LITERATURE AND ART (ALWAYS) FIGHT BACK
“Will poetry go viral? / Will her disease infect us? /
Will it help to create antibodies against indifference? /
Will the poems be the only safe spaces where we can meet?”
—Julia Álvarez in How Will the Pandemic Affect Poetry?
No. It is not an apology for disaster. But the truth is that when natural catastrophes occur, wars, pandemics, art flourishes, expands, finds new nooks through which to infiltrate the tissues of life and respiration. It is the urgency to explain ourselves, to protest, to follow the crowd forward. From apocalyptic books and works of art heralding an end around the corner and all sorts of alarmist speculation, to those praising the benefits of a new and positive global realignment, the arts, especially those that require or can be arranged with with minimal face-to-face interaction, are experiencing an exceptional production moment. It has been this way since the origins of memory. Tragedies, natural or human, are traumatic scenarios that force us to seek answers or entertain ourselves as we enter a new and unknown normality. For everyone it is a matter of individual and collective survival.
The arts have been not only a way to record these periods of history but also to recreate them, to reimagine the dynamics of society, the ways of continuing to exist and of perceiving and considering the future. Thus the biblical texts of catastrophes such as the flood, the plagues of Egypt or the horse of death that drags with it the sword of hunger and plague are part of the construction of the imaginary before an ever fragile existence. The History of the Peloponnesian War, from Thucydides, from the beginning of the 5th century BC, where it narrates the so-called “Plague of Athens”, would become the text that models the narratives of the epidemics of the following centuries. In the European Middle Ages, stories and art arising from the bubonic plague, such as Boccaccio's The Decameron published in the fourteenth century, and Brueghel the Elder's painting The Triumph of Death, from the early sixteenth century, They enter that hemisphere that redeems tragedy and transforms it into an aesthetic experience. The Third Relation, one of the annals written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Mexican indigenous historian Domingo Chimalpahin, which relates an epidemic, possibly of diphtheria, which occurred a few decades before the arrival of the Spanish. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas and other texts of his time from which we know that after all, it was the conquerors who brought the plagues that infested the continent, such as smallpox, measles, and typhus. In the eighteenth century A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe, which narrates the plague of London in 1665. Already in the twentieth century, The Plague, by Camus, a novel that these days is being revisited by curious critics and readers , some of whom find that the text has lost much of the force it had at the time. Or in this short mention of texts, the tragically beautiful Ensayo de la ceguera, by Saramago.
In our days, in the midst of one of the worst pandemics of modern times, creative expressions are present above all in the print media (books, newspapers, magazines) or audiovisual media (television, cinema, internet) and their presence is, in many cases, clairvoyant and pointing to what the world can be in our immediate future. Of course, all this marvelous production has nothing to do, fortunately for art, with the drama of the coronavirus, but also with even more devastating and damaging pandemics in the medium and long term, such as the resurgence of nationalisms and fascisms that threaten democracies, always vulnerable and never entirely established. Or an art that worries about other urgent crises such as the environment, immigration or the social justice movements, all of them intimately interconnected. There is also, as always, an escapist art, or an art for art's sake, or an art that happily withdraws from the present. And this is also a necessary art, because art does not necessarily have to be an instrument for other purposes. The primary objective of art is its very existence as a point of convergence with our humanity.
From the extensive list of productions that bring us closer to the present day, I would like to mention the essay The Monster at Our Door, by the sociologist and activist Mike Davis, a re-updating of a text he wrote in 2005, which links the emergence of pests such as the coronavirus with the environmental problems and the handling of the crisis by corrupt governments. I also recommend the book No Human is Illegal, by immigration lawyer J. J. Mulligan Sepúlveda, who explores the drama experienced by immigrants in detention centers on the United States-Mexico border. And the poem book Together In a Sudden Strangeness with multiple voices of poets from the United States facing the common experience of the pandemic. Among the many art museums, I'd like to suggest a look at the Museum of Latin American Art (molaa.org) in Long Beach, Calif., and browse their virtual exhibits, especially “OaxaCalifornia: Through the Experience of the Duo Tlacolulokos”. And the museum La Plaza de Cultura y Artes (lapca.org), which offers virtual exhibitions and a continuous program of live broadcast activities. The world becomes recursive in the face of crises. And art, as it has been through the ages, is one of its most dynamic and lasting expressions, one of the spaces from which life continues to emerge.
