“Recently, a new friend kept scrunching up her nose when I said my family moved from California to Detroit. This happens all the time. But in this moment it hit me that one of the things that makes no sense when people ask “WHY DETROIT?” with all of their death showing is this presumption that we can choose our homes.”

I stumbled on Borealis around this time last year and was so excited to see Aisha Sabatini Sloan had a new collection out. This did not disappoint. I’m not a writer, but pieces on craft always grip me and I loved not only the reflections on home but also hearing about the writing community and epiphanies some residencies can bring.

The way the COVID-19 pandemic was discussed and analyzed was especially validating and cathartic.

“The film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, begins with a little black girl gazing up into the face of a white man wearing a hazmat suit. A street preacher standing on a small box asks: “Why do they have on these suits and we don’t?” He refers to the hazmat men as “George Jetson rejects.” It feels wild to watch the film right now, as governors begin to take their states out of lockdown knowing that black and brown residents will continue to die at unprecedented rates, taking a calculated risk that will look, from the vantage point of history, a lot like genocide. The film’s street preacher sounds obscenely prophetic. “You can’t Google what’s going on right now,” he shouts. “They got plans for us.’”

I read the ebook earlier in the year and still hope to get a physical copy, but it is amazing how the format (especially of poetry) can elicit a different response in me. This read, I stopped and wrote and highlighted completely different poems than I did on the first read. Of course, the world continues to change as well.

Nadia,   I'll 
name her 
Nadia.   I'll

 the   card

 deck

 world, 
 God's 
house 
begins to 
burn

“… the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.”

It took me a long time to get a grip on this book, but I flew through the last half of it. A lyrical story of migration and travel, physically and metaphysically, through space and through time. I really appreciated how Hamid was able to show the perspectives of both the main refugee couple and those they end up traveling with as well as the people living in the places they land without the story becoming convoluted or too bogged down in individual politics. While some of the outcomes feel too utopian for our time (in one example, a western government gives shelter and jobs to refugees for building their own permanent housing in a former green space) it mostly felt hopeful rather than absurd. 

The crisis and response was easily connected to many of the issues right now, from COVID-19 to climate catastrophes and easily to war and revolutions. We should all be building community to create more resilient safe places.

“…and Saeed said, "It feels natural to have you here." 

She laughed. "Yes. Like a cave.’”

The writing was so vivid, a powerful ode to Chilean queer communities. I also really appreciate the context and process the introductions gave. 

This book was beautiful in ways I didn’t expect. The characters grabbed me and it had the perfect balance of politics and action. I wish I took more time with it because I miss it already!

why so much incest, Ursula 

maybe I’ll give a real review after my Bookclub, not processing this well at the moment! 

“When you are as sick as I am, you have to make some very tough choices. I had to let it all go. Ironically, people may think you’re giving up, when in fact you are simply giving in to the reality of your new life.”

This was an interesting book that I originally bought for a friend who was studying to become a doctor. Their medical school, like so many, ignored the empathy and patience doctors need to actually connect with and help their patients, and this sounded like a great book to start to bridge that chasm. Especially because Bernhard has afflictions that are still too often dismissed and ignored, such as ME/CFS, I wanted my friend to hear about the devastating impacts of a doctor refusing to believe a patient.

I gifted this book a year before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and borrowed it now that many more people are dealing with Post-Viral Syndrome/ME-CFS/and other complications or Long COVID from viral infection. This is your reminder that if you think you are too healthy to be greatly impacted by a COVID-19 infection, you are gambling with uncertain odds. Bernhard was also healthy and energetic when she contracted a virus in 2001 that left her sick for years, including bedbound, and it could also happen to you. Even if it doesn't happen to you, if you are not wearing a high-quality well-sealing mask in public, you could be bestowing this fate and worse upon those in your community as much of COVID-19 transmission takes place without or days before any symptoms appear. If you don't have the funds to buy yourself FFP2/N95 masks, go to maskbloc.org and reach out to the group closest to you for free PPE.

