5 minutes

The Corona epidemic and representations of the disease in literature

Dr..

Kamal Abdul Malik

06 May 2022

We know the affairs of our bodies, so we live within them, and wherever these bodies are located, we are found, and when they suffer, we suffer, and when they become strong, we become strong, and wherever they reside, the place of their residence becomes the same as the place of our residence.

In this sense, it can be said that our real address is our body, and not the address of the house we live in or the box that carries our postal number.

Doctors can diagnose disease, not suffering;

They can tell us something about the disease and the treatment, but only the accounts provided by the sufferers can represent the feeling of illness and the person's day-to-day experience of pain.

We can read many accounts of disease and human suffering in books ranging from “Diary of the Year of the Plague”, by the English writer Daniel Defoe (1722), through which he documented the plague that swept London in 1665, and “The Passion of Young Warter” for Goethe, and “The Plague.” Albert Camus (1947), “Sickness as Metaphor” by Susan Sontag (1978), “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985), “Blindness” by Portuguese José Saramago (1995), and “The Year of the Flood” by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (2009), and the novel “Love in the Time of Corona” by the Lebanese writer and media personality, Estefani Aweni (2020).

We can mention the poem “Cholera” by the Iraqi poet Nazik Al-Malaika (1947), which chronicled the spread of the cholera epidemic at the time, and her passionate emotion was narrowed by the limitations of the traditional poem;

This made her organize her poem in a new template that was later called: “Free Poetry.”

Now that more than two years have passed since the Corona epidemic and the restrictions it imposed on our lives as human societies, we ask: What has this epidemic done to us?

How has it changed our world, our concepts, and our relationships with those we live among?

Before this pandemic, we were talking about the need to be neighbors and cooperate as human beings, to be together, closer to each other.

Closeness, rapprochement, and rapprochement were what we needed to achieve, and living, coexistence and coexistence was what we aspired to establish, and acceptance, acceptance, interview and all the derivatives of these words between what we were calling each other to do.

Now the distance has become our goal, and between our slogan, and the societal advice for us are: social distancing, and physical distancing, indoors and outdoors, in schools and hospitals, in elevators and landing strips, and in queues for PCR tests and queues in supermarkets.

In order to understand this confusion caused by this epidemic in the logical arrangement of causes and effects, I suggest that we recall a metaphor in literary terms called metalepsis, which is when one places the effect before the cause, the present before the past, and contemporary events before the precursors.

We find in some popular Arabic songs that love is a disease that we must suffer, and pain must continue to suffer;

Should we not call the woman we love “my lover” or “my tormentor” and consider one to be synonymous with the other?

Do we not call the pleasure of listening to a beautiful melody “tarab”, which is a lightness and tremor that stirs the soul to joy, sadness or relief?

Isn’t the mother in our country happy with her newborn and expressing his “preciousness” by saying: “Dhana is expensive”?

Isn't it strange that the source of happiness here coincides with the source of fatigue and misery (dani yani, sane, sane and squalor)?

And we have disease and medicine as being in folk songs;

This reminds me of the Greek word pharmakon, which means poison and also means the antidote (here we must refer to the writings of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida on this paradox, and how it raises the problem of our interpretation of Socrates’s suicide by poison. Perhaps the saying was misleading on us while we were reading the news.

There is no doubt that the “Corona” epidemic has turned daily life upside down, and made humanity rise up in the face of it and eliminate it, and it was stimulated by the instinct of love of survival and preservation of the species. Material for reading and meditation.

* Visiting scholar at Harvard University

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