Fella Benabed

Angry-Didactic PathoGraphics: Exploring Blood-Transmitted Infections in Jonathan Hill’s Blood of the Paladin

Fella Benabed

Badji Mokhtar Annaba University

fella.benabed@univ-annaba.dz

This paper explores Claude Moliterni’s AIDS Connection (1993) and Jonathan Hill’s Blood of the Paladin (2020) as angry-didactic pathographics that address blood-transmitted infections to demonstrate the power of graphic narratives in conveying medical and social issues. Building on the concepts of graphic medicine and pathography, pathographics are textual and visual representations of health-related messages. Unlike dense textual information, which can overwhelm readers, pathographics allow them to set their own pace while engaging with the visual elements, inviting them to pause and uncover layered meanings through text-image interactions. The readers’ identification and immersion allow pathographics to achieve a range of objectives: raising awareness about disease transmission, helping patients to cope with the symptoms, increasing adherence to therapies, and improving experiences in healthcare settings. Drawing from Anne H. Hawkins’s typology of pathography, this paper borrows and combines the didactic type, which educates about diseases by integrating medical information with personal narratives; and the angry type, which critiques shortcomings in healthcare systems based on personal frustrations. Claude Moliterni’s AIDS Connection, illustrated by Sicomoro, denounces the blood merchants who, after bleeding “the Third World by all of its veins,” sell the blood of its poor inhabitants to the rich in the West. The author draws on genuine press articles from the French Blood Affair to denounce the link between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the “traffic of red gold,” claiming that contaminated blood was used despite known medical risks. Similarly, Jonathan Hill’s Blood of the Paladin, illustrated by Ryan Gielen, recounts Jonathan’s personal experience of contracting HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C through tainted blood products intended to treat his hemophilia. His fear of being disliked reflects the widespread stigma linked to this condition, and his experience reflects the enduring struggle for justice faced by countless patients in similar situations. It is tragic that a treatment breakthrough, once promised to give people with hemophilia a life with fewer bleeds and hospital visits, ended up causing a new deadly disease. Such pathographics are important to ensure that the world never repeats the contamination crisis and the suffering that resulted from it.

BIOGRAPHY

Fella Benabed is a Professor of Global Anglophone literature at the English department of Badji Mokhtar-Annaba University in Algeria. In her research, she is interested in the postcolonial, ecological, narrative, and medical approaches to global Anglophone literature. She is a US educational exchange alumna: she took part in the Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary American Literature, University of Louisville, Kentucky in 2011, and she was a Fulbright senior visiting scholar at Columbia University in the city of New York in 2021. In her Fulbright project, she worked on “Nervous Conditions in African Literature.” She has equally led a research project entitled “Literature and Medicine: Nurturing Clinical Empathy and Holistic Care,” and she has written a book titled Applied Global Health Humanities: Readings in the Global Anglophone Novel (De Gruyter, 2024). In parallel to her teaching and research in literary studies, and as a teacher of English, she is interested in continuous professional development. She obtained DELTA (Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Cambridge University in the UK and UTICEF Master's degree (Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Teaching and Training) from Strasbourg University in France.