Editors’ Introduction: More Than a Virus

Editors’ Introduction

more than a virus

Cherie Lacey and Annemarie Jutel

When we first started thinking about this Special Issue in our home country of New Zealand, we had little sense of what the future might hold. Emerging from a very strict lockdown—where one of us found herself in an isolated rural community, unable to return home, and the other was confined to a small suburban space with a dog, two children under the age of five, and a husband, and both of us with doubts as to what our jobs would look like when we were “released”—our minds were strictly focused on the pandemic and its immediate impact on our day-to-day lives.

At the same time, in the unfamiliar context of isolation, we connected with a colleague from Edinburgh, Michael Kelly—someone Annemarie knew from sabbatical trips and conferences, but with whom she had never worked. Enquiring first about his health and circumstances, the two started chatting from afar. Cherie joined in, and instead of fretting about the difficulty of undertaking research activities during lockdown, together we ended up writing a paper comparing the metaphors implemented to refer to the pandemic in our various media settings

The editors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their engagement with the essays published in this collection; Professors Damien Wilkins and Harry Ricketts for judging the entries in the 55-word story competition, “Living Through the 2020 Pandemic”; and all those who submitted entries for the competition, for their pithy insights into “the year like no other.” The editors would also like to express their gratitude to the authors who contributed their essays to this Special Issue.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 64, number 3 (summer 2021): 295–301. © 2021 by Johns Hopkins University Press

(Lacey, Kelly, and Jutel 2020). We went on to author other papers together, and to establish a new research relationship.

In August 2020, after submitting this first paper, and well before any country was out of the woods with regards to the pandemic (New Zealand included), the idea that we might consider COVID-19 as a shared experience gave us pause and pushed us to develop this special issue. We wanted to explore the dialectic of commonality in the experience of the pandemic. In our own email communications, our narratives moved between intensely felt personal anecdotes that highlighted the pleasures, stresses, joys, and breaking points in each of our own lives, and a sense that we were living through what was, perhaps, the most universal of any event in modern history.

The political rhetoric of the year almost universally relied on a narrative of common experience. But, although a sense of shared experience may be a fundamental human need—and indeed may help us to get through a crisis as it unfolds—the longer-lasting meanings of our “common experience” and what it required of us remains elusive. These past 18 or so months have seen an abundance of essays that try to make meaning of the pandemic experience. Often, these essays move between highly personal experiences—the domestic minutiae of lockdown life—and an awareness of the lines of shared humanity that crosscross the globe, drawing it close.

Of all the wonderful essays that have been written during this period, Zadie Smith’s “Something to Do,” from her slim collection of six pandemic essays, Intimations (2020), is a favorite. In “Something to Do,” Smith reflects on the experience of trying to work in a household in which her husband is also a writer and with a four-year-old child to look after in lockdown. In what is by far the best simile we have encountered in pandemic writing, Smith reflects on what might best be described as the collective madness that drove those of us who are nonessential workers to keep trying to work and write, even as the world fell apart around us: “What strikes me at once is how conflicted we feel about this new liberty and/or captivity. On the one hand, like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little legs keep pumping on, as they did when we were hurrying off to our workplaces. Do we know how to stop?” (22) Smith’s essay takes us into her domestic space and describes the pandemic from a perspective which can only be her own. Despite the fact that Smith and her husband Nick Laird happen to be two of the most respected writers on the planet in our current moment, somehow Smith’s experience also feels very much like ours. Like Smith, we were also compelled keep writing and working, pug-out-of-water-like, during the lockdown period. Perhaps the drive to keep working has something to do with an attempt to hold onto some kind of “ontological security” (see Mike Kelly’s essay in this Special Issue)—which is to say, to maintain some stability in our sense of self and who we are in this world. It is also, we believe, a way to start to make meaning from our personal and collective experiences of the pandemic.

Figure 1

“NZ stand together”: graffiti in Wellington, New Zealand. Credit: Cherie Lacey.

“Pandemic essays” such as Zadie Smith’s and the essays that follow in this collection might be read as an attempt to make something that feels bigger in a world that, to some extent, suddenly became very, very small. We mean this in a double sense: first, in the sense that our lives became confined to the domestic space and the surrounding neighborhood; and second, in the sense that the shared experience allowed us to feel closer to those with whom we are separated in space, time, and almost all things. As Arundhati Roy (2020) puts it in her wonderful pandemic essay: “What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus.”