Some of the Buddhist practices outlined in this book have become helpful to me, I especially think about the Broken Glass Practice often. “(The Buddha) saw the broken glass within the unbroken one. Whenever you use this glass, you should reflect that it's already broken. Whenever its time is up, it will break. Use the glass, look after it, until the day when it slips out of your hand and shatters. No problem. Why not? Because you saw its brokenness before it broke!” Bernhard describes how she used this practice when anything went differently when planned in her life - when the power went out or the landline was cut, and grew to use this practice when activities that used to bring her joy and give her life meaning suddenly were impossible or made her condition worse. I believe everyone should use this practice in fighting ableism, internal and external. As Imani Barbarin (crutches_and_spice) has said, "The only thing that separates me from a nondisabled person is luck and time. Every single barrier, every single stereotype that nondisabled people reinforce when they’re nondisabled will exist when they’re disabled. Like I said before, it’s not a binary. So you cannot think of these things as things that don’t affect you. If you could tell me what will happen to you tomorrow, I will tell you ableism does not affect you. But you can’t. So work on it now." You can look at a glass and see that one day it will break, and on the day you drop it and it shatters, you can feel peace instead of sadness and anger because you already saw the glass broken. You can live in a nondisabled body and have the luck to age into disability as everyone lucky enough to grow old inevitably will, or you could contract a disabling virus or be in a car accident or experience any number of things to make you disabled while relatively young. If you work on fighting ableism today, your disabled future will be easier. 

One thing I did question about this book was that most of the quotes that start each chapter or from teacher Bernhard learned from seemed to be white and most of the Asian Buddhists she quotes were from older or ancient writers, one exception being Thich Nhat Hahn. I am not part of or familiar with the Buddhist community in the western United States, so I don't know if this is an accurate reflection of that community, but it did feel strange to see so many white voices discussing an Asian tradition. To be fair, I noticed this a few chapters in and only kept a mental tally for a few chapters after that, so my perception could be wrong.

Despite seeing so much praise for this book, I was still surprised t how much I enjoyed it. Thrasher seamlessly joins together struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, Transphobia, ableism, poverty, the carceral state, militarized borders, climate change, and so much more without it ever feeling overwhelming in a book that I flew through. The COVID-19 pandemic should be radicalizing for anyone who has the slightest empathy and urge for community care, and The Viral Underclass is exactly the clarifying and motivating text for people who feel something is not right and need a final push to connect the dots.

Thrasher powerfully exposes the hypocrisy of the Democratic party and the broader Western "left" for rightfully opposing the racism, anti-science propaganda, and broad militarizations of of the "right" while in practice actually expanding these same dangerous systems. "Being told by Democrats that you have nowhere else to go, many (though not all) activists who might oppose carceral politics under Republicans do not protest Democrats who are just as prone to lock people up in cages. And once the Democratic Party embraced the carceral state, it hid from view its most violent effects, mitigated a lot of opposition, and stymied efforts to build a politics of care." (For me, this is exactly how and why the USA re-elected Trump this month.) Thrasher specially calls out how the Clinton Administration expanded the carceral state and defunded housing and food and health care access, how the Obama Administration created the deportation machines, how California Attorney General Kamala Harris fought to stop court-mandated releases of prisoners and kept California dependent on enslaved labor (with Governor Gavin Newsom), and how the Biden Administration further militarized borders and increased deportations, hoarded vaccines, appointed open eugenicists to his COVID-19 task force, lied about the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, and so so much more. "These kinds of disparities have persisted and increased across both Republican and Democratic administrations. However, the populations most affected by them are reliable voting constituents for the Democratic Party, which sometimes says it feels viral pain while causing so much of it to proliferate."

"People who live with and die from viruses are not the parasites. The parasite is capitalism.”

“Like homophobia and stigma, austerity is a plague around the world. Debt shapes our options in life, making it hard to build community and shelter. When this happens, viruses and addiction flourish freely. While Athens and Appalachia were both made vulnerable by austerity, their people were resilient in using community-based interventions when possible to mitigate austerity’s impact upon the viral underclass. Their examples illustrate how anarchy does not mean chaos, as it is often mischaracterized in the United States. Rather, anarchy means a horizontal politics of mutual aid and communal responsibility without the threat of violence from the state; it means a community where people share their abundance and care for and prioritize one another in a way that governments, time and time again, have failed to do. The answer in pandemics, then, from Appalachia to Athens to the Big Apple, isn’t austerity. The answer is a community-based response of mutual care and responsibility — anarchy and abundance — an ethos enacted bravely by transgressive gender-bending angels like Zackie Oh and like Queens, New York, activist Lorena Borjas.”

