The street noises quiet down. No jokes, no coughs, no curses drifting from the coffeeshop. The dice stop ringing on the wooden boards. Only the dogs are left. They reclaim the city as the humans are forced into their homes. The dogs, too, can sense that something is wrong. Their incessant, frantic barking tells us. A boy outside yells a verse from a famous song. His voice recalls a life that seems so distant now, but then he, too, falls silent. Perhaps he was waiting for a reaction, someone to pick up where he left off, to finish what’s left of the song. But nobody does.
How does a city ruled by fear, roamed by dogs and cats and weasels and lonesome singing boys look? We can only guess by what we see through our windows.
The internet doesn’t help. The wheel turns, nonstop: loading — like a mirror of many a mind right now, as we sit and wait. The unknown is scary, but waiting is heavier. We realize now that for the first time in forever, something binds us — something palpable though invisible — and we try to build on that. But building is an act that requires more than we can grasp right now.
What are we really waiting for? Do we miss the life suspended by the virus, or do we dread its return? Do we long for the moment we can merge with others again, or for the disease to penetrate our bodies, so we can finally stop anticipating? We can’t help thinking of George R. R. Martin’s White Walkers. The resemblance is clear: One looming danger threatening all of humanity, forcing us to shove all else aside for now so we can confront it.
But that act of shoving, too, is proving to be difficult. Some burdens won’t budge. They share our homes with us, staring us in the face all day and night. And there is no escape. Work persists, hunger — for food and much else — persists, and love — with all the pain it sometimes brings — definitely persists.
A certain heaviness is “lodged there, deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars,” as Arundhati Roy describes in The God of Small Things. And it “can’t be worried loose.”
“The pandemic is a portal,” Roy writes, and we know. But so far we’re all standing before that portal, uncertain just when we’ll be able to pass through to the other side — if we survive, that is. The unknown is scary, but waiting is heavier.
The weeks linger on, the days repeat themselves, like endless white nights. We try to break the cycle, desperately searching for poetry in the prosaic; discovery in domesticity. Even as we drown in the depths of our boredom, grappling with the inevitable bouts of anxiety, we know that today isn’t tomorrow: that there’s more yet to be found.
May our recommendations this week help you deduplicate your days.
This week, Mostafa Mohie gives us a glimpse into his routine in self-isolation, and we share a selection of recent readings that we found particularly insightful.
These days, I only check the date in the evening, when the Health Ministry releases its daily report on new coronavirus cases and deaths. I put the numbers in a spreadsheet and compare them with the preceding day. I calculate the weekly growth rate to try to understand the virus’s pattern, telling myself I might be onto something. I observe how the infection rate aligns with the government’s measures: suspending schools, travel and imposing a curfew. Maybe I’ll be able to predict the point when the curve stops rising.
Other than that, dates have stopped being important; there are no meetings, events or anything else to look forward to.
The two hours between 7.30 am and 9.30 am still resemble my pre-corona mornings. I can focus on reading a book or editing a piece I wrote earlier before the rest of the world wakes up and gets busy panicking about the virus.
I observe two universes: one in my living room and the other through the kitchen balcony. The former has turned into an office, with my laptop, cell phone, notebook and a pen that I once found lying around in the Mada office and took home with me.
On the screens of my laptop and phone, I follow a world that’s obsessed with COVID-19. I flip between local and international news, thinking up angles for stories I could write. The online world mirrors the racket of isolation. I skim through everything written by friends and by strangers, by newspapers and websites. There’s no doubt about it, this is a world ruled by COVID-19.
From my kitchen’s balcony, the world is starkly different. The virus hasn’t taken hold yet and passersby are walking slowly and calmly. Some of them are wearing face masks, a previously uncommon sight on the streets of Cairo.
I think to myself: others are going out, leaving their houses. I get jealous. Some people have figured that wearing a facemask and maybe washing their hands once when they get home is the most they can do to stop the virus from spreading.
My partner wakes up and I suggest we bring a friend or two to our weekly Friday walks. She likes the idea so I seize the opportunity and suggest we exchange home visits with a small and trusted circle of friends — no more than two people — if the lockdown persists. She doesn’t buy it.
The house seems haunted with the virus even though we clean it and sterilize it continuously, trying to turn it into a safe space. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is functioning normally.
Night Windows – Edward Hopper, 1928
The curfew is the best time to connect with friends. Everyone’s at home, done with their day job and left with the seemingly endless list of house chores, exacerbated by the fact that we’re always staying home.
