Twin Pandemics An autopsy of the current moment BY ISIUWA OMOIGUI
“ONCE AGAIN I REALIZED that, from inside these walls, life or death don’t count or matter, not even in large scale matters like this,” the woman wrote from prison in her letter to Mourning Our Losses (MOL). Endless columns of names descended on the television screen. Each unintelligible black scribble stretched out like a hand towards the ineffable things words can’t say. For how can a name capture a life? Behind the barbed wire and the thick walls and the cold steel bars, the woman sat watching, scanning for names of people who died of the coronavirus while incarcerated.
She found none. This did not surprise her. Incarcerated people, rendered invisible and leprous by the state in life, remained that way even in death. Crushed by mainstream media’s inability to even acknowledge the incarcerated dead and the government’s refusal to do so, she cried and let the darkness of her prison cell take over. As I write this, flat lines appear on monitors in hospital rooms. Somewhere and everywhere, a doctor is calling the time of death while families grieve. Rather than grappling with the nearly 250,000 deaths in America and mobilizing to prevent further harm, 19 25
