Reading In a Post-Pandemic World

Hello, Augurians! We’re back with an exciting guest post from our friends at the Hugo Award–winning Uncanny Magazine. Read on for Managing Editor Chimedum Ohaegbu’s thoughts on reading about and during a pandemic. And when you’re done, check out Uncanny’s Year 7 Kickstarter. They have a great lineup of solicited contributors, such as Aliette de Bodard, Martha Wells, Tochi Onyebuchi, Nisi Shawl and Neil Gaiman (to name a few of many). Let’s help them publish even more great SFF fiction, poetry and nonfiction!

Written by Chimedum Ohaegbu

Part of the title of this post is a lie. At time of writing, we’re far from post-COVID-19, even as reopening plans pile up and we brace for autumn. Post-, for now, is a pipe dream. What’s true is that I’m still reading—it’s been one way I’ve tried to make sense of all this.

Prior to COVID-19, I’d believed that the fight against a pandemic this extreme would be more, and less, straightforward. In speculative fiction that involves pandemics—zombie stories especially—the narrative is one of survival and, simultaneously, striving: the heroes spend these stories charging toward a panacea. Usually this cure-all is nigh-impossible for the heroes of the piece to obtain—and it’s only a specific, small group of protagonists who have the resources to pursue this goal—but they eventually make it, after much sacrifice. Upon finding/developing the vaccine, upon undoing the spell, upon ensuring that everyone has access to masks and spaces to socially distance and hand sanitizer, well: the credits roll, the acknowledgements page appears, and the audience is assured that all will once more be well in the world. That things can go back to normal. That we can attend concerts and conventions again.

Of course, ‘we’ is an excluding term (who’s we? and by extension, who’s they?) and safety is relative, designed to fluctuate based on racist, ableist, transphobic, classist boundaries of disposability. In Kelly Lagor’s “Cons, Crud, and Coronavirus”—one of my earliest lockdown reads—Lagor notes that “[e]ven if the WHO convinced every viroid of SARS-CoV-2 to shed its protein coat tomorrow and walk into the sea, remember that doesn’t mean the immunocompromised and the vulnerable within our communities will get to stop suddenly worrying about[…]what may become a not-so-simple case of con crud.” She’s right: normal wasn’t safe for many of us, particularly immunocompromised and otherwise marginalized people. It was the breeding ground, the starting line, the set of terms and conditions that gave rise to the pandemic in the first place, a reality not often reflected in disaster stories. ‘We’ can’t return to normal because all of ‘us’ weren’t protected there. And if the world can’t and shouldn’t go back to that, neither can the boxes the old world’s narratives were constrained by. 

One of these boxes is the tendency for (post-)apocalyptic literatures, at least the most institutionally hyped-up among them, to focus on the ruins of various Western nations, Panem or Airstrip One rising from the ashes of what was. In this way, the Western dystopian book, including pandemic literature, also moonlights as a mystery novel: whatever happened to the rest of the world? How is everyone else dealing with this? How can anyone deal with this? 

In another of my pandemic-era reads, Chinelo Onwualu’s A Love Song for Herkinal. as composed by Ashkernas amid the ruins of New Haven, an apocalypse for the West also causes seismic repercussions for Africa. The story’s focus is on Nigeria, whose response to the cataclysms involves governmental deterioration, the elevation of teachers, and “universal income that eradicated poverty. Healthcare, education, and housing [becoming] free”, among other ( no spoilers!) massive changes. It’s an Africanfuturism where the disaster becomes the basis upon which a new society must be built.

Of course, a pandemic or other wide-ranging catastrophe in and of itself doesn’t automatically result in a more equitable society: hegemony is slow-fading, and to tear down structures of oppression requires protests, mutual aid, education, revolution. But those with power hold onto it fiercely, as events pre-corona and during this year have shown: by casting themselves as the victim in a horror story, the state can turn critics into boogeymen. In pre- and post-disaster literature, outsiders are often divided into categories of who gets to be warned of danger, versus who is purposefully construed as danger(ous). This split frequently occurs along racialized lines—as seen with the amplification of anti-Asian racism this year, and with governments responding to Black Lives Matter protests with vicious violence but to (whiter) ‘anti-mask protests’ with encouragement. In another of the pieces I’ve read during this time, Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast, Brandon O’Brien writes, “I’m not allowed rage, am I? When beasts shout,/ townsfolk say that’s all a beast’s about. / It’s funny how nobody asks about the spell, /who uttered it, or why.[…]”, factuality in verse. Demonization of marginalized populations’ righteous anger —as a way to downplay the state’s complicity in disaster management—is a long-held strategy in pandemics and the media that spring from them.

I still think of “looking back” on the pandemic in the vague future. Hindsight’s 20/20, after all; the long-term ramifications of COVID-19 will become clearer later, my grasp on the whys and hows firmer. For now, reading and reassessing literatures published pre-pandemic, and during (both about and not about) this pandemic, has been an educational, hopeful, and empowering way to approach the situation.

CHIMEDUM OHAEGBU (she/her/hers) is a Hugo Award winning editor, the first Black woman to win in the semiprozine category. She’s undergoing her fifth and final year at UBC in pursuit of hummingbirds and a dual degree in English literature and creative writing. Her professional fiction debut was longlisted for the Nommo Award for African Science Fiction and Fantasy, and she also holds a Pushcart Prize nomination for poetry. She loves tisanes, insect facts but not insects, every single bird and magpies especially, and orchestral videogame music. Her fondness of bad puns has miraculously not prevented her work from being published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, This Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, The /tƐmz/ Review, and The Capilano Review, among others. Find her at www.chimedum.com or, more intermittently, at @chimedumohaegbu on Twitter.

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