In a nondescript corner of a Mumbai suburb one can find a small somewhat underwhelming shrine with an icon of the Virgin Mary with a small, overgrown patch of fallow land as its proverbial backyard. In a community with a large presence of Goanese Catholics, the presence of a shrine like this is not altogether surprising. But it had always intrigued me that in the wild west that is the Mumbai real estate market, this sizeable plot of land had been left undisturbed even while being surrounded by the hyperactive building spree of towering apartment blocks all around it. Growing up in that neighborhood in the 2000s, by the time my own generation of young delinquents came along, this little overgrown patch had become little more than an unremarkable teenage haunt. Yet the memory of this space intruded into my own consciousness a decade later in an entirely different city in the midst of a global pandemic. What made this particular shrine and its little backyard stand out was a weather-beaten sign at the entrance, quietly marking it as a memorial for the victims of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 that had killed a large portion of the population of local fisher folk who called the village the suburb was at the time home. Tucked away in plain sight of a bustling 21st century massive Indian metropolis was evidence of a traumatic past, of memories lying under the surface, waiting for resurrection. As I looked back at this structure years later, while witnessing the world around me change in the face of yet another “unprecedented” moment in history, I could not help but wonder at the vagaries of historical memory – at the myriad ways in which communities collectively choose to remember, and sometimes silence the past without being able to fully let go of the echoes of the feelings engendered.
On 4th March 1918, Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army soldier mobilized for World War I, reported to the infirmary at Camp Funston, Kansas, with a case of high fever. Camp Funston, part of the military base called Fort Riley, was being used to mobilize a vast number of troops from the American Midwest to be dispatched to the trenches of the Western Front. Many historians now count Fort Riley as one of the possible locations for the beginning of what is considered to be the most devastating pandemic in modern history; the flu pandemic of 1918. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 had a higher estimated death toll than either World War, and possibly consumed more lives than both the largest wars of the 20th century combined, wiping out an estimated 2.5 to 5 percent of the global population. Yet, as a seminal event of the modern era, the Flu is remembered and represented in collective memory and popular culture very differently than the wars that overshadowed it; and indeed, many other events which took a far lower toll on human lives. The sudden spate of interest in the flu pandemic of a century back in light of the current Covid-19 crisis is a helpful point of entry to look at the process of the formation of memories of profoundly disruptive historical events such as disease outbreaks of such massive scale.
One of the key reasons for the distinct mode for remembering a pandemic event is rooted in the fact that for most of history, the direct experience of disease took place within the domestic sphere. Prior to the advent of modern medicine and the formation of modern nation states that could command the resources to formulate large-scale public health policies, illness and caring for the ill was firmly confined to domestic spaces. During the flu pandemic of 1918, this facet of social life was still in a state of transition – and so, as the historian Laura Spinney puts it, ‘The Spanish flu is remembered personally not collectively.’ When considering the formation of collective memories of a social group, psychologists Henry Roediger and Magdalena Abel suggest that the structure of collective memories is rooted in relatively predictable storytelling forms with a beginning, turning and end, and salient points that are marked by mythicized constructs imbued with narratives of heroism and victory. Wars fall into this category of collective memorializing. The fact of human agency and the grand narratives of the political and ideological underpinnings behind collective human action provides war with a narrative logic and the scope to be grounded in the working of human agency. Pandemics, however, do not provide this functioning of human agency as neatly as military conflict does.
The threat posed to the discursive process of remembering a disease outbreak lies in the disruption of disease leading to a complete erasure of the social world itself. A pandemic is marked by the snuffing out of lives over a vast space, without the defining features of a battlefield, often within the private sphere, and often with the bane of anonymity; a vast number of deaths without the comforting narrative of a higher cause, of lives consumed before they could ever be recorded. Spinney sums this fact of a pandemic by noting that, ‘War has a victor, a pandemic only produces the vanquished.’ The erosion of an individual’s identity when faced with enormous trauma is further exacerbated when that trauma is in the form of an event as seemingly unmoored of narrative predictability as a virus. This can be seen as an argument to locate pandemics within a model of collective forgetting that follows Stanley Cohen’s model of the ‘open secret’, that is knowingly silenced. The fractures of the past can altogether be seen in the memories often elided over. This does not however mean that the act of remembrance is disabled. After all, memories, especially those of a traumatic period that served as the stage for personal and communal suffering, cannot help but mingle into the narratives of our collective existence even if sometimes veiled by the comfortable curtain of metaphor. It is this realization that made me revisit my own inherited store of stories passed down. It led me to confront memories from my childhood I did not know I still had, of my grandmother recounting frightening bedtime stories from her own childhood, She would tell us stories that she had been handed down by her forebears – stories of disturbing, supernatural wraith-like figures stalking through the villages of rural Bengal, mysteriously but insidiously snuffing out the lives of multitudes of villagers from another era that I now suspect may have been a metaphoric performance of the visceral experience of the plague pandemic of the 1890s. The memories of the past are from silenced as they echo down the generations only to connect with a new reality.
