We know how often the vocabulary of medicine has been hi-jacked to describe military violence (‘surgical strikes’ and the rest) – if you are unfamiliar with the trope, I recommend Colleen Bell’s two essays, ‘Hybrid warfare and its metaphors’, Humanity 3 (2) (2012) 225-247, and ‘War and the allegory of medical intervention’, International Political Sociology 6 (3) (2012) 325-8 – and, for that matter, the reverse: see Mark Harrison‘s classic essay, ‘The medicalization of war – the militarization of medicine’, Social History of Medicine 9 (2) (1996) 267–276.

The most obvious example of the latter is Trump’s grotesque self-inflation as a ‘war-time president‘ defeating the ‘Chinese virus’ (the racialization of epidemic disease has a long history too: think of European panic over the ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Indian cholera’ in the nineteenth century).  Another example, grotesque for entirely other reasons – which have to do with the mendacious incompetence of the US feral government – are descriptions of scenes in hospitals in New York City as war-zones where front-line doctors and nurses desperately struggle to treat and care for patients with Covid-19 while fighting for their own lives.  (For brief but insightful commentaries on these issues, on the performative work done by these metaphors, see Yasmeen Serhan at The Atlantic here and Eric Levenson at CNN here).

None of this is confined to the United States, I realise, and the questions that swirl through these metaphors (through which the virus becomes both a biopolitical and a social agent, infecting not only bodies and populations but also our imaginative geographies) reappear in still starker form once we think – in obdurately non-metaphorical terms – about the likely course of Covid-19 in war zones like Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Yemen where hospitals and clinics have been deliberately and systematically targeted, doctors and nurses killed, and the lives of desperately vulnerable populations inside and outside refugee camps made even more precarious (I’ll try to address this in detail in a later post, but see here and here).

All this is on my mind, a jumbled series of thoughts, impressions and emotions, as I sit at home – privileged and relatively safe – doing my best to practice physical distancing, and read this imaginative call for contributions from Warscapes.

We find ourselves in a truly challenging moment as this coronavirus pandemic becomes a long and difficult daily reality. Not only are our individual lives feeling severely compromised but the massive structural shifts are beyond despairing — the shocking death toll, the triumph of surveillance structures, the displacements, the police brutality, curfews, imminent starvation, mass unemployment…the list is long. We know that many of you have survived war, reported on war or lived through intensive periods of violence, scarcity and uncertainty. Perhaps you find yourself working through tangled memories of all kinds of warscapes. Perhaps some of you have no luxury of memory and have been thrown into the pandemic as doctors, social workers, aid workers, teachers, activists. Perhaps some of you have seen this as a welcome respite from a deeply pressured life and are enjoying time with family. Perhaps some are in an intellectual overdrive as our fight against inept governments and greedy capitalist systems intensifies. And perhaps some of you are quite ill and we wish you love and speedy healing. Whatever mood or situation you find yourself in, we are somehow all in this together processing our new reality, wittingly or unwittingly.

Unsurprisingly, there is an uptick in war rhetoric during this pandemic and since this is an online space dedicated to reflecting on the world through the “lens of war” we are launching a Warscapes video segment tentatively titled “Open Call: The Corona Notebooks.” If you are willing and able, we would love it if you could record a 2-3 minute video of yourself thinking about this pandemic, maybe accessing a previous memory, maybe reporting on an injustice, maybe narrating a sweet fragment from your daily life, maybe recounting a second chance that this pandemic gave you, maybe telling us about a loved one you reconnected with, maybe you’ve seen a movie or read a book that was powerful, maybe telling us about having the illness. The tone, the tale, the genre and the language is yours to choose. There is an overwhelming amount of news and information but we will together weave an emotionally vibrant and artistic tapestry.

We will simultaneously transcribe these and start publishing them online as well. And when/if/after this is all over, we can publish all the entries and either give them away as free chapbooks or see if it can go towards a relief effort. For those that are available and happy to do facebook/instagram live events, we will happily make this an event with audience interaction and allow for discussions centering around your piece.

Simple rules:

1. WIDESCREEN recording — Flip your phone to widescreen. Do NOT shoot in vertical.

2. CLEAR SOUND — Make sure the sound is clear, our world has been quiet so this should be easy.

3. PLAN IN ADVANCE — While informal, casual and intimate is great, it would be better write your piece down, work through it before recording, experiment with form, play with the visual. We would prefer to keep editing to the minimal.

4. TWO MINUTES MINIMUM — your entry should be at least 2 minutes long, no stipulations for maximum length.

5. Send videos to bhakti [dot]shringarpure[at]gmail [dot]com

If you too are sitting at home, weary of yet another Zoom meeting, and wondering what (else) you might do, then perhaps you might like to give this a try…