Khurpi
  • Home
  • Politics
  • Culture
  • Gender
  • Personal Features
Culture 0

Notes on lonliness and living through a pandemic

By Wajiha Mehdi · On November 17, 2020
Share on Facebook
Facebook
0Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Pin on Pinterest
Pinterest
0

Loneliness sits flat on my chest. Nine months into the pandemic, I have come to the conclusion that there is no depth in loneliness, no awakening or lessons to be learnt from silence.  My body bends forward in desperation grasping for in-person interaction and I am becoming acutely aware of how sound affects my body, the sound of Urdu and Farsi as waves moving across spatial realms, settling into every part of my body. After all, language is embodied like home. My mother sends a similar voice note each morning, “Salam Wajiha, kaisi ho, beta apni khairiyat se mutela karo, apna khayal rakhna, namaz parhti rehna, Imam-e-zamana aur panjitane paak ki zamanat mein diya.” Her voice creates home. I left home at seventeen and through this pandemic I have spent months questioning my move, what does it mean to live life with no roots, in a strange land.  

Every day, I speak with my Iranian friend. We are both aware of each other’s loneliness and our everyday conversations have developed a repetitive pattern to the extent that we know what the other person is thinking and going to say, we laugh at the same jokes day after day.  Everyday on his way back home from work, he asks me if I remember what central London looked like, he says it is quiet like a ghost city. I think about how performances of sounds create spaces. Specifically, I think a lot about the chants of “azaadi” (freedom) by Muslim women that were reverberating the entirety of India in December and January, oscillating through bodies and spaces to reclaim, reconstruct and reimagine belonging to the Indian nation.  Sounds lay out networks for how we listen. The narrative laid out by colonial government set the beginning for how postcolonial India set out to manage its Muslim population. Narratives around Muslim women have historically focused on silences and absences, thus, the surprise surrounding the “impossible” in the protests led by Muslim women during the anti-CAA protests in India suggests the Islamophobic ways in which Muslim women are placed out of spaces. The Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 brought forth a call for azaadi (freedom) from bodily-spatial violence embedded in the nation-state, reflecting the places of Muslim resistance led by Muslim women.

The response to this call for “azaadi” was anti-Muslim progrom in Delhi. Soon after, the advent of COVID-19 pandemic brought a new Islamophobic rhetoric in India. Indian Muslims were accused by leaders from ruling party for a campaign of spreading Covid-19 to the Hindu majority through “Corona terrorism” and “Coronajihad.”  Sounds construct networks of power, through connecting certain bodies and excluding others, the presentation of Muslim body as bearer of terror and virus- the coronajihadist- suggested that a personal Muslim pathology was at work. The use of the words such as coronaspitters, biojihad and corona terrorist invoked a rhetoric of sickness where, in the struggle between health and decay, the coronajihadist is a dangerous and decaying body.

As Indian Muslims were being blamed for spreading COVID-19 in India, there was violent manifestation of Anti-Asian racism related to COVID-19 across Canada (and globally) and months after, silence around Black Lives Matter in the predominantly white space I lived in. There is a visceral context to how we listen, speak or choose to stay silent, sound constructs political and social subjectivities and spaces of marginalization. Through these long ten months, I have felt simultaneously displaced and present across multiple geographies, I often think about the predominantly white space I lived in. My voice shrunk in that space, living day after day on a survival mode surrounded by whiteness. Since being once ordered quite aggressively by a white person to declare my respect towards their love for their settler-colonial nation, I have been thinking about the role of sonic power in disciplining of the speech of racialized Others’ in establishing abstract spaces like nation and borders, how expansive whiteness is and how loud and empty land acknowledgements engulf these stolen Indigenous lands.

Share on Facebook
Facebook
0Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Pin on Pinterest
Pinterest
0
Wajiha Mehdi

Wajiha Mehdi

Wajiha Mehdi is the Gender Editor at Khurpi. She is currently pursuing PhD in Social Justice at University of British Columbia on the prestigious Graduate Global Leadership Fellowship. She has pursued her MSc Development Studies at London South Bank University on a Commonwealth Shared Scholarship, MA in Human Rights from AMU and BA Communicative English, AMU. She was earlier elected as the only female Cabinet Member of AMU Students Union in 2011-2012. Apart from being a staunch feminist, she loves to write poetry. Contact her at wajiha@khurpi.info

You Might Also Like

  • Culture

    Notes on undoing academic elitism

  • Culture

    Why is Secret Superstar problematic and yet commendable?

  • Culture

    In Hope of a Body Positive World

Subscribe to Khurpi

Get Articles in your inbox, it's FREE

Recent Articles

  • Notes on lonliness and living through a pandemic
  • Notes on undoing academic elitism
  • Why is Secret Superstar problematic and yet commendable?
  • The Sexual Politics of Dupatta
  • More Embarrasment for Donald Trump
  • Home
  • About
  • Our Team
  • Write for us
  • Comments Policy

About Khurpi

At Khurpi, we say we dig deep into everything. We don’t believe in reading the surface but in deep analysis of what’s happening around us. We question at every step and focus on the solutions. Why politics is mired with cynicism today? Why ethnocultural identities prosper even in the age of globalisation? Why we continue to live in a gendered world where patriarchy is still very much the norm? Read more

Search the Site

Archives

  • November 2020
  • June 2019
  • December 2017
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014

Contributors

Sarwar Jahan Chowdhury
Surangama Guha

More

© 2014 Khurpi.com, Inc. All rights reserved.