My Brother Read Online Free PDF

noticed that every woman of child-bearing age was not pregnant anymore? It is true that every woman of child-bearing age is not pregnant, but I had not noticed it; I take it for granted that every woman of child-bearing age does not have a child if she does not want to. Dr. Ramsey told me that when he first started to talk to Antiguans about sexually transmitted diseases, and in particular AIDS, men would say that he was lying, that he was being unnecessarily alarming, and, jokingly, that he had an ulterior motive (“Me no go wid Ramsey, you know, ’e just want to keep all de women fo’ ’eself”). He told me that one night he gave a talk to some young people about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Afterward two young men asked him for a lift, and when they reached a certain part of town, a part of town where prostitutes live, they asked to be let out. Dr. Ramsey asked them if they had condoms and they said no. He asked them if they had not listened to anything he had just told them, and they said to him yes, but they would rather die than leave the butter women alone (“Me rather dead dan leave butta women ’lone”). The prostitutes in Antigua are from Santo Domingo. They are mostly light-brown-skinned black women. Because of their complexion, Antiguan men call them butter women. It is believed that a majority of them are HIV-positive.
    I did not know how my brother had contracted the HIV virus. I would have liked to know because it would have told me something about him. I was almost sure it was not through the use of intravenous drugs, because there was no evidence of that on his body as far as I could see; also, such a thing as piercing himself with a needle, causing himself pain, did not seem to be in keeping with his personality; the use of intravenous drugs involves hypodermic needles and hypodermic needles would be associated with illness and death. In a place like Antigua, I suspect, the use of drugs is not about the dulling of pain in a useless life but about providing and extending pleasure. I do not know this with certainty, I only suspect so. I suspected he got the virus through sex and I supposed it to be heterosexual sex. I only supposed this, I did not know it with any certainty. If he had had homosexual sex, he would not have advertised it. Antiguans are not particularly homophobic so much as they are quick to disparage anyone or anything that is different from whom or what they think of as normal. And they think of themselves and the things they do as normal: this includes a man and a woman having sex with each other. I only wanted to know these things about my brother because they would tell me something about him, but also, on the whole I like to know whom people have sex with, and a description of it I find especially interesting. My own life, from a sexual standpoint, can be described as a monument to boring conventionality. And so perhaps because of this I have a great interest in other people’s personal lives. I wanted him to tell me what his personal life had been like. He would not do that. Antiguans are at once prudish and licentious. A young woman will be loudly praised for being a very nice girl, by which it is meant she does not have sex; yet no young woman would ever be ostracized because she had ten children by ten different men.
    He used to have many friends, they were at his house visiting him all the time before he got sick, when he was well, with no thought of sickness at all. They were young men like him, Rastafarians like him. They would come to his house and sit on his bed and smoke fat marijuana cigarettes. My mother would complain about these young men visiting her son, but her words of complaint did not stop them and she did not go further than words. These boys had Rastafarian names, names they had given themselves, names very different from the ones their parents had given them. My brother’s Rastafarian name was the name of a