Through the COVID-19 looking glass: Resisting always already known injustice and shaping a ‘new normal’

The COVID-19 looking glass

Initial reporting in mainstream media all over the world would have us believe that ‘no-one really saw it coming’, and close to 9 months after the World Health Organization declared the 2019 novel coronavirus a global pandemic, there is still a sense that no-one could have predicted what we have all been witnessing. What we are witnessing and experiencing has been consistently described as unprecedented – as if the world has travelled into or is viewing itself through a COVID-19 looking glass in which – similar to Alice’s looking glass ⁵ – everything is upside down and inside out.

That is not quite accurate, however. Some scientists and the science journalists who followed their work did in fact ‘see it coming’, decades ago. Scientists sounded many an alarm, and science journalists wrote articles and books that went into considerable detail about what would happen in the event of just the kind of global viral pandemic that COVID-19 has turned out to be (see, for example, Marantz Henig, 1994). Predictably, such efforts – including the ones that became best sellers – did not garner enough attention and were not taken seriously enough to warrant the kinds of policy responses that could have better prepared us for what we are living through now. In an article published in the National Geographic a week or two after most countries had entered into the first lockdowns, Marantz Henig noted that at the time she was writing about potential global epidemics (late 1980s, early 1990s), the consensus among field virologists was that it would take ‘the death of one white person’ (emphasis added) to make Western countries sit up and pay attention.

And there we have it in six short words – six short words that frame the COVID-19 looking glass as one that amplifies all that we always already knew about how power works to create, uphold and tighten structural inequalities in this world. The COVID-19 looking glass does not show us a world turned upside down because of the effects of a global pandemic; it shows us more starkly than ever how unequal our world is, has always been.

The enabling and sustaining conditions for all that we have witnessed all year in all regions were always already in place and fully operational ⁷ long before COVID-19 became part of our daily realities. Or, as Ruha Benjamin put it in an ‘initial set of provocations’ she shared in early Spring 2020, ‘the virus is not simply a biological entity, but a biopolitical reality which travels along well-worn patterns of inequity’.

‘We try these things . . .’

As the spread of the virus accelerated across Western Europe and numbers of deaths increased exponentially during March and early April, medical and scientific experts dominated television and online news and current affairs programmes. During a discussion on a French channel about the use of existing BCG vaccinations to protect people from COVID-19, one of the speakers – the head of intensive care at a Paris hospital – stated,

If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation? In fact, a bit like how it is done for some studies on AIDS, or among prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves!

There was swift condemnation of these remarks across online social media platforms, which were reported by online media in various countries in Africa (including Ghana, Morocco and Kenya) as well as by the BBC in the United Kingdom and news outlets in France. The French TV channel removed the footage containing the doctor’s remarks, and the doctor issued an apology via social media, explaining that he had ‘clumsily’ been trying to signal that African countries should not be left out of trials that were to be launched in countries in Europe and in Australia. ⁸

To many, however, the remarks were neither shocking nor surprising. The sentiments expressed with such nonchalance by the doctor are nothing new; just the COVID-19-iteration of the ‘we do what we like’ attitude former coloniser European countries have always already had towards countries in Africa and towards the bodies of African people. In the doctor’s words were echoes of the ‘well-worn patterns’ – retraced anew in response to a global pandemic – of exploitation, violence and complete disregard for African lives that characterised European colonisation of the African continent. The well-worn pattern here is one in which African bodies – specifically African women’s bodies – are identified by European men as legitimate objects for experimentation.

We know this pattern well.

We can trace it back to the testing of anti-AIDS drugs on sex workers in African countries in the early 2000s. ⁹ Further back to African women’s bodies and genitalia being put on display in European countries in the late 1800s and cut from their bodies after their death for the purposes of ‘research’ (as discussed below). Further back still to the rape and forced breeding of African women captured during the transatlantic slave trade (Micheletti et al., 2020). ¹⁰

But even a well-worn pattern can be undone: slowly stitch by stitch or with a sudden yank that tears it asunder. African women – on the continent and in the diaspora – have long shown that there are many, many ways to challenge and resist power.

Drawing on North American Indigenous conceptualisations and praxis of ‘coming-into-being’, Gail Lewis has posited that ‘presencing’ contests and ‘has the potential to detoxify the effects of colonial discourse (historical and contemporary) in which Indigenous [and also Black/African] peoples are rendered invisible and/or insensible’ (Lewis, 2017: 4). Lewis suggests a couple of requirements that must be met in order for Black/African women to be fully present. One of these is ‘development of our courage to acknowledge the harm done her, historically and in the here and now, by utilising the resources we have in the archive in the interests of practising presencing’ (Lewis, 2017: 8). ¹¹

The online responses pointing to, and locating the French doctor’s words within well-worn patterns of objectification, exploitation and abuse of African/African women’s bodies felt like a slow unpicking of the pattern. It took a powerful form of presencing of African womanhood to show how a well-worn pattern can be torn apart.

As the lockdowns forced so many to remain in their own countries and in their homes, hundreds of events moved online, including the 2020 Ake Arts and Book Festival, which took place on 23–25 October 2020. South African poet, author, actress and producer Lebogang Mashile’s play ‘Venus Vs Modernity’ reached a global audience on the second day of the 3-day festival, some 5 months after the doctor’s off-the-cuff remarks.

Venus Vs Modernity tells the story of Saartjie Baartman, an enslaved South African woman – nicknamed ‘Hottentot Venus’ – who was included in freakshows and displayed in human zoos in England and in France between 1810 and 1815. After her death at the age of 26 in 1815, Baartman’s body was dissected and displayed in jars at the Musée de L’homme in Paris for some 150 years. Her remains were not returned to South Africa and buried in her ancestral home until 2002, after an intervention by President Nelson Mandela.

It was serendipitous – or perhaps not – that the French doctor’s comments about dispensable African women’s bodies could be so powerfully pushed back by the kind of presencing of the same bodies that Mashile’s play offers. In Lewis’ terms, the play both contests and detoxifies the harmful effects of historical and contemporary colonial discourse as it explores themes of history, colonialism, sex work, romance, fame, religion and body image through spoken word and music. The play offered some welcome reprieve as a key moment of African women resisting the always already known power structures that view and would treat their bodies as dispensable objects and which we also see so clearly through the COVID-19 looking glass.

Tools for shaping a #NewNormal

In an essay published at the beginning of April, Arundhati Roy suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic ‘is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’. Humans, she says, can choose to travel through the portal ‘dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us’, or we can leave all of that behind to emerge on the other side of the portal ‘ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it’.

Right now, perhaps more than ever, the work done by feminists – wherever they may be located in the world – represents a lifeline, a critical tool for those who – catalysed by the injustices brought into sharp relief by the effects of the pandemic – want to both imagine and fight for another world and work to shape a ‘new normal’.

We have always needed deeply feminist work in all of its forms – academic, activist, creative – that is emancipatory, political and rooted in the differentiated realities of people of all genders and none. This need persists, and fulfilling it is critical as the mammoth task of building a ‘new normal’ of justice and freedom gets underway. To quote poet Vanessa Kisuule (2017),

we are indispensable

walking pillars of defiance . . .