Antigone Issue No. 04 | Winter 2020 | 'Seeing'

On the cover: Yuriko Yamamoto

Find out more about the artist on page 29

Editorial: Simoné Walt, Kimberlin Brink

Contributing Writers: Vanessa Chan, Beli Ya Al, Danielle Van Meter, Lauren Weinhold

Artists: Yuriko Yamamoto, Marta Quaresma, Agnieszka Szubert

Contact us: teawithantigone@gmail.com

Facebook | Instagram | Medium | Newsletter | Support Antigone

Welcome to the fourth issue of Antigone

On Tuesday, the 4th of August, I was tapping through Instagram stories when I came across a video of a Middle Eastern city with a volcano-like column of smoke rising above it. Plumes rose into the perfectly blue sky. Then it seemed to almost cave in on itself as a second explosion tore from the smoke. And it was like that shock blasted right out of the screen, all the way out of Beirut, right into my living room, and into my body. That video haunted me for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t process the magnitude of what I had seen, so unlike anything I’d come across in my lifetime before, not even in movies.

The explosion in Beirut was one of many shocks emanating from my phone screen. From the US to Italy to South Africa and the very town I live in. I’ve been seeing the world through this rectangle for the past few months and it seems so perfectly usual at this point that it might sound glib to even point it out. Indeed, the moment you raise any questions on the topic it’s hard not to sound merely like a finger-wagging technophobe.

But I think it’s the job of writers to make unfamiliar (to make visible again) that which we have become so accustomed to. To make us see anew that which we’ve become blind to through familiarity. And before we get too used to things as they are now, before we leap to declaring something a “new normal” it may be worth asking why we are so ready to settle for that.

Because a “new” normal is essentially the “old” normal with slight adjustments. We are so keen to settle back into something familiar, even when that thing has been shown to be utterly broken. New normal is bailing out corporations and banks. New normal is sacrificing lives by lifting lockdown restrictions before it is safe to do so. There is nothing new or revolutionary or groundbreaking about any of this; we are bumbling along like we have been for years.

Do not settle for a new normal, not when real change is so close at hand.

How we see the world and how we see each other may have become rigidly bound to our screens. But perhaps we can take this opportunity to see our friends or family or coworkers in a whole new way. If we are travelling only virtually now, take this opportunity to radically change how you interact with the world. There is nothing normal about being able to almost reach through your screen into a whole different country, to make a new friend on the other side of the planet, to raise money for a cause with the click of a button. There is nothing normal about this and if we can just change the way we look at it, we might find it is the greatest gift.

All the best,Simoné