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50 pages 1 hour read

Pearl Cleage

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997

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Background

Authorial Context: Pearl Cleage

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses life with HIV/AIDS and the associated social and cultural stigmas.

Pearl Cleage is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist. Cleage has published 13 works of fiction and nonfiction and 4 plays. Her diverse authorial career was inspired by her personal political endeavors. Before she became a writer, Cleage worked as a speechwriter and press secretary for Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Eager to express her own ideas, opinions, and stories in writing, Cleage left the political arena to focus on creative writing.

Cleage’s novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and features scenarios, places, and themes relevant to Cleage’s personal life. Like the novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, Ava Johnson, Cleage has also lived between Michigan and Georgia. She spent much of her childhood in the Detroit area before relocating to Atlanta. The novel also explores issues that Cleage considers across her personal canon. In both her writing and her politics, Cleage seeks change and awareness for those living with HIV/AIDs, women, and Black Americans. By centering the life, story, and perspective of a young Black woman in What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Cleage normalizes Ava’s experience and humanizes her character. At the same time, Joyce Mitchell’s character and passions mirror Cleage’s. Joyce’s dedication to supporting and loving her community resembles Cleage’s parallel activist work for Black women in need. Cleage’s authorial work is also informed by her experiences teaching at Smith and Spelman Colleges, founding and editing the literary magazine Catalyst, and working as an artistic director at the Just Us Theater Company.

Cultural Context: Social and Cultural Attitude Toward HIV/AIDS in the United States

The novel’s temporal setting dictates its primary conflicts. As a woman living in the 1990s, Ava’s life changes when she discovers that she is HIV positive. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, is a virus that damages the immune system and is most frequently transmitted through sex or sharing drug injection equipment; AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) is a late-stage HIV infection that can be fatal without treatment (“About HIV.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). The ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged in the United States in the 1980s, with racial and ethnic minorities and men who have sex with men particularly affected (“The HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the United States: The Basics.” KFF). HIV/AIDS was immediately stigmatized due to the already-marginalized identities of many who were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and the way HIV is transmitted, and many felt that the government’s response was too slow (Katz, Mitchell H. “The Public Health Response to HIV/AIDS: What Have We Learned?” The AIDS Pandemic (2005): 90-109.) Activist groups like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), who Ava mentions in the novel, advocated for awareness and medical research and protested the government’s inaction, but HIV stigma continues to exist today.

In this social and cultural context, Ava learns to see herself as a threat to society. As soon as she tests HIV positive, she retreats from her life. She’s met with harassment, ridicule, slander, and judgment. The political atmosphere has taught her that she must confess and describe the “sin” that led to her condition so that her society can “decide how much sympathy, attention, help, money, and understanding [she’s] entitled to” (4). Therefore, she chooses to stop having sex, sell her business, and move home to Idlewild to avoid these social repercussions. Leaving Atlanta gives her the illusion of escaping her diagnosis.

Although Ava’s family and friends don’t reject her for her diagnosis, life in Idlewild isn’t free of social stigmas. For example, Gerry Anderson slanders Ava after learning she’s HIV positive. She tries to use the virus to ruin Ava’s reputation and to hurt her sister. Gerry’s grandson, Tyrone, and his friend, Frank, also verbally attack Ava in public settings because she has HIV. These incidents illustrate the adversity that Ava faces because of her diagnosis. Her community’s ignorance of the virus inspires their scorn and rejection. These negative cultural attitudes in turn affect how Ava sees herself. She learns to feel ashamed of being alive and forming relationships simply because others hold these beliefs about her. These complex dynamics inspire tension throughout Ava’s narrative.

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