Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
-Naomi Shihab Nye (Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Modernity has injected heavy doses of self-confidence and individualism into our spirits. While these attributes can facilitate us to reap success and achievements, they can also generate an illusion that life rests poised on solid ground, with rare possibilities of shifting beams. But, life is a messy plot with peripheries shifting unbeknownst to us.

Modernity may have trained us to approach tragedies with an outlook based on scientific prediction, but tragedies stalk us like surreptitious shadows; they are stealthy, which is why they hit hard and leave deep scars. Within limits, we may foresee trends, but we don’t live in a world free of fallibility. Communities are defined by a complex set of local factors (diverse set of livelihoods that are informal and depend on proximity between vendors and clients, mobility restrictions, housing restrictions, etc.) that can escape the tightknit models of globalization that often overlook such factors.

One could say that communities ravaged by tragedies search for hope in the most unexpected ways. Hope is embedded in the cervices of the complex geometry of what we perceive as life. One could argue that hope is a textured mask that we employ to shield ourselves from desperation and fear. We cling to layers of hope that we try to wrap, one by one, tightening them around our fragility, when we sink deeper and deeper into unsettling emotional aftershocks during calamities.

During stagnant normalcy, we are strapped to a heavy baggage of predictable routines and patterns. We breathe a discourse that proclaims that we can predict any turbulence, armed with science, research, funds, and sophisticated skills.

Such a message of overpowering the odds displays inherent cracks when unpredictable hardships, calamities, and misfortunes disrupt the dependable webs of our existence. Those of us who reside inside bubbles of privilege cannot be bothered to reflect on offering hope to people with no access to power structures, because privilege generates blind spots that impede our understanding of a shared community spirit. Not until a menace literally rips through the social fabric of our humanity, steps up to our doorway, and threatens to uproot all our logical notions of safe and unsafe, do we have to tackle the mathematics of what’s the center and what are the margins, what’s normal and what’s abnormal.

Disasters slow life down; the dearth of our usual peripheries and centers force us to cherish the smallest details that would have escaped us in good times. We equip ourselves with new ways of nourishing our senses, in order to overcome our sense of loss. Artistic endeavors allow us to tap into new language and imageries, dig deep into our tragedies, as we document and process our experiences, holding onto the discomfort, but connecting it to our resilience.

Recording resilience through art requires engaging in a series of aesthetic negotiations; such negotiations may involve innovative uses of light and shadow, photographing reflections, geometric patterns, and the use of other strategies, as the artist searches for hope, restructuring and redefining the bleak landscape of turbulence into something meaningful. Sometimes, this artistic journey is draped in reflective silence. It can be severe and graphic, as it describes shifting power structures and engages in social critique.

Such silence can operate in different ways. On one hand, it urges us to step out of our comfort zone and apply our spirits to a deeper level of critical thinking. It also offers us an opportunity to appreciate the dignity of the mass, to become aware of the challenges faced by the so-called ordinary people. Finally, it cautions us not to disregard our collective interdependencies: if we don’t have our masses, we don’t have a future.

As we process our reactions, hope may not be the first item that one identifies in artwork that responds to disasters, as we process a sense of daze, faced with imageries that haunt us deeply. The Bengal famine of 1943, for example, is a significant example of how artists reacted to an unforeseen disaster that unfolded in the wake of the Second World War. The deadly famine was orchestrated by British colonialism and more than 4 million innocent victims perished. At the same time, the tragedy became a powerful source of social critique for artists such as Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-1978) and Somnath Hore (1921-2006).

Chittaprosad’s deep commitment to the common people¹ of rural Bengal is well documented; he had acquired first-hand knowledge about villages, their culture, living conditions when he had travelled with the voluntary relief workers during the 1941 Japanese invasion of Chittagong; although his political caricatures and posters were extraordinary, his sketches and prints that focused on women and children stood out for their poignant details of impoverished circumstances. His personal experience of the Bengal famine motivated him to create an ensemble of illustrations, along with a written narrative that underscores human tragedies but embeds empathy within a solid core of sharp critique.

Somnath Hore², who had been conspicuously active in the political landscape, documented the chilling images of emaciated bodies, seated skeletons, the unsettling image of the skeletal mother and her skeletal child, all of which captured the severity of human suffering that the famine had unleashed. These visuals make no bones about the horror. Hore’s images clearly root for the downtrodden, who were pushed to the margins of the society and left to die of hunger. At the same time, his images inform a wider public about the exploitative mechanism of colonialism. Both Chittaprosad and Hore engage in a visual discourse that chooses to emphasize the unsettling trauma of a destabilized world, exploited and mangled by a privileged few who anchor themselves to abundant power by hoarding resources.

Shifting notions of privilege and power structures are also echoed in Satyajit Ray’s (1921-1992) film Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder)/1973, set in rural Bengal. He frames the story in a hopeful lush environment³, but then ushers in turbulent conditions that lead us towards the Bengal famine; the plot documents the erosion of human values, as food becomes scarce. We witness how individuals hang on to hope as they struggle to make the right decisions. Social structures collapse as a community is faced with a gradual erosion of peripheries of what’s decent and what’s indecent. While turbulence serves as the backdrop for the film and pessimism pervades the entire storyline, we can identify a sense of social awakening vis-à-vis the central character, who enjoys social privilege, but is gradually pushed to the peripheries, as he and his wife deal with the harsh realities of economic and social chaos.

