Pandemic Reads: Books for Quarantine Season, Part 2
In a bar in Morgantown, WV, I took the picture above a couple of years ago at a July WVU Writers Workshop gathering. Back then, we could actually go to bars, eat and drink and groups. Now, the thought of doing something so irresponsible terrifies me. All I can think of doing now is staying home and reading books.
In a time when words like “epidemic” and “pandemic” proliferate everyone’s vocabulary, avid readers find themselves returning to epidemiological thrillers like Camus’ The Plague, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and even Laurie Garrett’s virology-based thriller The Coming Plague. Most readers, until now, have never faced an epidemic or pandemic, but certainly the mere mention of one recent epidemic still causes fear, questions, and political and social debates — AIDS. While many journalists, scientists, and politicians quickly drew correlations between the AIDS epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic shortly after implementing lockdowns and quarantines globally, many fell short of acknowledging that in today’s society, informative and educational conversations about AIDS, AIDS prevention, and living with AIDS as patient, family, or friend are still considered forbidden in many settings. However, Elena Schwolsky’s poignant, relevant, and emotional memoir reminds readers that viruses and epidemics — unlike people, societies, and drastic medical and political policies — do not discriminate, nor do those suffering from them warrant exclusion from family, society, and existence.
At its core, this book opens unexplored and overlooked aspects of Cuban culture — its family expectations and intimacies, its celebration of work and life as they intertwine, as well as its resilience in the face of far-reaching, crippling US policies — to readers with its deep portrayal of memorable, enigmatic, and diplomatic patients in Cuba’s once-mandatory AIDS sanatoriums. Schwolsky’s portrayals testify to the power of collaboration as her intriguing prose depicts working with patients and volunteers to create useful, dialogue-opening platforms and workshops that benefitted and informed not only Cuban society, but also the world, about a virus as confusing and bewildering as the US-imposed restrictions regarding the shipment and distribution of life-saving AIDS medicines in Cuba.
Via vivid description, readers progress through Havana’s crowded streets where drivers and cyclists speed on aging bicycles and aging cars, market places where acquiring even lightbulbs becomes a Herculean task, and sanatoriums that by government-design began as prison-like dormitories transformed by resident-design into loving, supportive, self-expressive communities. Inventar — a word that conveys the “acceptance of limitations, determination to keep going, and a seemingly endless ability to come up with creative solutions” (127) — becomes a mantra for readers and a means of existence for not only Cubans facing the 1996 economic crisis, but also those living in the sanatoriums as restrictions loosen and allow them to work and live on their own. Schwolsky and other volunteers like Hermes serve as inspirational figures for those advocating for social justice reforms in today’s escalating US socio-political climate and show that human frustration regarding systems delineated by the oppression of AIDS-sufferers like friki Tanya, gay Alejandro, and anti-war Vietnam veteran Clarence can be harnessed into the most powerful weapon with which one can arm themselves — education.
In conclusion, as the world and the US face political changes, policy reforms, and social attitude shifts regarding not only medical response to disease but also the systematic oppression of underrepresented and marginalized groups, books like this become necessary reading, and not just during a pandemic or a time of social questioning. This memoir bears witness to the strength and power of one woman who believed in her cause, her message, and her efforts to help others. Most of all, it serves as a memorial to those who lived with not only a misunderstood virus, but with the horrendous stigma surrounding not only it, but them. Every now and then, I encounter a memoir that completely alters my perception of my current situation. This time, that perception-altering experience came thanks to Elena Schwolsky’s Waking in Havana: A Memoir of AIDS and Healing in Cuba.
While I’m traveling a medical/science path, allow me to introduce Martha Silano’s poetry collection Gravity Assist. Gravity Assist opens with a section titled “Periapsis” (meaning “the point in the path of an orbiting body at which it is nearest to the body that it orbits”). It begins with the authoritative poem “Here I Am,” and during these times of socio-political questioning and stance-taking, this poem becomes the perfect identity-establishing anthem. Lines like “Here I am/ with the spoke before I thought/ with the sizzling sea” create a sense of humility and awe and the recognition of humankind’s futility. This first section then blends the narrator’s familial reflections and experiences with mathematical equations in poems like “Dear Absolute Certainty,” which defiantly humbles and places the concept of certainty into its place: “Here’s a domain just for you: math.com.” This section then ends with my favorite poem from the collection, “The Chamber of Silence” in which “Cosmonauts bereft of their Pushkin/ the Ukrainian folksongs” undergo a Major Tom-like awakening, Soviet-style and by the poem’s end “roll three times through waving wheat, land face first in a field never smelling as sweet.”
The second section of Gravity Assist, titled “Orbit Insertion,” tackle and fuse reflections about self-hood, environment, and domesticity. In the brilliant, flippantly toned “Dear Mr. Wordsworth,” the narrator stabs at traditionalism, not only in the literary world but also the domestic one: “Dear Mr. Wordsworth,/ It turns out my son had slippage this June-uary spring, neglected not only his teeth/ but the last four weeks of geography homework.” This section also waxes into an exploration of paleontology, and a discussion of present existence in terms of the past, in the overwhelming poem “The Trilobites:” “All that week I’d wanted to delve/ into the late Devonian, when order/ that had held on 270 million years/ began its certain demise.” “The Trilobites” transitions from acute, intricate observations about, well, trilobites, and segues into subdued personal reflections of suburban existence, familial interactions, and the futile recognition that mortality is inescapable: “They,/ who had not seen it coming; I, at any moment,/ caught in the same rush.” Similarly, in poems like “Nearly Every Songbird on Earth is Eating Plastic,” the environment takes center stage in what readers can interpret as metaphorical discussions about climate change and the consequences dealt to humanity because of consumer selfishness.
In Gravity Assist’s third section, “Escape Velocity,” the collection’s narrator poses a future filled with life on Mars, red peppers, and bumblebees. Again, the recognition of human futility appears in the poem “Because the Dead Never Vanish,” which poses that the dead appear as “sand in your shoes” and “In a river named Myakka” and “because a river is a meandering reminder.” However, despite that recognition, life and the pursuit of survival continue in poems like “Life on Mars,” where “Off-Earth children will gather for bedtime stories about the fiery skipper/ and the mourning cloak, a planet where sunsets were painted/ with a many-colored broom.” The personal and universal fortitude exuded in this collection becomes a much-needed message during our current times, when so many think that the only place left to go is to the end, but the collection’s final poem “Break-Away Effect” reminds readers of the importance of steadfastness: “Instead, I’m glued/ to the porthole, to the wispy beards of mountains, stray-hair rivers, lemony fields of wheat, light/ as if streaming from the stained glass of Pokrovsky/ Cathedral.”
Well, friends, I hope that you consider adding these books to your reading list. Stay safe. Read much.
— NY
