Mapping Time: A Coronavirus Diary

By Khaddafina Mbabazi

The start of global lockdown (March) found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A graduate student, I was knee-deep in thesis work and could not appreciate the sentiments of those – expressed via Twitter – for whom time seemed to be playing a trick. Vanishing. But once the semester was over, and once I’d handed my students’ grades in, things started to change. My labours behind me, I began to have the sensation that I was a complete blank: that my mind was empty, the days – which often I couldn’t fully recall – were empty, and the only time I remembered I existed in a physical way was when I felt pain somewhere in my body. It felt like I was just an empty apartment of flesh.

I would only begin to understand what was happening –that time had disappeared from me, too –when one evening, a fed-up friend rang me and said these words: “There’s just no end in sight.” She was lamenting, but she had also unwittingly worked something out on my behalf, something I had been attempting to resolve: the problem with this time, what I’ve taken to calling Pandemic Time, is that it arouses the sense that we are living not just in something unknown, but in something without edges or borders. A world, to borrow from the Book of Common Prayer, “without end”.

Something to think about:

We contemporary humans are natural cartographers. Each day, around the world, we make maps of our daily lives using a variety of tools: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok. We have continued to do this – I imagine we’re doing more of it – throughout this crisis. But if one were to map this inchoate world – the vast and borderless world of Pandemic Time – what would one name it? Terra Incognita? As an idea this feels insufficient somehow – to me at least. But I think the impulse to borrow from ancient Roman cartography is a useful one. Because unlike we – modern people with the knowledge of so much of the world at our fingertips – these ancient mapmakers ran into the problem of unexplored lands more frequently and so developed a lexicon to denote them. There is another phrase that cartographers used on maps of the unknown: hic sunt leones. Here be lions (or: here be danger). In the early 16^th century, this idea underwent a mythical mutation when it was borrowed by European cartographers for the Hunt-Lenox Globe. There, on the southeast coast of Asia, one finds a different inscription: hic sunt dracones. Here be dragons.

As I write this – the dead are nearing 800,000. Of the living, over 19 million have contracted the virus. There are those who have recovered – 13 million of them– but scores of them, on online forums, mark their post-virus lives as terrains of damage, of suffering, and of psychological unease. We are many months in, with no vaccine, and no end in sight. And let’s not forget the myriad other singularities of 2020: the explosion in Beirut; the billion-locust plague destroying East African crops; another plague, both old and new – the plague of anti-Blackness; the 4,000 year old Canadian ice shelf that just melted into the Arctic; and the bushfires that destroyed 18 million hectares of Australian land, and a billion of its animals.

To brood over this – this incineration of life– is to see that here be dragons indeed. 

It is August now. And for the moment – perhaps by crossing time zones or swapping one clime for another (the wet and heavy heat of Virginia, for the more charitably cool Kampala)– time has returned to me. (Or maybe, if I may borrow from the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, I am once more aware of “the passage of (my) own private time.”)

Speaking of writers, I can’t help but also think of the Argentine Borges who, in 1941, wrote an essay about time (“Circular Time”). Writes Borges: “I tend to return eternally to the Eternal Return.” There’s a larger point to be gleaned here, and I’ll come to it later, but I’ve been thinking about Schulz and Borges because I’ve been reading (as well as thinking about) books. Earlier, I mentioned how we contemporary humans map our lives, map time, using social media. But our ancestors mapped their lifetimes with the tools of their time. I’m not thinking of history books, but of art and literature. To understand something of a Nigerian woman’s experience of the 20^th century, one could read history books, sure, but one could also read Buchi Emecheta (perhaps beginning with The Slave Girl, a novel set in Nigeria during the time of the Spanish Flu). Similarly, to fathom the ways in which apartheid deformed both its victims and its perpetrators, one would do well to go beyond the history books, and to step into the work of Nadine Gordimer. A year ago, reading Thomas Mofolo’s works for the first time, I wondered what they might tell us about the Basotho of that age. History is a map of time, but so is literature.

I wonder, then, what literature this modern pandemic will beget. More precisely: what fiction or poetry. Elizabethan England suffered its share of plagues and produced two writers who dealt differently with that reality. On the one hand, the playwright and poet Thomas Nashe, who in 1592 penned the poem “A Litany in Time of Plague”:

This is a poem that gazes directly at the plague and yields to it (“I am sick, I must die.”) On the other hand, there is William Shakespeare, whose work doesn’t yield to the reality of plague at all, and instead gazes away from it. (I bring Shakespeare up partly because much was made of Shakespeare in the early days of lockdown, and on his productivity during 16^th century quarantine. You remember the tweets – Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine. What are you doing, you lazy dunce? – as well as the inevitable backlash these tweets produced.)

So far, I’ve come across a smatter of pandemic poetry penned by writers from across Africa and the globe. Published in a literary journal based out of Kampala, the poems have provided me with comic relief more than anything else. I’m yet to read any of the pandemic fiction in this same journal, but I intend to. Just as I intend to read The New York Times Magazine’s Decameron Project, in which 29 authors – several prolific African ones among them – have authored stories “inspired by the moment”. I suspect most will take the Nashean route – penning worlds of pandemic horror – but I’m more curious to read those works that tread through the present terrain more lightly.

There is another reason why art and literature are at the forefront of my mind. In addition to travel, certain cultural artefacts helped to lift me out of the horrid emptiness of Pandemic Time. No surprise there. “We go to literature”, says Ben Okri, “for that which speaks to us in time and outside time.” The same can be said for other art forms. Presently, I’m in thrall to Middlemarch, the 19^th century beauty by the novelist George Eliot. An early passage reads: “Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very useful members of society under good feminine direction.” At a time when the world feels besieged by male populists (Tanzania, Brazil, Britain, the US, the list goes on) this sentiment feels apposite. But it is also simply funny. Like Middlemarch itself, it brings me joy. Something else: like many a spectator around the globe, I’ve gobbled up the television series ‘I May Destroy You’. A creation of British Ghanaian actress and writer Michaela Coel, it is a deep and complex consideration of sexual consent amongst millennials (though it is also more than this). What I admired most about it was its dispensing with this fidelity to moral purity that’s in vogue now and that’s unrealistic in daily, lived life, as well as deforming in art. If you find yourself stuck in Pandemic Time and trying to escape– I highly recommend these two major cultural artefacts.

Let me return, briefly and one last time, to Borges, as well as to the question of time. When Borges wrote “Circular Time” in 1941, two great plagues were marching forth: Nazism and The Second World War. In the essay, Borges opines that time is circular, that what has been will be again, and that this is a good thing. “In times of ascendancy,” he writes, “the conjecture that man’s existence is a constant, unvarying quantity can sadden or irritate us; in times of decline (such as the present), it holds out the hope that no ignominy, no calamity, no dictator, can impoverish us.” This is Borges in 1941, but it is also the author (or authors) of Ecclesiastes, thousands of years before Borges, and hundreds of years before Christ.

That there is, to quote my friend, “no end in sight” does not mean there is no end at all. That the dragon looms over us, still, is a fact not a fate. Time will disappear again. But we can be sure it will return.

Khaddafina Mbabazi is a writer and musician from Kampala whose fiction is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review. An MFA candidate at the University of Virginia, she is completing a short story collection titled History and Memory, and working on a novel.