Crisis in Africa.

TODAY THE HAWK TAKES ONE CHICK

BY JANE GILLOOLY

72 MINUTES, 2007

Toward the end of Jane Gillooly's deeply arresting documentary Today the Hawk Takes One Chick (2007), a grandmother explains that she has heard her grandchildren tell her, "we are going to die before you die." This brief moment seems to encapsulate the paradox that is at the heart of this film, one that details a world so devastated by death from HIV/AIDS, that children must accept the unnatural fact that the young will die early. The grandmother responds by saying, "I tell them things can happen at any time, no matter how old you are. Today the hawk takes one chick. Tomorrow it's the other." Gillooly uses the grandmother's response as the title of this film, and although the older woman's reply is probably intended to reassure, it also speaks to the vulnerability at hand: this is a world where the young are very much at risk.

Filmed in the Lubombo region of Swaziland, an independent kingdom in southern Africa, Gillooly's work examines the corrosive effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a country where its prevalence is the greatest in the world. One terrible consequence of the epidemic in Swaziland is the disappearance of almost an entire middle adult generation. It has been left to the grandmothers--or "gogos," as they are called in the native SiSwati language--to raise the next generation of orphaned children, many of whom are HIV positive, having inherited the disease from their infected parents. Throughout the film, Gillooly documents the efforts of three such women, demonstrating the strength and determination of this older generation of matriarchs as they care for their grandchildren as well as their infected adult children, many of whom return to their villages and homesteads from the cities to die.

The devastation of HIV/AIDS in Swaziland has been accompanied by drought. Food shortages in the small rural villages and homesteads have been only slightly alleviated by neighborhood and world food programs. One "gogo" Gillooly follows is Maria Shongwe, an aged woman who cares for her ten orphaned grandchildren (seven of her nine biological children have died). Shongwe's body is bent and her rural, poverty-stricken homestead is sparse. A few chickens and dogs populate her land where stone and mud huts with thatched roofs stand on dry red earth. Food is in such short supply that for three days she and her grandchildren had to live on wild fruit from the river. "My life is miserable," she says, "but they are my grandchildren."

Another "gogo" followed in the film is Albertina Skhosana, who, along with her own family responsibilities, volunteers through neighborhood programs to help with education efforts around HIV/AIDS issues and to assist orphaned children who must either care for themselves in child-led homesteads (homes where both parents have died that have no relatives available to take charge of the children) or live in hostels. At a community gathering she asks if anyone has been tested. After some hesitation, a woman volunteers, "I've tested myself and family." There is applause and Skhosana tells the group, "These are the heroes we want, not the people who die silently"

The central figure of this film is Thandiwe Mathunjwa, who is not only a "gogo," but also a nurse whose heroic efforts to help her community are evident throughout the film. In one scene she holds an education session at the local health center. She lectures the audience about the importance of testing, choosing one partner, and remaining faithful to that partner to help stop the spread of the disease. "Those who are enlightened," she tells the audience, "must educate our neighbors. Preach as though preaching the Gospel." In another scene, she visits one of the child-led homesteads to tend to an HIV-infected child. After cleaning an infection on the child's ear, Mathunjwa tells her to bury the cotton swabs in the yard so they will not infect anyone. Perhaps the most upsetting scene of the film occurs when Mathunjwa travels to a homestead to visit an HIV-infected woman. When she arrives, six children are huddled silently around the gate. Mathunjwa appears stunned to learn that their mother has died and has already been buried.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There is a quiet strength to the observant style Gillooly has adopted for the film. Without voice-over narration directing viewers through the work, its structure is elliptical and expressive. With starkly evocative details punctuating the film, the tone is solemn rather than declarative. Viewers are left with impressions rather than explanations or judgment. It is a world on the precipice of immense destruction, a world so ravaged by this disease that Mathunjwa sadly announces, "All the children we are bringing up now, we are just bringing them up for HIV" It is also a world of sacrifice and purpose. As the "gogos" demonstrate through their resolve to break the cycle of infection, their belief in education, and their devotion to the next generation, it is a world where perhaps tomorrow the chick will be protected from the hawk.

TINA WASSERMAN is a faculty member in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University.