I speak on the phone with a friend about how the pandemic has brought all of us back to a primitive state — literally trying to just stay alive. We buy enough food for a week to limit the time we have to go out and we sterilize our houses with bleach and, if available, alcohol. When we go out we take precautions worthy of uncharted wilderness. She says the pandemic has turned us into an endangered species. What brings humanity together today is that we share the same genes: just the grandchildren of homo sapiens, endangered like sea turtles or pandas. Nothing more and nothing less.
Another friend tells me she likes the early hours of the morning, when she, along with friends from around the world, agree on a theme for the day which she then curates a playlist around that they all listen to together. After that, her day returns to its normal rhythm, fluctuating between anxiety and boredom, as she passes the hours with her cat, Halawa.
The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse – Adolph Menzel, 1851
It’s not just the dates that disappeared with the isolation — the future has also vanished. The pandemic has thrown us in a state of “liminality,” lying between two stages: “we aren’t what we used to be,” and “we aren’t yet what we’re becoming.” British anthropologist Victor Turner (1920 – 1980) explained that the liminal phase for individuals (between childhood and puberty) or for societies (between feudalism and capitalism) are characterized by the suspension of the old governing principles, without a new set of rules taking their place. It’s the rupture in the movement of history towards a future which modernity tried to take control over by denying it as a realm filled with possibilities. In a liminal phase like the one we’re experiencing now, the future ceases to become a predetermined eventuality and returns to being full of possibilities once again.
The liminal phase is neither a vacuum nor an extension of what preceded it. It’s not similar to what follows it, either. Rather, it’s a period that sets the stage for the future. The change in the governing principles of the future will depend on the depth of the schism with the past. Is this pandemic the largest rupture in the course of history since the Second World War? We can’t be sure yet, but we will know soon enough.
The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey – Thomas Cole, 1847
-Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek pens a guide for self-isolation, particularly for those gripped by anxiety due to a sense that the world is irrevocably changing while their daily life isn’t that different: “My friend Gabriel Tupinamba, a Lacanian psychoanalyst who works in Rio de Janeiro, explained this paradox to me in an email message: ‘People who already worked from home are the ones who are the most anxious, and exposed to the worst fantasies of impotence, since not even a change in their habits is delimiting the singularity of this situation in their daily lives.’ His point is complex but clear: if there is no great change in our daily reality, then the threat is experienced as a spectral fantasy nowhere to be seen and all the more powerful for that reason.”
-Indian novelist Arundhati Roy’s previously mentioned essay in the Financial Times, where she paints a vivid portrait of the dire situation in her country, and dares to imagine what lies on the other side of the pandemic: “Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
Arundhati Roy
-In the New Yorker, Polish author and Nobel laureate Olga Tocarczuk reflects on the current moment of uncertainty through what she sees from her window during self-isolation: “Images from my childhood keep coming back to me. There was so much more time then, and it was possible to “waste” it and “kill” it, spending hours just staring out the window, observing the ants, or lying under the table and imagining it to be the ark. Reading the encyclopedia. Might it not be the case that we have returned to a normal rhythm of life? That it isn’t that the virus is a disruption of the norm, but rather exactly the reverse — that the hectic world before the virus arrived was abnormal?”
-The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the international art world to a state of unprecedented suspension. Two major art events set to take place during the spring and the summer are the Biennale of Sydney and the Venice Architecture Biennale (the former is set to become a virtual experience while the latter has been postponed, perhaps canceled). A reflective piece on Hyperallergic and another on Failed Architecture look into the implications of this disruption, questioning the effectiveness of international art events of such scale, and pondering alternatives in the world to come: “We should therefore celebrate [international art expos] while we can, as relics of a receding world. Their familiar spectacularist format is now thoroughly endangered. With their passing there is of course much to mourn … (but) it will not necessarily be an unwelcome or unproductive thing.”
-And finally, we conclude our Read section this week with Lebanese comic artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj’s “Corona Diaries,” where he adds a new comic or piece of music he’s been experimenting with every day.
Comic by Mazen Kerbaj
Nawara Belal, who has spent her time in self-quarantine so far watching films about the “end of the world,” writes this week’s Watch recommendations.
This is an invitation to enjoy watching the end of the world from your couch with your drink of choice to prepare you for the end, sponsored by every casual conversation you’ve recently had about pandemics, storms, death, fear and desperate means for protection/prevention, such as ethylene alcohol and soap.
