CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 381
chord in cultural practices and in cultural critique. Craig G. Harris's
poem "Our Dead Are Not Buried Beneath Us" (1987) is an example of
itscontinuingappealtowriters.Harris,memberofNewYorkCity'sgay
Black Artists Collective was an AIDS activist and succumbed to the
diseasein1983.Hewrites:
Inoticedthetribalmarkings
ofhisface
multiplied
growinglargerthanwhenI'dlastseen
constantremindersof
dimlylitliaisons.(qtd.inWoods163)In this poem, Harris, by calling the splotches surfacing on the skin
andassociatedwithHIV-AIDS,"tribalmarkings,"opensupavarietyof
interrelations between the body's surface and its inside, the somatic and
the semantic, but also between past and present, Africa and the United
States,betweenanearlierstageoftheillnessandalater,moreacuteone.
Overdetermined in this way by his surface markings, the suffering
individualbecomesthe"bearer"ofsignifications,allofthempainful(at
least mentally, in memory), some also subversive. As the markings
proliferate during the progress of AIDS, they attain a function in the
author's perspective that goes beyond the compass of a medical
condition;theybecomeinscriptionsbringingtolightnotonlythecovert
"liaisons" in "dimly lit rooms" between gay people but on a second,
possibly allegorical level also the disavowed "liaisons" between people
with AIDS (PWAs) and U.S.-American society at large. The cultural
work such paralinguistic signs perform consists in the search for a
signified which they inaugurate and authorize but which—as Craig
Harris's poem shows—remains culturally ambivalent. The relations
involved here must in the author's view be attended to if the HI-virus
anditsattendantsocialandculturalpathologiesaretobecombattedwith
anyhopeofbothmedicalandculturalhealing.
This is not to suggest that the signatures of pain need to be plainly
andclearlyvisiblemarkingsonthesurface,inorderforthemtofunction
as unambiguous surface signifiers for the pain "inside." This would be
the Wittgensteinian position, to which I will revert later. At this point I
would argue that, as in the quote above, markings are taken to be