Turning to the present issue, we present a collection of essays interspersed with short creative pieces. Hearkening back to Perspectives in Biology and Medicine’s 2015 Special Issue on Diagnosis (58.1), we remembered the success of the 55word story as a genre. Its concision and breadth offer an innovative way to engage with complex experiences. We held a story competition for 55-word stories on the theme of “Living Through the 2020 Pandemic,” and we include four of those stories in this issue.

Ruby Solomon’s story, “The Unexpected Perks of Flatting During COVID-19,” was the winner of our 55-word story competition. The competition was judged by Professor Damien Wilkins, Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and Professor Harry Ricketts, Professor of English Literature, Victoria University of Wellington. The judges said that they liked Solomon’s story “for its appealing voice, its tonal shifts,

as well as the skillful and swift move to the dream, and then the surprise and sweetness of the ending. The unavailable dream mother and the frantic narrator stay alive within that sweetness.” Stories by Rebecca Gray and Michael McLane were runners-up, and the story by Julia Schneider was an honorable mention.

The stories, along with images of COVID-inspired street art, are scattered among the essays by sociologists, philosophers, educationalists, historians, media scholars, and creative writers, all of whom join us to comment on ways in which the virus is more than a virus. As Rubén Gatambide-Fernandez and Mike Kelly both point out in their essays, COVID-19 might be understood as what medical anthropologist Merrill Singer (2009) has called a syndemic—a concept that describes the complex interaction between “epidemic diseases or other disorders and the socioenvironmental context that promotes their interactions” (Gatambide-Fernández, this issue). Mike Kelly goes on to call the pandemic a “natural experiment in breakdown” and notes that to simply treat COVID-19 as an infectious disease “is to misunderstand what is going on.”

Gatambide-Fernández’s essay, which opens this collection, traces some of the ways in which the pandemic has prompted us to recognize the contradictions— and fragilities—inherent in the notion of “solidarity” itself. From the nightly cacerolazos, or “pot-clanging,” on the balconies of Latin America to show solidarity with frontline health workers, to Donald’s Trump calls for solidarity among his supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, solidarity doesn’t always look the same. If we are to defend solidarity as a central aspect of how societies confront the pandemic, Gatambide-Fernández argues, we need to articulate a theory of solidarity that surfaces its underlying processes.

Kelly writes about the ways in which COVID-19 has fundamentally challenged, or even ruptured, ontological security. His essay documents the many ways in which the pandemic has undermined and destabilized our routines and daily habits and, in so doing, has introduced a new kind of insecurity to the population. What is clear from his essay is that this new insecurity is experienced differently by different segments of the population—most significantly, by socially disadvantaged groups, Black and ethnic minorities, and the elderly. “The tenuousness of many people’s material lives,” he writes, “was laid bare very swiftly” by the pandemic. His essay also reminds us that meaning-making activities in regards to the virus (such as this collection of essays) are very much a privilege and a luxury.

Annemarie Jutel’s essay examines how solidarity is built into the fabric of diagnosis itself. Like Gatambide-Fernández and Kelly, she also observes the ways in which the pandemic has both reinvigorated and undermined enactments of national solidarity. Her essay reflects on the emergence of a second-wave cluster in a Pasifika community in Auckland, New Zealand, in the latter part of 2020, and how it produced the “wrong” kind of solidarity in parts of New Zealand, which rallied against the community and divided the nation along racial lines. Although

a diagnosis of COVID-19 may be a “powerful unifier,” creating new affective and techno-social networks of belonging, it is also necessary to scrutinize the notion of solidarity, since with it “comes enmity, censure, and reproach as much as camaraderie.” Jutel’s essay is the first of a few which come from what we call, down here, “Aotearoa New Zealand.”

To say that different communities experience the pandemic in different ways has become something of a truism over the past year. In her essay, Jennifer Lum explores the material reality of this idea for one elderly Chinese woman in the United States. Lum implores readers to pay attention to this woman’s story, which, in its singularity, also manages to disclose many of the sociohistorical conditions through which the US came to be one of the countries worst affected by COVID-19. Her story highlights the fragility and precarity of life among Asian and Asian American elders living in the US, as well as the “staunch” acts of solidarity that persist even during the present spate of anti-Asian hate crimes.

