Bearing witness to resilience

 

Bearing witness to resilience

How Abayomi Olusunle’s “Black women living with HIV on motherhood, misconceptions and their mental health” challenges narrative silence

By Richard Elesho

In the landscape of health writing, essays addressing HIV continue to be shadowed by stigma, misinformation, and the persistent erasure of certain voices. That is precisely why Abayomi Olusunle’s essay “Black Women Living With HIV On Motherhood, Misconceptions & Their Mental Health,” published in Black Ballad, stands as a significant intervention in contemporary literature addressing health justice and cultural representation.

At its core, Olusunle’s essay refuses to allow Black women living with HIV to remain abstract policy subjects or tragic figures in public health narratives. Instead, she centers on their lived experience, their agency, and their complexity. The essay opens not with statistics or clinical information but with conversation. Olusunle moves between personal interviews and reflection, allowing women to speak about motherhood, fear, hope, and the particular burden of navigating healthcare systems that treat them with suspicion rather than compassion.

What distinguishes this essay is its refusal of either sentimentality or clinical detachment. Olusunle does not offer inspiration porn narratives of triumph over adversity. Nor does she reduce lived experience to medical abstractions. Instead, she creates textual space where personal vulnerability becomes the basis for systemic critique. When a woman shares her fear of transmission to her children, Olusunle uses that intimate moment to interrogate how healthcare providers often fail to provide adequate information and emotional support. When another discusses the shame embedded in disclosure, Olusunle traces that shame to broader cultural narratives that criminalize and stigmatize HIV, particularly for Black women.

The essay’s analytical precision distinguishes it from much health writing. Olusunle demonstrates an understanding of how medical racism, gender-based discrimination, and racial stereotyping compound the already complex experience of living with HIV as a Black woman. She does not treat these systemic factors as abstract background; instead, they emerge organically from the stories shared and the author’s own rigorous analysis. This integration of narrative and critique creates something rare in contemporary essays: work that is simultaneously emotionally resonant and intellectually sophisticated.

What makes this essay truly remarkable is how it addresses mental health dimensions of HIV that are persistently underexamined in public health discourse. Olusunle explores the psychological toll of living with a condition that remains deeply stigmatized, the impact of disclosure decisions on intimate relationships, the trauma of navigating a healthcare system that often fails to see you as fully human. By focusing on mental health, she insists that health can not be reduced to purely medical. Wellbeing is psychological, relational, and deeply embedded in broader social contexts.

Olusunle’s essay also intervenes in conversations about motherhood in ways that challenge both mainstream and progressive discourse. She does not present motherhood as inherently redemptive or transformative. Instead, she explores the specific anxieties, joys, complexities, and contradictions of being a mother while living with HIV in a culture that continues to stigmatize both motherhood and HIV seropositivity Her approach honors the intelligence and agency of the women she features, refusing to reduce their experience to either victim narratives or triumph narratives.

The essay’s significance extends beyond its immediate subject matter. It models what contemporary essay writing can accomplish when informed by genuine commitment to justice, intellectual rigour, and artistic sophistication. Olusunle demonstrates that personal narrative and systemic analysis are not opposing forces but complementary approaches to understanding how power operates in the intimate and the institutional spheres simultaneously.

In publishing this essay, Black Ballad has provided a crucial platform for a voice that insists on complexity, refuses silence, and demands that we reckon with the humanity and agency of those whose stories are too often absent from mainstream discourse. Olusunle’s work reminds us why representation matters, why the question of “whose stories get told and how” remains ethically urgent, and why literature remains a vital site of cultural intervention and social transformation.

For readers seeking essays that challenge stigma while refusing simplification, that centre marginalized voices while refusing to flatten complexity, that combine journalistic rigour with literary artistry, Olusunle’s work offers an exemplary model. This essay will likely become required reading in discussions of health justice, narrative ethics, and the role of literature in cultural reckoning with systemic inequality.

About the Author:

Elesho, a former public servant, is a journalist of more than three decades of experience reporting politics, health, judiciary, and government.

About Abayomi Olusunle:

Abayomi ‘Yomi’ Olusunle is an essayist and cultural leader whose work addresses health justice, neurodiversity, migration, and identity. She has been published on the World Economic Forum, Black Ballad, Thisday Nigeria, Black Minds Matter UK, and other platforms. She holds an MSc in Psychology and is British Psychological Society accredited. She serves on the boards of Terrence Higgins Trust and Noetic, is a UN Women delegate, and curates the World Economic Forum Birmingham Global Shapers hub