Pandemic reflections on a year of being still
Al JazeeraLast year, the pandemic put a stop to my itinerant life, perhaps for the better. While I had been darting around the planet thanks in large part to a passport provided by the United States, a homeland I despised, the less privileged had to contend with fanatically militarised borders – especially the US ones. These delineate territory controlled by rival gangs – yet another byproduct of American empire – and mean that an act as mundane as crossing the street can amount to a death sentence. As I write in my forthcoming book Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place, attempts to conduct tranquil strolls on the beach were interrupted by rapid-succession flashbacks to Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Vietnam, Oman, my mind “lurching in deranged fashion between countries, people, trajectories, selves”. It was like a “high-speed word association game in which none of the memories were associated beyond the fact that they all belonged to me, and I fretted over what sort of catastrophic miswiring neurologists would find were they to inspect the interior of my head”.
History of this topic
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