Liminality and Regeneration in Wahome Mutahi’s the House of Doom, Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera and Moraa Gitaa’s the Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold

Abstract

This paper is a critical interrogation of three Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels: Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom (2004), Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera (2004) and Moraa Gitaa’s The Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (2008). It examines how the enactments of illness by the diseased characters in the three texts relate to their quest for meaning. The paper has drawn primarily on the existentialist notions advanced by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the Foucauldian postulations on the politics of and the care of the self and de Certeau’s thoughts on liminality. These paradigms have the self as a shared feature and are useful in focusing the analysis to the individuality of the diseased subjects and their relationship with themselves and the complex social world around them. The paper emanates from the need to foster understanding of the ontological issues surrounding AIDS experience.