After all, despite being an ocean away from one of my hometowns (Shanghai), soundwaves of aunties’ wails-heard from videos uploaded to Twitter and Youtube-still register as grief, as hunger, as anger, as relation. Despite estrangement and disconnection, I have felt called to translate and rework these rituals into other ways to mourn-poems, art, memes, bouts of madness, the absence of productivity, mutual aid, reflection, organizing. This pandemic is one where rituals and traditions communities have cultivated for mourning have also been interrupted. A sign-it’s not too late to demand a different one. A sigh: this is not the life we owe one another.
Which is to say, a breath, an exhale, and acknowledgement that we are still here, and when we are here, we also speak (or sign, or finger spell, or mumble, or type, or use AAC) to the many who are not, and when we tell our stories, when we make art, when we protest, when we scream, we are also calling into the room all we have lost who, despite no longer being here physically, still buoys us (through the love we have for them) into living a life they would have wanted (or that the world convinced them they should not get to live) and, in turn, wanted for us. What Billy-Ray Belcourt calls “a new grammar of living,” what Jody Chan calls madness, what Audre Lorde calls “poetry as illumination,” what many call disability justice, is prefigurative work that often begins with a sigh. Who would one have to be to sit in that normal restfully, to mourn it, or to desire its continuance? But, I and many other people hate that normal. Their innocence is politically, economically and psychically lucrative.Was the violence against women normal? Was the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism normal? Was white supremacy normal? Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes, I suppose all of that was normal. I have felt tremendous irritation at the innocence of those people (mostly, but not only, white) finally up against their historic and present culpability in a set of dreadful politics and dreadful economics - ecocidal and genocidal. What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expose even further the endoskeleton of the world.
Content notes: suicide, genocide, deaths in long-term care, serophobia, medical abuse, labour exploitation, overdose deathsĭionne Brand’s piercing article “On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying” teaches us that ‘normal’ is an anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and capitalist ruse:
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