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Accepted Paper:
Hope after life: narrative possibilities in the face of multiple endings
Annemarie Samuels
(Leiden University)
How do orientations to what comes after life shape living with life-threatening illness in the present? In this paper, I explore how narrative possibilities shape everyday efforts of combining temporal orientations to death, life after death and present living in Aceh, Indonesia.
Paper long abstract:
How do orientations to what comes after life shape living with life-threatening illness in the present? In this paper, I explore how narrative possibilities shape everyday efforts of combining temporal orientations to death, life after death and present living. Drawing on the story of one HIV-positive mother and activist in the Indonesian province of Aceh, I analyze how her publicly articulated as well as more privately narrated hopes of future living with HIV intertwined with Islamic orientations towards death and the afterlife. As the horizons of her worldly aspiration of political and social recognition of people living with HIV in Indonesia and her personal dream of a ‘normal’ family life were shaped by a religious orientation to fate, acceptance and divine judgment in the afterlife, the act of narrating these futures was enmeshed with the recurrent experience of friends dying of AIDS and the unstable chronicity of living with HIV in the present. The silence and solitude in the interstices of crafting (activist) future narratives in the face of multiple endings – of others’ lives, her own life, and the end of the world after life – attune us to the delicate and effortful work of navigating multiple temporalities of hope in structures of social inequality.