Remembering Severo Sarduy

Abstract: Despite struggling with his own HIV diagnosis and its physical and psychological tolls during the AIDS epidemic’s peak years, Severo Sarduy as a personality was such that suicide didn’t emerge as the inevitable, commonsensical choice. In his life and work, he demonstrates a way of going on without valorizing either the emotional highs or lows because emotions are simply a barometer of fatigue and temperament for him. The universality rather than the particularity of his condition—or its particularity that coaxed out a sense of the universal—provided an additional protective layer against depression. From the beginning of his career, Sarduy believed all bodies were doomed, not just diseased ones. His literature shifts how death is perceived by refocusing the lens through which all bodies, not just HIV-positive ones, are apprehended.