[In The Drafts] Reflections on Grief in A Pandemic: Resisting the Apocalypse-As-Metaphor
Something I wrote for a student magazine that never got published! Enjoy x
The refusal to bury our dead may come back to haunt us: perhaps that is what dooms the tyrant Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone. No such comeuppance has arrived for our leaders yet. As the death toll for the pandemic climbs due to vaccine apartheid and the failure to follow and enforce guidelines in countries like the U.S. and U.K., it seems we are increasingly (if not constantly) surrounded by death – not just from the pandemic and the way states have responded to it, but from other, more long-standing forms of state violence, as well: most notably, the spectre of police brutality against Black and brown people in the U.S., the rise of anti-Asian violence, the climate crisis and anti-Indigenous violence, settler colonial violence in Palestine, the treatment of poor and working class people as dispensable everywhere. The list marches on. A miasma has formed as a consequence of all this death and neglect, looming like a prophecy even as we flock to the Internet to escape it. But the unavenged dead do not go gentle into that good night; they stalk the headlines, our Twitter feeds, communities, neighbourhoods and collective psyche, no matter how much we bar them from the gates of memory and reckoning.
How does one speak of beginnings in these conditions? Apocalyptic language falls from the lips of statesman and citizen alike. People are dying, the environment is dying, Boris Johnson throws a party for his fellow politicians and staffers while their subjects are quarantined in their homes. Antigone is finally tired after summers upon summers of protests. It is a march towards death now. You would be forgiven for thinking the world is ending, and to laugh in the face of that.
Indeed, it feels like many things ended with the pandemic: the “great outdoors” as a means of escape and a site of social life; throwing caution to the wind (for some more than others); conversations with friends. Alongside loved ones lost to the pandemic (or the state response to the pandemic), and the death that encloses us, we have been navigating – a little pitifully – a period of mourning that now, in year three of the pandemic, is starting to feel fatalistic.
There is no sell-by date on grief. Or on a pandemic, for that matter. To move on, continue, muscle through, resume and restart in such a miasmal state, without proper witness to, or rites of burial for, the dead and dying, is to choose to believe in the myth of the well-oiled machine that needn’t stop for mass death or genocide, let alone personal griefs. It experienced a technical difficulty, out of a pure shock to the system, but it is back up and running because it has to be, because the capitalist economy literally cannot afford to pause for very long, and it does not account for human lives. And so people reach for doomsday metaphors because they sense that there is nothing they can do as characters in a tragedy, for everywhere they look are memento mori: Remember that you must die.
This is real life, however, not a Shakespearean drama. Death, suffering, and harmful decisions are not inevitable, nor are structural forces inexorable. We are the authors of our own fate, insofar as ‘fate’ is dictated by human action and will, both individual and collective. We must not mystify the nature and origins of material conditions, because metaphors can obfuscate as much as they illuminate. The ‘apocalypse’ we are supposedly living in is really an ongoing crisis; the only thing that has changed is our relationship to the alarm. Not everyone has had that luxury.
‘There are times when the metaphors that I’m thinking about aren’t coming from a strangeness but are coming from systems that take strict limits to the imagination,’ poet Heather Christle explains in an interview for Guernica Magazine. Those who have had the privilege of living a life relatively free of the anxieties of survival – the bourgeois, the ‘healthy’ and non-disabled, the historically non-persecuted – are now, in a global pandemic, rudely confronted with the prospect of it, but only in an abstracted sense, if anti-mask protests in the U.K. and social media comment threads are anything to go by. Yet it is often these people who traffic in conspiracies and take up doomsday metaphors with an ease that should be unsettling. The newly disillusioned cannot imagine their way out of things as they are, partly because of genuine despair, partly because of learned helplessness, and partly because some of them, us, still benefit – or at least do not lose out much – from ‘the way things are.’
Grief immobilises us, robs us of our imagination – the tyranny of capital coupled with the tyranny of the news cycle. We are in a sea of endings, buffeted by waves that threaten to consume us. But who is ‘we’? Certainly not those who are already acting as if the pandemic has ended. We are the ones who have survived without trying, while outside the city walls, bodies rot.
If the pandemic has taught me anything, it is that death – and its effaced partner, grief – is political, revealing painfully how the line between private loss and the machinations of the state apparatus is often blurred. We have been here many times before; history is written in the blood of those disciplined and punished by the state, those neglected by it, lest we forget that an unsullied ‘normal’ doesn’t actually exist. What happens when mass death and genocide punctuate the everyday reality of otherwise sheltered portions of the populace? What happens when the dead haunt our feeds, every day an uptick in the pandemic’s body count to the point where the press and the state have stopped reporting on it: out of sight, out of mind? When Antigone exits the stage before her sentence to the tomb, her sister Ismene cries, ‘How am I to live alone without her?’ To which Creon replies, with chilling insouciance, ‘Don’t speak of her. She no longer exists.’ One can’t help but read a similar suppression in the talking heads on television, on social media, an unspoken collective agreement to move on, back to ‘normal,’ because the alternative is intolerable: to acknowledge that we have failed to take care of the vulnerable, to take care of each other, to resist the lure of an ‘every man for himself’ ableist individualism that does, indeed, render our circumstances dystopian. To recognise that this is, in fact, the norm.
We accept the terms of our own fate without a cry of protest, so bogged down by death, which is the shadow of life, that we are. I imagine Antigone kneeling in the dirt, hands trembling yet determined over the cold body of her brother, her mind set on reprieve, a resting place. She obeys no law – not man-made nor divine – but love, in the midst of a crackdown, of direct threats to her and her sister’s safety, of a restless but distant public. She was surrounded by death as well, the daughter of tragic Oedipus, mourning her recently dead brothers, an arrow nocked towards its own destruction. And still the play sings because she rebelled ceaselessly, despite everything, and fuelled by hope, for it is the seed of resistance. Against our doomscrolling and naysaying rings her claim to burial for her brother, audacious in its challenge of Creon’s jingoism: ‘It is my nature to form ties of love, not hate.’
Writer and activist Angela Y. Davis writes in Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, ‘… I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as [Antonio] Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.’ This optimism can be found in movements, in ‘communities of resistance, communities of struggle’ that survive through and within realities of state-sanctioned violence and repression, in spite of turned cheeks and averted eyes. ‘It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism,’ Davis counsels. Antigone dies because she is alone in her endeavour; one wonders what might have happened if she had help from her community, even just from her sister.
Perhaps in order to dismantle, we have to destroy. But this is destruction in an anarchic, not dystopic, sense: in order to tangibly challenge the rule of private property and state violence (whether enforced or meted out through neglect), we must treat the means as the ends, and the ends as the means. There is no Antigone in our midst – we are all Antigone, or we are bystanders. We must form communities of struggle, rather than waiting for individual heroes. As writer Ursula K. Le Guin contends in her novel The Dispossessed, ‘You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.’