Transnational Bodies in the Time of COVID-19 Lockdowns

How are you? I'm asking folks. How am I? I try to write in bite-sized texts and emails. 

Yesterday, my body fell into a kind of shock as I read the news from India. It is a visceral, continuous shock—waves of fury—at the Indian government's handling of the coronavirus situation, putting millions of human lives at risk, exposed to starvation, battened about as if they did not matter. The fear that this government does not know, does not care, and will manipulate ceaselessly to improve its image, to lash down at people it sees as threats, all the while the most vulnerable people have and are risking their lives to make lives better for some. 

And, when I wrote that to people, one of the responses I received was ...silence. I imagine these folks navigating the limits of empathy, not knowing what to say, titrating.  

And, a part of me wonders: hasn't it always been hard for America to get not-America? And, how so many people don't understand the privilege of their ignorance—what it is to know your body-blood-ancestors to be linked to a land that is unbearably far away. 

It is sometimes easier to distance from the knowing of our connectedness, given the mass illusion that technocapitalism can connect us all. The starkness of the body knows differently. I hope it will teach us differently. 

(Image of the Indian subcontinent via NASA Earth Observatory, Wikimedia)