Author Yewande Omotoso (Bom Boy) recently published this essay in the Sunday Times (South Africa) about enduring the coronavirus pandemic. We have republished it here with permission of the author.
We Need The Courage to Live Through This Wide Awake
That which cannot be explained can be comprehended, and endured, in silence
Without intending to seem callous, the question comes to me: our world is fraught with crises, what is it about this one that has captured us so?
Perhaps it is in Covid-19’s knack for globality, its capacity – helped along by our technologies of fast transportation – to roam the planet touching what it pleases. This free-roaming characteristic, the apparent opposite of the ecological crisis, the malaria crisis or, localised in a different way (within certain kinds of bodies for instance), the rape crisis.
As Arundhati Roy put it in a recent article in the Financial Times: “Coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.”
Covid-19, like a psychopathic bank robber, has started taking lives, all kinds, and, however slow some have been to take notice, it now has our full attention.
Usually, now, at this part in the movie, the bank robber makes demands, the deft police officer negotiates and, depending whose side we are meant to be on (the cops or the robbers), the movie resolves itself; someone either goes to jail or gets away with a million dollars.
But this is not a movie, of course. It’s real life. Still, as someone who worships at the altar of story, unfaltering in my faith that fiction bears truth, I wonder: if we personified this virus for a few seconds, what are Covid-19’s demands?
Another way of phrasing that question: what is this moment really asking of us apart from the essential fussing with disinfectant wipes?
In a recent webinar, “African Feminist and Anti-Capitalist Responses to Covid-19”, Max Ajl described the coronavirus as a lightning bolt: it is illuminating, it supercharges our existing problems and, notably, when it hits, the impact across the land varies.
This element of variance struck me a few days into SA’s Covid-19 lockdown when a friend shared a video of soldiers kicking a group of men found drinking beer on the sidewalk, cussing and refusing to self-isolate.
She’d sent it aiming for humour, I think, but I felt a cold shiver, a reaction not only in response to the violence.
On the surface it looked like unruly men being disciplined to comply with the sensible, urgent request from government to staunch the spread of the virus. That’s the language they understand, my friend claimed, but this seemed inaccurate to me somehow.
What, I wondered, were the conditions of their homes that would have them rather be out on the street facing down angry men in camouflage.
As more and more countries institute lockdown, the statistics roll in – domestic violence, child abuse, hungry households – reminding us that “staying at home” means very different things to different people.
What about those for whom being asked to sit at home doesn’t only mean go and be with yourselves and your families but could also mean go and sit in cramped, uninhabitable spaces? Amidst all this madness, go and sit sober and sombre. Go and sit at your home, wherever and whatever it may be, just go, go and sit.
A friend said she watched yet another clip of a man who was caught outside, defying lockdown regulations. He appealed to the camera, shrugging. I had to come out, he said. I needed to breathe.
Information from the experts tells us that the best way to curb the spread, in addition to incessant hand-washing and sanitising, is to confine ourselves. And while the virus itself can’t tell if you’re female, white, rich or hungry, it has crept into a world already stratified along those lines and more – an unfair world deeply biased and unequal; a world with such marked fault lines that even class-blind Covid-19 can’t but follow the cracks.
But along with the ways in which the inequities of our world are magnified in a time of coronavirus, another thing I wondered about was what, really, are we asking of each other when we say “stay at home”.
Before lockdown I had visited a relative who upon opening her eyes in the morning blares the radio. At some point between morning tea and brushing her teeth she adds the television to the mix and this cacophony lasts the entire day – phone calls and visitors be damned – until she closes her eyes.
Those who know her know to speak up when they visit. Friends and family shout on the phone.
“I like noise,” she says.
Being introverted and a great fan of silence, it took something for me to comprehend her desire, so at odds with my own natural inclinations. And yet that insight into someone else’s ways pops up when I think of “stay at home”.
To me, silence and self-isolation are as normal as teeth-brushing and rooibos tea. I work from home, apart from forays to the shops or to visit my family I can go days and days and days without seeing a single person.
Many dear to me, including my partner, live in other cities, other countries. We connect regularly using the plethora of applications available. I’m accustomed to sitting at home and there are many others like me – our offices are wherever our laptops and the internet can co-exist.
But what about those for whom sitting at home for five consecutive weeks seems unthinkable, the same way as lack of noise is unthinkable for my relative? During my visit, each time she returned from work to find me at the kitchen table typing, covered in silence, she looked at me askance. “You didn’t turn on the radio?” she’d ask, utterly perplexed.
Amid the chaos of this moment, amid the suffering, there seems also the introduction of a certain quality of silence. That stretch of a Saturday, for instance, what if we didn’t rush to fill it with Netflix and Zoom, the radio and the television?
While I don’t argue that silence is some kind of panacea – the idea seems too annoyingly mystical – there is something that happens to the human condition, unmediated. A friend used to say we’re not human beings, we’re human doings. It does seem true that we very rarely practise simple, unadorned, undistracted, be-ing. What of now?
If there is one thing this moment calls us to be with – to contend with – it’s uncertainty. This realisation has emerged already, evident in what many have already written and shared: the return to family; the opportunity, in the corona-induced silence, to remember what matters; the startling discovery, as layers of extraneous life get stripped away, of what actually remains.
We all know (enough well-meaning memes exist to confirm this) that uncertainty is a natural condition of life. Death and taxes, goes the joke. And yet so much of life seems geared, by necessity, towards establishing certainty – the job, the marriage vows, the contracts, deeds, ownership.
We make plans, and surely there can’t be anything wrong with plans. But there are always those moments, often short, seldom as sustained as this one, that occur in life. Moments that cut through, draw us out of our construction and remind us of the true state of what it is to be alive – to not know and to be seeking regardless.
The death of someone dear often does it. Deep misfortune. Trauma. Sickness. Not only sad circumstances – carrying a living being in your womb can do it, being present at the birth of a baby, listening to someone knowledgeable explain about the Milky Way holding hundreds of billions of stars, only one of which is our little sun. We see we are small. It frustrates and frightens but can also simply make us go still, leave us in wonder.
There will never be a time to romanticise Covid-19, just as there is never a time to be merely whimsical about death (or taxes for that matter) but if nothing else we are being forced every day of this extended moment to live life as it really is, uncertain and, despite our greatest attempts, unknown to us.
For some perhaps that uncertainty is familiar. For many it might not be. When this moment passes, however far or near in the future that time may be, whatever guise it takes, I hope we retain something of the sharpness of this reality, some of the residue of that feeling.
“For me,” said the meditation master to his students, “this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. And when the wind eventually knocks it over, I say, ‘Of course.'”
In his essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” James Baldwin writes: “No time can be easy if one is living through it.” He seems to be saying that if we’re only cruising we are at best half-asleep.
And so, as different lines are drawn and corporations and governments rally to see whose pie gets bigger or smaller through this crisis, as families draw near, as support organisations remain alert to those rendered more vulnerable under lockdown, as we clap and cry and grieve and fret and work and risk and tend, may we also find the wherewithal to keep awake, to endure, and not because there is any particular reward waiting on the other side. Some of us will die, others will do the burying. We’ll all die anyway, of Covid-19 or something else, eventually.
Baldwin’s words suggest the reward lies only in the thing itself: the courage to live through, wide awake, wearing no blinkers. It seems a notion only for the realm of ideals but let’s not dismiss it. If there was ever a time for ideals, surely it is now.
• Omotoso is a Johannesburg-based novelist and architect who was born in Barbados, grew up in Nigeria and moved to SA with her family in 1992. Her novels ‘Bom Boy’ (2011) and ‘The Woman Next Door’ (2016) were short-listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.
