In poetry, novel and article ... this is how Corona sneaked into writers' notebooks

For a long time before the spread of the Corona virus, the topic of the epidemic was a literary tradition broadcast in literary history, and a number of novelists and poets dealt with human stories ranging from familiarity and separation, and the feelings of those who lost their beloved by the epidemic, as well as those trapped in quarantine or afraid of infection or fleeing death.

Varied are the topics of literature, and because they are also not without what we do not like, poems, stories and novels often emerged from the womb of human suffering, and the outbreak of the Corona pandemic awakened memories of the world about ancient epidemics, and throughout human history, epidemics have struck ancient civilizations and societies since the first known outbreak in 430 BC during the Peloponnesian War (between the allies of Athens and the allies of Sparta).

Among the most famous poems on which the epidemic was the subject was the poem "Cholera" by the late Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika, which was considered the beginning of "free poetry", which made this poem more famous than the poem of the Egyptian poet Ali Al-Jarim, which he wrote when cholera struck his hometown "Rashid City" in Egypt in 1895 .

Poetry and rhymes awareness

Literature critics argue that the poetic purpose is one of the determinants of the way of writing. Poetry, which is intended to raise awareness, for example, must be clear and direct.

Poems have been written in most Arab countries to raise awareness and advice, and they were mostly in the spoken language, and it may come as eloquent as the poem of the Tunisian poet Abdel Aziz Hamami:

So, let us enter your house if you will

The world is pested

And the air of the street is breaking

Home is your first response

And your place in the room is clearer

Mansour does not see in "poetry and reason" the differentiation by type of method, and if we want to measure the quality of poetry or its value, it is not correct to take from direct or indirect a measure that separates quality from badness, but it only relies on poetry.

The closure of places of worship and the inability to answer the call emanating from the mosques constituted a strange and new situation for Muslims that shed tears and made many people.

The most difficult scene was the absence of a dish of the Kaaba from a ta'if or prayer.

But poets see things with their hearts, which made the Iraqi poet Omar Anaz see something other than what people see, and he says:

It was empty of visitors to the house, they said

I said: I see it crowded in the courtyard

Spacious, people left him kima

Heaven's angels circumnavigate it

Many stopped at this pandemic relying on it to respond to mankind to his humanity after modern life took him in a gasp and a movement devoid of feelings, and this is what the Sudanese poet Bahr El-Din Abdullah treated in a poem he says at the beginning:

This is a robot

It will kill the dream of viruses

He is defeated with love

Strains of covid

Bahr al-Din continues his poem, saying:

This human

The robot

He will disbelieve in masks

And believe

With the luminous melody

And serums for monotheism

This

robot

He will drink from the palm of God

And the love of God

A luminous hymn

After hymn

The book "The Next Plague"

The New York Times published an interview with the American journalist, Laurie Garrett, who predicted the Corona epidemic more than two decades ago, during which she expected that the pandemic would be prolonged, and that its economic repercussions would cause mass anger and political unrest.

Garrett - whom the Americans call "Cassandra," which Greek mythology says was given the ability to predict future events and judged that people would not believe her prophecies - in her book "The Next Plague" published in 1994, she warned of a pandemic like the current one that would sweep the world, and she kept repeating her warnings about it. In her lectures and writings over the past years.

In the interview with the journalist Frank Bruni, Garrett suggested that the new drug "Ramdisever" would not be effective in treating people with the Coronavirus, noting that the strongest claims about its effectiveness so far are that it reduces the recovery time of people with the epidemic.

The need for a treatment or a vaccine against the virus has become urgent, but Garrett does not see that that vaccine will be available during the next year, and you see that the duration of the Corona epidemic crisis will be long.

"I have told everyone that my horizon of vision for the event is about 36 months, and this is the best possibility," said Garrett. "I am absolutely sure that (the virus outbreak) will be in waves, and there will be no tsunami sweeping America and then back off at the same time."

A novel from South Africa

South African writer and journalist Lauren Buyukes (1976) recently released her novel After the Earth, which takes place in a time of pandemic.

In the fictional novel and over about 350 pages, a highly contagious virus killed about 4 billion men, and the human community became in disrepair with no treatment in sight, women lost opportunities to have children, and only a limited number of surviving males remained who demonstrated that they had healthy immunity or a resistant gene. Disease, so they became commodities for different agendas in a world dominated by women.

"After Earth" revolves around the post-pandemic world and belongs to the "corrupt city and bitter reality" literature (Al Jazeera)

In a mixture of psychological suspense, excitement and science fiction, the novel's reader follows 12-year-old Najat Miles with his mother, and the authorities seek to lock him in quarantine forever while human traffickers and a sect of nuns seek to obtain him.

In a desperate chase across a radically changed America, the mother will do whatever it takes to secure her son and deliver him to the homeland (South Africa).

The novelist explores the idea that the world of women will not necessarily be a nicer, more beautiful and safer place, but rather a "world of people, in which the inherent human capacity for good and evil is because women are capable of being power-hungry, violent, self-interested, abused, and evil like men, especially when We live in the same community, but maybe in different ways. "

Likewise, men are capable of being empathetic, and caregivers of care and friendship, the South African novelist adds in her interview published on The Conversation.

As with good fictional novels, Biocese is concerned with the reshaping of society that occurs in the wake of an imagined epidemic, including new forms of social organization, human interaction, and of course the perversion and problems that arise from it all.

"You cannot imagine how the world can change in 6 months ... you cannot," the writer says, through one of the novel's characters.

The novel allows us to see America through South African lenses, and is exposed to the differences between cities on the two continents, and the language of the novel is not without a clear South African accent.

Although it is entirely fictional, it included many scenes that seem inspired by reality, such as the lack of sanitizers, strict hand washing, anxiety that no treatment will ever be found, conspiracy theories, the collapse of financial markets, the overcrowding of hospitals, and other scenes that are almost the headlines of today's newspapers.