Kathleen Kuehn’s essay similarly interweaves reflections on the political responses to COVID-19 via her own, deeply personal experience. As an American expatriate living in New Zealand, her essay is a journey into the politics of love as a response to extraordinary times and an exploration of what this politics asks of us: “self-contemplation, reflection and transformation, and the recognition that liberation hinges on our obligations to others.” Although she doesn’t mean her essay to be read as a “turncoat critique of ‘mean America,’” she can’t help but note the vast differences between her experience of the pandemic in her new home in Wellington and those of her family in the US. For Kuehn, New Zealand’s “Be Kind” politics marked the beginning of her own re-subjectification, of an “uprooting of self from my national-borne identity,” and of finding a place to stand in her new home. Kuehn’s essay also reminds us that, for many, the pandemic provided space to stop and breathe. She calls lockdown a “holiday for [her] soul,” one that shed light on the pre-COVID “grind culture” so many of us bought into and that set her onto her own spiritual awakening.

Staying in New Zealand, Molly Robson’s essay starts with her walking along the waterfront near her house moments after listening to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s announcement that the country was going into lockdown. In an attempt to ward off a rising sense of anxiety, Robson put on her headphones and listened to one of her favorite podcasts. In her essay, she recalls how the experience of listening to familiar voices provided a sense of comfort in this moment and beyond, as she rode out the pandemic in a small Wellington flat. From here, her essay moves into a meditation on the role of the human voice in mediating a sense of solidarity and sociality during periods of isolation. For her, the mediated voice can be a way of soothing loneliness and pain, but she warns that it might also contribute to increasing social and political fragmentation as the world enters a post-COVID existence.

Rebecca Olson and colleagues tell the stories of three frontline health workers from Australia and New Zealand. Their essay reveals how these workers became,

simultaneously, the victim, victor, and vector in the story of the pandemic—a complex positioning that had potentially harmful effects for these workers’ health and well-being. Their essay looks at how health professionals learned to play their parts in the complex drama of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggests that narrative plays a crucial role in supporting themselves and their colleagues. The essay reminds us of the role of narrative in producing solidarity, and—as Jutel’s essay does—of the real harm that can come from setting up certain segments of the population as “villains.”

The final essay in the collection zooms out again to encompass a broader view of the pandemic. Merle Eisenberg’s essay takes a historian’s-eye view of COVID-19, looking both at how previous pandemics have shaped society and at the effects that our present one might have on our collective future. This essay does a wonderful job of crystalizing many of the lines of thought present in the other essays in this special issue: that the pandemic has created a rupture in all kinds of narratives—historical, medical, social, subjective—and constitutes an event so significant it has the power to divide time into a “before” and an “after.”

As scholars, we are well aware that in any subject (and indeed in the pandemic experience) there is always a surface that needs scratching, deeper meanings that require revelation, alternative readings that power or context has silenced. We see it as the job of this Special Issue to get inside the subject of the Pandemic Experience. But we are also mindful that facile reinterpretations of the “benefits” of the pandemic or of its creative potential are not enough. To reread the COVID-19 pandemic is not to become apologists for a year like no other.

We believe that critical reflection is borne of critical distance, but when trying to write about the experience of living through the pandemic, critical distance is hard to find. As writer Maria Tumarkin wryly observed in an email to Cherie, “Writing about living through the pandemic is like narrating your surgery while you’re being operated on.”

However, like the Editorial Board of this journal, we know that putting an important subject in a broader scientific, social, or humanistic context—using the tools of disciplines and epistemes outside of those of biology and medicine—adumbrates matters otherwise obscured. This provides critical distance, a distance in which, paradoxically, the potential for rapprochement and solidarity resides.

Cherie LaCey and annemarie JuteL Wellington, New Zealand

References

Lacey, C., M. P. Kelly, and A. Jutel. 2020. “Fighting Words in the Antipodes.” Perspect

Biol Med 63 (4): 669–82. Lederer, E. M. 2021. “UN Women: COVID-19 Is ‘Most Discriminatory Crisis’ for

Women.” Stuff, March 16. Roy, A. 2020 “The Pandemic Is a Portal.” Financial Times, April 4. https://www.ft.com/ content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca. Singer, M. 2009. Introduction to Syndemics: A Critical Systems Approach to Public and Community Health. Hoboken: John Wiley. Smith, Z. 2020. Intimations: Six Essays. New York: Penguin.