Today’s film picks are also sponsored by every fictional monster out there — even though they don’t make this list — and Godzilla is their representative (how many films have been made about Godzilla so far? I’ve lost count). The “dragon storm” rattled us on March 12, we’re cornered by a pandemic and absurdity is taking over our reality. It seems such a mythic figure is the one thing missing from the picture.
The weekend of the storm is when my obsession with rewatching American “end-of-the-world” films first started, and let me tell you — there are many of them. But now, my friends, is the time for guilty pleasures. Some of these films may be filled with the thrills typical of Hollywood action flicks (a welcome escape right now, to be honest), but that’s not all there is to them. Each of them is also a journey towards the idea of “acceptance” — accepting the end — and it is a journey that takes us from one mental state to another, preparing us, or distancing us (because sometimes that’s the only way to deal), from said acceptance. It’s not very different from the five stages of grief, and that’s how I chose to classify those films I write about today.
The first stage of grief is denial, and it is represented by This Is the End (2013), an apocalyptic comedy written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The film ends with its protagonists dancing in heaven to the tunes of “Backstreet’s Back,” performed by the Backstreet Boys themselves. The film more or less tells us we shouldn’t really worry about the end of the world. In fact, who wouldn’t want the world to end if we’re going to be hanging out with a bunch of wealthy, euphoric celebrities, dancing to our favorite 90s tunes? In reality, however, we know that the raucous spectacle is actually a denial of the depth of the calamity, isolating us from the horrors of collective pain. But if dying by laughter is a possibility, then let the fun begin.
The anger of the second stage of grief is adequately manifested in Outbreak (1995), directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman. It’s a sci-fi film that follows the spread of an Ebola-like disease that’s been manufactured by US army generals. Such movies are often fun to watch in terms of the gripping action they involve, but I am of course enraged by the tired chauvinistic portrayal of the American Hero who saves the day; the arrogance of America creating a virus and then saving the world from it is infuriating. The anger the film induces is duplicated on screen, in the sense of impending destruction it pulsates with. I keep myself from giving in to my rage, even if at times it’s a welcome feeling because, with its power, it creates a sense that something might move — that something might change.
The bargaining stage of grief is represented by Kevin Reynolds’s Waterworld (1995), an apocalyptic/sci-fi movie starring Kevin Costner. The film is set in the year 2500 when the polar ice caps have already melted causing sea levels to rise over 7600 meters, covering most of the earth. How much bargaining can we bear for life to go on? In the struggle within my head — between anxiety taking over and my attempts at control — I realize that returning to some semblance of life is possible. Not necessarily “normal” life — as we’ve known it in this age of capitalist progress — but a life in which age-old human practices can still take place, within a modern context. To return to the world, once again moving and convening and working and touching and roaming the earth. The earth, though — we’ll still be here, on this planet. Could it be that one day the thing we’ll be bargaining over won’t just be our lives, but the very spatial plane on which we exist?
I Am Legend (2007), directed by Francis Lawrence, represents the fourth stage of grief, which is depression. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a virologist and the sole survivor in a city whose inhabitants were wiped out by a deadly virus. Anyone would be depressed if they woke up to find themselves alone in their city, with only a dog to keep them company. Just imagine that all you know is the silence we experience every day when the curfew starts in the evening. You’re the only moving element in a canvas of absolute silence, debris, smog and darkness. The filmmakers went to great lengths to drown the audience in a puddle of suffocation and distress.
We’re now at the fifth stage of grief, and that is acceptance. The film is Perfect Sense (2011), an apocalyptic romantic drama directed by David Mackenzie and starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green. An epidemiologist and a cook fall in love amid a pandemic that makes humans lose their senses one after the other. The film basically tells the story of the end of human sense, and we see how the human race adapts to the crisis as it unfolds. With each lost sense, a consciousness about the meaning of what it means to exist as a human grows — to smell, to see, to hear, to taste, to touch — clinging to the sensory memory of what one has always known. The movie takes us to the epitome of loss, imbued with a sense of calmness that only comes with true acceptance. Loss is always personal and excruciatingly tangible, yet others are there to comfort you in the totality of the unseen. Total absence and deafening silence are only matched by absolute submission, with no promises of revival or renewal.
Movement is key. To help you get through the endless days (and nights, if exercising at the end of the day is your thing), here’s a beat-heavy playlist by music journalist Maha El Nabawi, designed to get you into full flex mode during your home workouts.
In the end, we leave you with the first edition of our Care Package, curated with love and sealed in solidarity. A joint project conceptualized with Sarah Rifky and Amman’s MMAG Foundation, we hope it brings you some solace during the days and weeks ahead.
