbre, helping build his group, Treatment Action Campaign, into a national movement. Yet with each passing month, Zackie grew sicker .... Fig Trees is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Capetown, as narrated by an albino squirrel, an amputee busker, and St. Teresa of Avila. Telling the story of Zackie's treatment strike in song, and the larger story of the fight for pills on two continents and across two decades, Fig Trees performs musical and political inversion on the music and words of Gertrude Stein's 1934 avant-garde classic Four Saints in Three Acts. Using compositional techniques of chance, inversion, and polyphony, Fig Trees finds points of political harmony and musical convergence in operatic and documentary sequences that profile the overlapping stories of various activists: Tim McCaskell, Gugu Dlamini, Stephen Lewis, Simon Nkoli ... and Zackie himself.[1]

The film was powerfully affecting. I was surprised by the wash of memory—and bubbles of trauma—the film loosened as I watched. Playfully held together with surreal panache by the wonderfully bizarre and moving adaptation of Four Saints in Three Acts by David Wall, Fig Trees artfully weaves the global with the local across boundaries of nation, geography, and race in its juxtaposition and intertwining of AIDS protest movements in the developed and developing world. Using archival footage of significant moments in AIDS protest history—protests, conferences, breakthroughs, and documentary-style interviews, Fig Trees "beatifies" two prominent queer activist "saints" and a number of corollaries, building their case for queer "sainthood" by following their travails and activist "miracles" they leave in their wake: long-time activist St. Tim McCaskill of Toronto's AIDS Action Now, a "tireless crusader against corporate pharmaceutical greed "[2]; and most centrally, St. Zackie Achmat, who famously refused to take the AIDS medications available to him (friends were able to pay for the drugs) until everyone in South Africa had access to them as well—sparking a global movement for access to AIDS drugs in South Africa and other nations in the developing world. Zackie was also the founder of South Africa's influential Treatment Action Campaign, which popularized the wearing of bold t-shirts reading "HIV POSITIVE," a political statement that played with the ambiguity of the wearer's HIV status to help de-stigmatize people with HIV.

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