![]() Undoing long-term vulnerabilities will take even longer. Understanding what the current pandemic means and what its real impact is will also take years. This “ novel of voices”, as she calls it, captures precisely those discordant meanings, ongoing sense of irreparable loss and confusion. Indeed, her novel Chernobyl Prayer took ten years to complete. For Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, reflecting on writing in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, it soon became clear that “the book that I’m going to write will take years”. The future starts with listening to the discordant experiences of those most affected by the impact of the pandemic. In the meantime, artists, neighbourhood groups, mutual aid and solidarity groups forge their way through the crisis, start this slow labour of recovering, already pointing towards what alternative futures, in a small way, might look like.Īlexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. ![]() Yet waiting for these might mean waiting too long. How it will look depends on long-term community efforts and – even more so – on policy changes and political decisions. Good artistic works aim to recover these hidden narratives and voices, voices that need to be central to any long-term recovery processes. Rather, post-pandemic recovery has to work to address and repair these long-term structures of injustice, racism, and political, social and cultural marginalisation. No return to the pre-pandemic conditions is possible, nor should it be wished for. Yet, it is precisely this “normal” – the reality of fatal inequalities, racial violence, injustice, and disenfranchisement – that is the problem. In response to the profound suffering and disruption to all aspects of our lives, many yearn for some, even small, return to “normal life”. In short, the impact of the pandemic (and we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg) is contingent on pre-existing, long-term, and sustained vulnerability. It has cut a swath through the most vulnerable populations, the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions as well as the key workers who are keeping the cities, hospitals, and schools running. The pandemic is having a disproportionate impact on certain demographic and labour groups. What COVID-19 has revealed is ever-starker socioeconomic divides. The pandemic has not struck with the same force nor at the same time. This has been captured by poetry, and confirmed by research. Zadie Smith’s recently published Intimations, an essay collection of pandemic reflections, describes this in clear terms: “The misery is very precisely designed, and different for each person.” As the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 clearly demonstrates, we are all not in the same boat. Viewers, meanwhile, have criticised it as being in bad taste for trying “to bank on the current times and failing just about every step of the way”.įilms, TV series and books about disasters show, again and again, that there is no one way of experiencing any disaster. Other reviewers also saw the film as a “schlocky and opportunistic” production. In contrast, Canada’s Globe and Mail, cautioned viewers to “physically distance” themselves from Songbird, which it described as “crass and gimmicky”. One of the most generous reviews is from The Guardian, which described the film as “a fascinating historical document of how some creatives found their way around the rules during an impossible time for a struggling industry”. Hailed as the first feature film about the pandemic, released during the pandemic, Songbird has not received the warm welcome its producers might have hoped for. As one reviewer writes, the film combines “a Romeo & Juliet-lite love story with a sub-Contagion thriller”. If the reality of COVID-19 were not enough, you can now watch Songbird, a new blockbuster movie which pictures the world in 2024 trying to deal with the ravages of COVID-23, a new mutation of the coronavirus.
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