The Old Drift is a historical and fictional novel with magical realism to tell the decades-spanning story of African nations. This article will discuss the main issue of this novel: the problem of vaccine testing on African prostitutes.
Adding ethnical issues, marginalized groups such as women in ethnic minorities and lower class have raised their consciousnesses to pursue their identities and freedom. With the rise of postcolonial movement, literary writers put their efforts and energies into revealing the discrimination on African women. Exploding with class and race, various characters were afflicted with mythic stigmata so that The Old Drift is a testament and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.
Several perspectives in discussing this novel have been ticked off academically. Till now, most researches mainly construct the main issues through the angles of family, gender, race, nation and so on. Therefore, other angles and approaches needed to be distributed in discussing this novel. AIDS epidemic has become a major medical issue throughout the world. The status and situation of prostitutes have not raised great attentions when discussing the marginalization of African women.
Medical ethic proclaims that medical testing, care and treatment should be in advocacy with no discrimination in facing epidemic. However, a certain group of people like prostitutes, who suffer from sexual and social margination and oppression, are targeted as objects to do vaccine testing in the novel, regardless of their human rights. Doctors, usually male, are authoritative figures that control others bodies as testing objects.
The novel described several special or marginalized women like the one with long hair, blind, full of tears and so on to show that they were under depression and exiled by male dominance. African female characters all suffer from the dumping from male characters, being exiled from the whole society.
