In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. In February, she asked you to tell her about your “pandemic body” and how you go through time and its strangeness through the body. Selected extract.
The immigrant body and the pandemic body are fighting a duel. In the competition of suffering, the game is tight. The immigrant body triumphs first, it is experienced. It’s naive, almost touching: he becomes smug and mocks the disarray of the pandemic bodies brutally invited to his table. The harassing absence of loved bodies, missed rituals, birthdays on Zoom. Children who grow up too fast and too far from their relatives. But the sharing will stop there.
The immigrant body will keep the monopoly of homesickness that we sweep away to meet the permanent challenge of adaptation, this grueling cultural mediation that never lets up. Disillusions maintain its imperious character, even when the superhuman forces of the first times, those which propelled the immigrant body on the road and made it cut ties and roots, died out in resignation.
The immigrant body, especially if it has not known how to quickly surround itself with other immigrant bodies, is terribly alone. He feels like a ghost among ghosts, without being able to explain to other bodies what his solitude is made of, so much is it the product of lacks that are impossible to describe. Between immigrant bodies, it bursts by subtraction: one feels oneself to exist, seen, finally in relation, not that of the chatter of the alley or the school fence which never leads to an invitation, the one which starts at quarter turn, eager to emotional and cultural promiscuity. The collective imagination that we reactivate together, the fatigue of translation, the reminiscences of populous and sunny origins.
The immigrant body does not understand the grammar of native bodies. Even in a relationship with one of them, even after a decade, he is still groping. He feels himself floating, made invisible by looks he seeks in vain. He misses those of his family, tellers, judges, seducers, who envelop, weigh, even attack, but always validate his membership in society. Because the body, over there, is first of all social, for better or for worse.
The pandemic body and its panoply of chains cannot dislodge the immigrant body from the foreground. He occupies it obsessively. The mask is a derisory weapon, it almost harms the pandemic body in battle by allowing a more assumed look away from the gag. Adding a meter between bodies that above all cherish their freedom and avoid each other, big deal! At the library, which the immigrant body has frequented for so long, the staff still does not know his name, nor those of his children. Plexiglas has nothing to do with this deliberate amnesia. And in winter, confined or not, the bodies invariably disappear, in the houses or in the fabric. The adolescent pandemic body could not shoulder the sufferings of the immigrant body.
Then he settled in for the long term and gained muscle. Quarantine in the hotel deterred, deprived of mobility, immigration became exile, we no longer counted in months, but in years. We prayed that the deaths await us. We got exhausted following the waves on two continents. What does everyday life turn green if the childhood home remains red, or the inaccessible sky?
The mature pandemic body has caught up with the immigrant body. He scratched his wounds, isolated him again in his experience so hard to share. A fine player, the immigrant body yields this round to him: the war, it is he who will win it. The pandemic body doesn’t have much longer, it’s here for good.