Art. Connection. Culture.

A normal day for me. If normal can be defined at all. Up early. Breakfast. Some television. Today's day included a drive out to City Hall East in Atlanta, Georgia. On the fifth floor of City Hall East is where the Office of Cultural Affairs has its offices. For now at least. I understand that the building has been sold and the Office of Cultural Affairs (OCA) must relocate. As an art lover, an artist, a mother, a new resident of the outskirts of Atlanta, I am paying close attention to this news.

But this is not about Atlanta or the OCA, not about art or culture; this is not even about my day, not really, but kinda. On the first floor as I entered the building under the dark parking structure, past the metal detector and police officers, down the long white corridor, was an exhibit called Body Maps which featured ten life sized outlined bodies of nine women and one man. Each body map was a separate painting. The art was colorful which is what first caught my attention. It was childlike and left-handed and honestly brilliant in a Basquiat kind of way. There were some words and phrases written on each painting. Most of the writing was in a South African language. But next to each painting was a literary description of the painting and a bit about the artist/author. I stood there and the tears were building and building fast. BODY MAPS inspired the book, LONG LIFE, a collaborative book of positive HIV stories of the Bamanani women.

I am usually attracted to art with mothers and babies and red is my favorite color. My attention went first to the painting by Ncedeka. From a distance she could be telling the story of a long day and finally putting her beautiful sleepy baby down to nap. But then something grabs you and demands that you stop and know that there is more to this to tell. Much more. Much more to this exhibit then I was prepped for. Look at me, needing to be prepped for real life. Ncedeka painted a picture of herself holding her baby because she is happy when she thinks of her baby. Her baby who died in 1999 after only a year and four months on this planet. She became sick. She was told that her baby did not have HIV but her health kept failing. Ncedeka was unknowingly carrying the virus and was breastfeeding her child. She wishes still that she could have more children. Thozama is a young girl whose stepfather beat her and said that he would no longer pay for her to go to school because she had a boyfriend. She went to live with her boyfriend whom she later broke up with because he had twelve other girlfriends. "Always changing, changing, changing." She met another man and married him. Thozama found out that she is HIV positive and believes she contracted the disease from her first boyfriend because "he is getting thinner." Her husband told her that if she goes to find out her status not to tell him because he cannot sleep with someone who is positive. So she did not tell him and they have a child. She has only told the rest of the world. No one else. At Bongiwe's story I had to release the tears that had been building. "I was raped. But I would say I was fortunate because not all of them raped me. The other one hit me with a beer bottle on my head and blood started coming out." And then there is Babalwa who is also HIV positive and has to deal with this daily and lives in a community where so many are sick because of this disease says, "I feel like my life is not finished." Nomawhetu was beaten and stabbed by men trying to rob her and she defended herself by stabbing one of the men. She tells this story and you know that there are many, many stories she has to tell. But she is living through it. She closes by saying that her sister killed herself. And you just know that Nomawhetu will live through this too. This too? Some of them do not have the drugs available to them that they need but they understand that finding something to be happy about keeps them going as Victoria says "When I get sad, I get sore and I feel the pain all around my heart." Me too, Victoria, me too. Noloyiso remembers her first boyfriend, Babs when she is sad. She loved him and had their baby when she was in the ninth grade. The same year he died. Before he found out she was pregnant. She has had other boyfriends, but it is Babs she misses. Bulelwa was beaten by her grandmother for getting pregnant but her grandmother is there with her everyday to take care of her baby. Grandmothers.

Thobani was the only man in the group. He dropped out. This seems to be how many of the men are dealing with this issue. Not discussing it. He comes to the group when he is really sick, as many men do, but by then it is too late. My tour of the BODY MAPS ended with Nondumiso's story. "If you hear the president saying something you think it's the truth. But here in South Africa the president is not always telling the truth." The president? Lying? Come on now Nondumiso.

This was not some newspaper. This was not some campaign for condoms; these were real women who had real lives and real families to feed and real babies waiting for them to get better and feed them and live forever. Forever with a normal life. If again, normal could be defined at all. One woman told of witnessing her own mother dying. She said that she was glad that God took her because there was nothing else she could do to help. The insides of her bones were showing.

So I was standing there, in front of each piece, crying, moving slowly thinking about the four other times I had passed the stories before. I remember walking through the gallery the first time the exhibit went up and casually commenting that the paintings were "beautiful" and "ohhh, this one's really pretty, red is my favorite color." But this was more than "beautiful," more than "pretty" and not about my favorite color at all.

How easy it is for us to complain about points in our lives that shape us. Whatever it is that they mean to us, we make them mean that. We can choose to grow from them. We can choose to accept that there, surrounding these rough edges are clouds and good times and love and flowers and sex and children and people and family and more real life.