It is in this very act of remembering that there is a scope for resisting the fate of erasure. Survival of a pandemic is also intertwined with a remembrance for those lost. Orality and the working of memory forms the crux for individuals to remember the loved ones they lost and in doing so form the key interface between a personal memory and collective history. The collection and collation of data is often important for understanding history, but the sheer scale of a pandemic renders it effectively impossible to document and hence capture its affective dimensions. This conventional, positivist form of historiography can be challenged however – by the simple gesture of storytelling. Personal stories of loss and trauma, woven into the collective fabric of memory by simply passing them on. Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a perfect example of this new form of memorializing, by recounting an aesthetic form of personal memory. Porter’s novel mirrors her own traumatic experience of being infected by the virus and losing her own lover at the time, a soldier named Alexander Barclay. In the novel Miranda uses memory as a shield to hold on to her identity as her body is ravaged by the disease. When numbered as one among the thousands of patients crammed into an overcrowded hospital she returns to memories and visions of her childhood home and even her rented accommodation in her adopted city where she works as a journalist. Holding on to those memories is her way of holding onto her identity and a sense of her self that is determined to survive and finds within herself a resilience to hold onto herself in the drowning multitudes of a global pandemic.
Given Katherine Porter’s own life having been a female reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado in 1918, her novel also provides a revealing glimpse into the transformative impacts of modernity on individual lives and their subsequent responses to the crisis. Both Miranda and Adam are single young people who have been brought to their city away from their families and the traditional social networks that would have been their primary source of support, both emotional and physical, during a crisis like the flu pandemic. Yet in centering the narrative of caring and compassion on the two young lovers Porter opens up the possibility of reading the mobility and migrations that are a feature of industrial modernity as a site of forging new networks of loyalty and affection and rooting the act of caring in spaces that mark a break from the traditional household, such as Adam’s staying with Miranda in her rented accommodation during her illness and providing her with solace. As she reaffirms this new modality of personal bonding Porter states that, ‘The hell they shared, no matter what kind of hell, it was theirs, they were together’. Despite the bond that Miranda forged with her lover, the trauma of the pandemic for her is encapsulated by her lover’s conspicuous absence. Miranda suffers from survivor’s guilt as she contemplates the horrific vision, she had during her fevered hallucinations of attempting to save Adam from an arrow by physically throwing herself in its path only to have it pierce through her, leaving her unscathed, but killing Adam. In this sense Porter’s act of memorializing her own dead lover Alexander through the means of a novel forms a response to the challenge that the trauma of a pandemic poses to the formation of memories. Pale Horse, Pale Rider may be read as an aestheticized form of historical recollection that also functions as a prosthetic memory, turning her personal memories in the form of a literary narrative into a valuable primary record. The functioning of memory thus becomes a key vehicle for Miranda to process her own trauma and at the same time carry out her role as a survivor of the pandemic to prevent the erasure of those who were lost. For Miranda (and by extension Porter herself) this process is complicated by the fact that the nostalgic memories of their lovers are forever intertwined with the traumatic loss unleashed on them by the flu.
It is in this vein that the spiritual that Miranda and Adam sing as she is beset by the flu makes the act of mourning as a form of remembrance explicit. ‘Pale horse, pale rider, dun’ take my lover away…Death, oh, leave one singer to mourn’, these words from a spiritual traditionally sung by African-Americans becomes Miranda’s coping mechanism to process the trauma she faces during the pandemic even as she is ravaged by the illness. Through her memories Miranda begins the process of healing by consciously engaging in the act of mourning. The act of mourning prevents the erasure of the victims of the pandemic. Miranda almost laments by saying, ‘Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead.’ Katherine Porter’s novel then is an inoculation against the silences that threaten the memorialization of those lost. The act of mourning is both a deeply intimate as well as a collective act of holding onto the social worlds and emotional networks that become casualties to disasters of this scale. In moving from an American text to memoirs of the pandemic emanating from the Global South one notices the same narratives of loss and coping with trauma present in literature working as signifiers for those lost to the disease. The Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala lost his wife, brother, sister-in-law and niece to the pandemic of 1918. Despite writing his memoirs long after the event he is seemingly numb when contemplating the scale of the tragedy that permanently transformed his private sphere as he simply states that, ‘My family disappeared in a blink of the eye.’ Sigmund Freud viewed the act of mourning as a process of detachment and reattachment and through this a survivor is able to confront the actuality of loss. Yet the same process of detachment is coupled with a sense of reattachment as through his memoirs he fixes the affective scope of the loss of his wife as he renegotiates the longing and loss, he experienced by stating that, ‘I became aware of the intensity of her love just as she was ready to take leave of life.’