There were also histories here I was unfamiliar with. While I know about the continuing human rights violations the USA is committing at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I did not know the USA created that facility in response to the "the Haitian refugee crisis of 1991, not the attacks of 9/11," where the USA forcibly sterilized Haitian asylum seekers as eugenicists believed it could prevent refugees (who had not yet even been granted a legal appeal to enter the USA) from birthing children with HIV. This horrific policy was mimicked in 2020 when President Joe Biden kept international borders closed and continued to target countries like South Africa and other African countries with travel bans because they shared research about new COVID-19 variants that were already circulating in the USA. Further, as Thrasher wrote, "Almost three decades later, in 2020, while most international borders were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE deported people with coronavirus from its U.S. prisons to Haiti, threatening to overwhelm the impoverished nation. And in a single week the following year, when the Haitian president was assassinated in his own home, the United States was contemplating giving its own people a third booster COVID-19 shot, while no one in Haiti had yet been vaccinated at all; Haiti was the only country in the Western Hemisphere with no vaccines in mid-2021. That fall, the Biden administration continued to exile Haitian refugees under Rule 42, a provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act that allows federal authorities to expedite deportations during a pandemic (and which the Trump administration controversially invoked to expel migrants seeking asylum). In fact, as the Guardian reported, the Biden administration “deported more Haitians in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a whole year,” and the administration sought contractors who spoke
Spanish and Creole to prepare detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay for an expected influx, once again, of Haitian refugees seeking asylum."

He deftly continues to show the connections between disease and liberatory movements:
"Viruses are used to determine who is deserving of being allowed to cross various borders — of geography, of gender, of American-ness, of worthiness... Think about the body you live in: with every breath you breathe in and out, the idea that your body has permanent borders between what’s inside and outside it is revealed to be a fiction... There are no stark borders between races, between those living with viruses and without, between those in the United States and outside it, between being American and non-American (or un-American), between men and women. Borders are myths, and while viruses are used to justify their necessity and marginalize those who don’t fit neatly on one side of them, viruses ironically disprove them...
For any person to enjoy the benefits of lower community viral loads, breathable air, and the kind of equitable vaccination that leads to herd immunity, communal thinking is required. But true communal thinking is not nationalist thinking... What if viruses teach us that there is no “me” and no “you” at all and that we all share one collective body? And that such individualistic thinking creates not only an underclass, but alienation across lines of class? ... What if we all share just one body — a body that stretches across not just our egos and political philosophies and national borders, but even species?...
If we humans are going to survive pandemics from any virus—let alone if we are going to survive the existential climate crisis—we cannot do so while behaving as if each of our destinies were disconnected. “It’s not a bad thing to say we’re interdependent,” [disability activist Alice Wong] continued, raising a concept foreign to many Americans. It requires courage and an acceptance of vulnerability to admit how SARS-CoV-2 has shown, as Alice put it, that “we’re in the same soup. Exactly in the same soup and open to the exact same things.” Our connection is not merely biophysical but cultural: “This is about the invisible conditions that are swirling around us. In our air. In our atmosphere. Through our words.’”

There is so much more I want to share about this phenomenal book, but I will have to just say, stand up for the marginalized in your community and WEAR A HIGH QUALITY MASK and read this book.

“Thought is retribution, a crime, treason against the Leader. And insofar as calm and tranquillity can incite a person to think, it is essential to drag out the masses to these roaring marches every once in a while to brainwash them and keep them from committing the crime of thought. What else could be the point of all that noise?”

For such a short book, it took me longer than I expected to finish it. The setting was completely immersive, but after a while my attention wandered. I enjoyed the idea of using love and laughter to fight dictatorship, but was somewhat disappointed to find no further opposition or appreciation of any other means of resistance. The way women (especially women's bodies) and sexual scenes were written also turned me away. However, it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read overall and I will probably see if I can get my hands on Sirees' States of Passion.

Very interesting, though sometimes it got a bit too technical on Said's musical criticisms. I'm glad I read Said's autobiography, Out Of Place, before picking this up, as the differences between how he saw himself and how others perceived him, especially in his family dynamics, gave me a lot to think about. I'll hopefully be able to read his daughter Najla Said's book Looking For Palestine next.