Letter from the editors: A global issue
Photography Nathan Nelson
All our lives have been reshaped by the virus, but we’re still inhabiting vastly different realities
By Allyssia Alleyne and Maddalena Vatti
When we first started discussing this issue, we were playing with this idea of the “new normal,” a turn of phrase that only months ago felt new and exciting. But honestly, discussing the pandemic and its effects in this context feels not only painfully trite, but completely pointless.
As restrictions have been tightened and slackened, and then tightened again, we’ve come to understand that the only “norm” is uncertainty. The plans you made on Friday could be made redundant in a week’s time, and a new government guideline enacted today could be tossed out in less time than that.
And from the news stories and our Instagram Stories, it’s obvious we’re all inhabiting vastly different realities, based on geography, based on politics, based on how much we think we can get away without kind of hating ourselves. We flick through photos of people’s holidays with equal parts jealousy and wonder; then scan the track-and-trace QR code as we enter a bar, and drink away the fear of getting that dreaded warning. Your friends and family back home are out at house parties you’d get fined for organising, while you’re booking flights to countries they aren’t even allowed to enter. “Normal” is personal and situational, always has been.
So this time, we decided to take a virtual trip to find out how the rest of the world was coping with this uneven transformation. We reached out to our friends and friends-of-friends globally and gathered stories about the many hopes and preoccupations these strange times have sparked, and how differently (and sometimes irreversibly) everyone’s lives have been changed.
For us, their stories offered a look into experiences that were at once foreign and relatable. Helen Randall, a producer who saw her year abroad in Australia derailed by the pandemic, sent a collage of her life under draconian (and effective) “state of disaster” measures in Melbourne, which saw her housebound for the better part of two months. In Los Angeles, performance artist and activist La Pachamami, whose two closest family members are severely at-risk, is witnessing firsthand the many ways that the US healthcare system fails its marginalised communities. Meanwhile, Hong Kong-based DJ Zahra Jamshed — who has put together a chilled playlist for us this month — has been struck by how short-lived lockdown restrictions on restaurants forced residents to confront the city’s glaring wealth inequality.
We were inspired by the email chain Beirut-based researcher Nur Turkmani instigated to connect 40 women from different parts of her life as they contended with the virus in their own corners of the world, as well as by our resident illustrator Noemi Ponzoni’s nostalgic impressions of her summer in Italy.
But the differences go beyond the geographic. Our experience in London, after all, is much different than that of writer Ellie Stewart. Though she lives just south of the river, her anxieties as a pregnant woman are markedly different than ours. “Am I being a paranoid, hormonal pregnant woman, or am I doing the best I can in an unprecedented situation to protect my unborn child, while also prioritising my need for social connection?” she asks. We couldn’t begin to imagine that struggle.
At the heart of each of this issue’s dispatches run currents of disruption, uncertainty and destabilisation. But there is also an optimism, a unifying belief that this shit can’t last forever, that maybe some good will come of it. As we all brace ourselves for the crash of our next waves, we’ll take all the optimism we can get.
In solidarity and isolation,
Allyssia + Maddalena