While Ray’s film showcases the plight of unprepared rural communities, impacted by a set of parameters that are beyond their control, tragedy strikes early in The Plague/1947 when Algerian born French novelist Albert Camus⁴ (1913-1960) weaves a plot around a nightmarish disaster in a city where people are equally unprepared, as they are consumed with an ambition to become rich. In addition to being an all-encompassing calamity, the plague deforms the peripheries of normalcy (the disease itself blurs all boundaries of social and economic class, since it affects everyone) and threatens the concept of logical existence. Themes of ignorance, isolation, art, religious zeal, graphic death, and erosion of rituals are narrated with precise arguments. Even though the plague eventually retreats, a cautionary message of future outbreaks doesn’t offer much scope for immediate optimism. However, there is an underlying message that to be human is to be hopeful, to be human is to face disasters, no matter how deadly they are. Equally vital is the idea of independent spirit, which the plot showcases as a requirement, if one is to fight against complacency, indifference and ignorance.

Indifference and ignorance of a socially and economically polarized society are portrayed from a unique angle by Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera/1985⁵ is a compelling narrative of hope, although tragedy is evoked from the outset; cholera, a medicinal calamity, a symbol of ignorance and backwardness is contrasted with concepts of modernity, progress and corporal hygiene. What is interesting is how cholera/tragedy offers the perfect excuse for ushering in hope, when two aged lovers find a second chance at happiness, travelling on a boat marked by a cholera quarantine flag (an intentional strategy to prevent the boat from landing in any port in order to avoid interruptions), which offers them a new space of optimism, of blissful isolation, a new center for expressing their love, a new chance to delineate their own peripheries, defying the margins of decency as established by the society they live in.

Hope as a strategy to recover coherence becomes a more complicated task when we are assaulted by devastation and start to feel broken. We try to absorb hope from symbols, tangible, and intangible.

At a time when we are barred from being able to count on stable reference points of physical proximity, forced to gaze at each other from a distance of suspicion, mixed with yearning and fear, even the most casual conversations have become inaccessible, emotionally muted, lukewarm, and dreary. Social, commercial, and cultural identities are often characterized by the very spaces that we inhabit. Our freedom to maximize our spaces determines how well we channel our creative abilities; we have a claim to every inch of that precious space.

All the creative works that I refer to draw on the complexities of class privilege, the value of community interdependency, the vulnerability of the masses, and question the validity of “normal” during extreme disasters. They point to the fatal consequences of egoism at times of crises; they reveal the unsuitability of a stable center tailored to benefit a few privileged, which causes the masses to disproportionately bear the brunt of shifting margins. Creative works remind us that tragedies deepen when power structures with unprecedented access to resources moralize on what is right and what is wrong. Such a presumptive attitude goes hand in hand with a wide-ranging misunderstanding of the complexities of everyday survival, faced by masses with limited options of survival. At the same time, creative works remind us that hope does not linger in the topsoil of our existence. Hope lurks in the deeper layers of community interdependence and is available to us when we commit ourselves to defend new definitions of normalcy. Temporary monetary assistance to struggling communities in times of crises has a short shelf life. The desire to go back to the normalcy of a top-heavy center that offers little protection to the informal sectors of our economies can lead us to a toxic future. If we wish to endure disasters, we must train ourselves to be better at caretaking, at communicating kindness, at generating structures that allow the less privileged to have alternative options of dignified survival.

When social distancing pounces upon us, invades our peripheries, mangles our measurements, and instructs us to switch over to a mathematically trimmed interaction, we gravitate to a landscape deficient in spontaneity. This loss of freedom becomes even more unbearable, when we are constantly cautioned that daring to claim our usual margins may well be a death sentence. At times like this, we become participants in a spectacle of patterns, working steadily at pacifying our troubled souls, seeking out value in distant shadows, oblique reflections on street corners, solitary puddles of water, partial road signs, silent playgrounds, masked pedestrians queuing up in newfound obedience, troubled gazes sneaking a quick look at us, even as they stay trapped in masks, masks and bandanas dangling on humble bicycles like red-hot symbols of deliverance, masks blending in with people’s outfits as if they were the new standards of fashion.

Before we are ready to step out of this spectacle of signs and shadows, we’d have to peer deep into our souls and evaluate the baggage of certainties that we carry around. We’d have to figure out a way to embrace uncertainty not as a weakness, but as an opportunity to adjust our perceptions of chaos.

If we keep adhering to rigid notions of normalcy and predictability, we’d be exactly where disaster wanted us to be, vulnerable and ready to be destabilized. So, the next time we venture out into open spaces, fearful even while we stay shielded behind our masks, let’s take a deep breath and give our communities a second chance, even as we stay tethered to uncertainty. Let these masks not harden our souls into something hermetic and sterile; let our skin breathe courage, let our gazes be kind, let social distancing instill solidarity in us, let our fears heal and let the scars lead us towards hope, despite everything.

1 Wille, Simone. A Transitional Socialist Solidarity. Stedelijk Studies.

2 Ray, Pranab Ranjan. Hunger and the Painter Somnath Hore and the Wounds. Critical Collective.

3 Selden, Daniel L. Postcolonial Critique of the Cinematic Apparatus. Postcolonial Studies.

4 Engel, Amir. Hope, Despair, and Justice in Postwar European Culture: Bicycle Thieves, The Plague, and The Man Outside as Case Studies. Comparative Literature

5 Moraña, Mabel. Modernity and Marginality in Love in the Time of Cholera. Studies in 20^th Century Literature