Life in the age of Covid 19

“‘Home’ was one place, ‘work’ was someplace else. But under work-from-home, the two places melded into one. Where I once had the security of knowing I could simply close my eyes to the world outside, strangely, the world outside was seeping in. I had to manage the space in my home so that work happened in a certain area, and home happened everywhere else. One of the hardest psychological affects of coronavirus during this period (other than the lack of certainty, the unclear yet overwhelming presence of danger, the changing expectations of what a functioning society was going to look like, and the knowledge that things were going to get worse before they got better) was the compartmentalization of everyday life.”

“Not everyone had a safe childhood like me, or moved to a new city like me. And not everyone was impacted by this past year the same way that I was. But to me, home is a mixture of a lot of ideas and emotions and events that are difficult to attach to one location, because, strangely, they go wherever I go.

Following is a list adjectives that describes our collective sense of ‘Home’ – thank you Zac! I would like you all to please read that list slowly.

• • • The following are a list of themes discussed in my peers blog posts on the same topic:

• • • Unique Space
    • Land
    • Independence
    • Freedom
    • Joy and Happiness and Love and Pride
    • Memories
    • Hope, Future
    • Security, Care
    • Family
    • Community
    • Belonging
    • Making Connections
    • Shared Experience and History
    • Knowledge
    • Learning

Take your time and engage with how each description relates to your individual sense of home – or, not.

Now, I would like you to imagine what life might be like if you were ‘homeless’ …. . What if people speaking a strange language began to arrive and told you that you and all your family must move, that your home is not really yours, that you do not belong because —

You are not civilized — like us.

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If you have not read Magdalena’s story about Home – it is a beautiful story that deserves to be read in it’s entirety 🙂

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Listening with your Eyes (Reading Robinson)

“In his article “Godzilla vs Post-Colonial,” Thomas King slots Harry Robinson’s writings into a category he terms “interfusional:” a blending of oral and written literature within Native literature (186). In other words, Robinson is using an oral voice, informed by elements of oral literature, in a written medium. This effect relies heavily on syntax: the same syntax that tripped me up. King concludes that “…by forcing the reader to read aloud, Robinson’s prose, to a large extent, avoids [the loss of the voice of the storyteller], re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Perhaps this is what I found so challenging: I was being guided by Robinson’s prose to become the storyteller myself, for a story which I did not quite comprehend in a syntax that was not my own. I fell into the trap of becoming wrapped up in parsing the syntax, in attempting to follow the shifting pronouns from “he” to “they” and back again. I feared that, by leaning into Robinson’s syntax and thus imitating his speech patterns, I would be disrespecting his voice when, according to King, that may very well have been his intent.

A wonderful turn of words: “When reading silently, our brains frequently don’t take the time to examine each word, too busy cracking the code of the written language; as an example, consider this familiar internet meme. Listening to the story might let us take the time needed to better understand.”