When we studied periods of great global turmoil in history class, it was often with a comforting sense of closure. The rise of virulent nationalism and fascists in Europe nearly a hundred years ago was nearly always described in context to their seemingly inevitable defeat at the end of the Second World War. Neat, tidy little package with a battered but beautiful bow.
One of the consequences of learning history this way is that we often see it in terms of endings rather than beginnings, which are often murkier and less linear than historians like them to be. When they were alive, I’d ask my grandparents questions about life in the 1930s and ‘40s.
The Coronavirus lockdown has been compared to popular fictional versions of the apocalypse
What was it like before TV? Did everyone use gramophones? Did you actually see German planes whizzing over Chitral as they did in movies? What do you mean people didn’t have indoor toilets? What are telegrams anyway? When my Nani told me that she and her family left Kashmir for Lahore during Partition, she kept emphasizing how temporary the move felt at the time. How they never imagined they would never be back, how it all happened so quickly. Hearing this as a child 50 years after Partition, force-fed reams of narrative fiction masquerading as history, I didn’t understand how they couldn’t see what history books told me so clearly would happen.
World wars, partitions, revolutions, crumbling empires – these things were the vestiges of an older, crueler world. Their world. They had no place in my internet-connected, TV-saturated world that we were told was thriving.
Surely they must have seen first-hand as giant events were unfolding? After all, world wars, partitions, revolutions, crumbling empires, these things were the vestiges of an older, crueler world. Their world. They had no place in my internet-connected, TV-saturated world that we were told was thriving.
Coming of age in the new millennium meant confronting these and many other fictions. When seismic events occur, I learned, they do not come with a warning label putting them in chronological context. They exist as any other contemporary event does – as a matter of fact rather than a turn in destiny. People never know how long war or global crises will last, or even what effect they will have (although many people make a living pretending otherwise). People who have lived through extraordinary times do what everyone else does: they get up every day and survive. Again and again.
We both know this. For the last year, we have been surviving a day at a time. The pandemic is perhaps the first time that the whole world is consciously aware of itself living through a historical event, mostly because it’s been rather difficult to pretend otherwise. Like our grandparents, we do not know when it will end, nor what life will look like if it does. What we do know is what our lives look like today, and hope for a better tomorrow.
Life is terrifying. Much of the last several years — decades even— have felt like planning a party while ignoring the series of increasingly violent explosions creeping over the horizon
Life is terrifying. Much of the last several years — decades even— have felt like planning a party while ignoring the series of increasingly violent explosions creeping over the horizon. Now the explosions are bigger still, joined by an existential biological threat. It has shone a harsh light on the more insidious darkness of humanity that had been uselessly poisoning our lives all the while: the rise of fascism around the world, the long shadow of damage inflicted by shortsighted populist leaders, the blatantly consistent hypocrisy of the Western world powers, and above all the shameless way white supremacy has shrugged off its hood and walked proudly into the open, daring the world to look at it, let alone fight it. It feels like historical boiling point.
Pope Francis prays in an empty St. Peter's Square during the pandemic
And while I now get how my grandparents spoke of their lives during the world wars, or my parents lives during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and ‘70s, I have a suspicion that the events of this past year or twenty are bigger than all of them combined. What happens now will affect us in real time, all of us. They involve a rewriting of very basic assumptions held throughout several previous generations, and that kind of conflict doesn’t resolve itself overnight. Not even over a decade. And while we may know these are difficult times, it is also just the beginning of a much larger war.
