Northwestern writing Prof. Michael McColly remembers how his doctors worried about his plans to travel around the world. But McColly persisted.
“My doctors didn’t want me to do this,” he said. “They were supportive, but they didn’t want me to go into Vietnam or some really rural places. But it was a mission: Once you start it, you can’t just sit around.”
McColly will release his new book, “The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism,” within the next month. The book documents the work of AIDS activists in places such as Senegal, India and Chicago.
McColly, who is HIV positive, said the book is a blend of personal memoir and reporting. He said he wanted to add a different perspective to the discussion of AIDS.
“I was interested in the ground-level response to the pandemic, rather than what the people in the suits would tell me,” he said.
McColly said he initially became interested in activism when he attended a 2000 AIDS conference in South Africa, where he offered a yoga workshop to the conference attendees.
He returned to Chicago but took a leave of absence in 2001 to work on his book. He said he traveled from 2001 to 2002 and started writing the book afterward.
“The network of AIDS activists is so powerful,” he said. “Once you get into it, you are led deeper and deeper into it.”
McColly interviewed people who were living with AIDS in the United States. He said he was surprised at the similarities among activists around the world.
“It was pretty much the same story and situation,” he said. “I was surprised that people had the same problems, such as the negative stigma even though people here have drugs.”
Although McColly was able to connect with AIDS activists because he had HIV, he said he faced an obstacle because about 95 percent of the people he interviewed did not have the access to the AIDS medicine that he had.
“You face an ethical dilemma when you see that they will die because they don’t have some little pills that you have,” he said.
McColly also focused on the spiritual healing powers of yoga in the book. McColly emphasized that yoga is not a cure for AIDS but said some Vedic doctors in India believe yoga poses can effect people’s immune systems because the control of one’s breathing can improve blood circulation.
“Yoga gives people a way to heal their body and to take control,” he said. “You have a sense of doing something about your health.”
McColly also said yoga can help people reconcile themselves to living with HIV or AIDS.
“Anybody who has a chronic disease needs a way to live with the ongoing realities that they may die and that people might treat them differently because of that,” he said. “A spiritual discipline like yoga can help them.”
Per Erez, a yoga instructor, agreed that yoga can help people with HIV or AIDS.
“People living with HIV can use yoga as one portion of holistic healing,” Erez said. “It gives people a chance – regardless of their health status – to slowly get comfortable being embodied. There are a lot of activities that one can do, but they don’t integrate body, mind and spirit.”
McColly agreed, saying yoga helped him retain control of his body even though he had to take medication.
Reach Ketul Patel at [email protected].