The Brazilian writer Pedro Nava in his memoirs records the death of the object of his teenage affections, Nair Cardoso Sales Rodrigues. In her illness and death, he experienced the full brunt of transforming identity that is imposed on a victim of a deadly disease. Nava writes, ‘Gone was the radiance…she was so changed it was as if she had turned into another person, as if some kinds of demon were haunting her.’ After Nair’s death on 1st November 1918, All Saints’ Day, Nava laments her transformation from the teenage girl he loved to a ‘marble bride’. The multiple transformations and resurrections of the pandemic dead was made literal in the case of Nair’s corpse as she was buried in a waterlogged grave due to the breakdown of municipal services in Rio de Janeiro at the height of the pandemic. Her mummified corpse was exhumed and reburied in an earthen grave years later by Aunt Eugenia, and after that once her body had been reduced to bones, she was transferred to her family mausoleum. For Nava the return and repetition of the sign of his lost lover was quite literal, yet when composing his memoirs several decades later, he returned to the sign of his departed and wrote, ‘Sweet girl may you rest in peace.’ It is revealing that Nava’s personal memoir became the seminal text to establish the autobiographical form within the canon of modernist Brazilian writing.
Since the disease made its first appearance in India at the Bombay docks on 29th May 1918, it killed an estimated 12-15 million people, giving British India the dubious distinction of suffering from the highest death toll of any country during the pandemic. Predictably then, in a colony like India, the pandemic took a devastating toll. With a local mortality rate of 20.6 (in comparison the mortality rate in Britain was 4.7), mortality rates in India were hideously high. The scale of the disaster was so vast that the 1911-1921 census has been the only census in Indian history which showed a reduction in the population of the country. Yet when we take into account popular culture, literature and collective memory, the vast majority of Indians, until the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic, would have recalled the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 as the seminal devastating event of those years. This returns us to the question of how pandemic events, despite being located at the intersection of various discourses – political, cultural, racial, gendered – are remembered differently than other events. Laura Spinney points out that the online library catalogue, WorldCat, documents that there are 80,000 books in roughly 40 languages about the First World War whereas there exist only about 400 in 5 languages written about the Spanish flu. Spinney argues however that the process of narrativizing disease as a discursive event and inscribing it into collective memory or popular consciousness is a more nuanced and drawn-out process than it is in the case of events such as wars and revolutions. Pandemic memories due to their location within individual narratives of personal loss and their indelible association with domesticity, follow a different trajectory of memory formation. In taking up the case of what may arguably be called one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, the Black Death, Spinney refers to Philip Zeigler’s observation that the first major study of the medieval plague was only published in 1853, almost 500 years after the event. In fact, the plague was known as ‘The Blue Death’ throughout the medieval era and would not take on the moniker by which it is known to us today until the 16th century, and while there were chroniclers who recounted the devastating impact of the plague in their cities, at the time the chaos of the Hundred Years War continued to dominate contemporary narratives.
But the slow process of resurrecting the flu pandemic in popular memory has been gaining ground throughout the 21st century as Spinney notes the increasing presence of the flu in popular culture, from its appearance as the cause of death for characters on the TV series Downton Abbey, or the fact that Edward Cullen from the popular Twilight series was turned into a vampire to save him from succumbing to the Spanish flu in 1918. The panics created by the rise of avian and swine flu strains in the opening decades of the 21st century along with the current Coronavirus pandemic have enormously accelerated the process of resurrecting the legacies of the 1918 pandemic, as in 2020 there is little doubt that people find the events of the Spanish flu to be of much more extreme relevance to their lives than the First World War. The problem of theorizing about the event of a disease outbreak as a discursive event is to squarely contend with the very primal anxieties that pandemics unleash within the collective human psyche. Diseases, more than other natural disasters, form a lynchpin to understand the precarious frailty of humanity as a species biologically tied down to a specific ecosystem regardless of how far humans attempt to change the rules of that ecosystem to bring it to heel. Pandemics are fundamental challenges to the grand narratives of human progress that have taken root in our collective cultural discursive horizon since the Enlightenment. William McNeill notes the triumphalism that accompanied the discovery of germ theory and the invention of vaccines by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch at the end of the 19th century, and yet the notion of modern medicine being able to vaccinate against any disease was undone by the experiences of 1918. The World Health Organization’s remarkable feat of eradicating smallpox, one of mankind’s oldest diseases in the 1970s, was a brief respite before the outbreak of the AIDS pandemic.
If disease remains a visceral intimation to the human psyche of mortality, revisiting the narratives of people who lived through the plagues of the past also proves to be a fruitful ground to root our own understanding of the human condition. The lawyer Evagrius lamented the deaths of his wife, daughter and grandson during the 6th century C.E. during the Plague of Justinian while the chronicler Agnolo di Tura of Siena’s account of his many business ventures to support his wife Nicoluccia’s desire for prosperity ended with the single sentence, ‘And, I Agnolo di Tura…buried my wife and five children with own hands.’ It acts as a stark testament to the devastation wrought by bubonic plague in the Italy of 1348. In more recent times, a similarly wrenching account can be found in the gay activist Randy Shilts’s reporting of the catastrophic devastation unleashed by the AIDS pandemic on the LGBTQ community of 1980s San Francisco. These voices from the past destabilize the temporal distances between the eras of their readers and their writers as they mirror the deep-seated fears and anxieties of humankind throughout the centuries, of facing their mortality and the prospect of losing loved ones. Writing this article in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic, a little over a year after my own story-telling grandmother succumbed to the virus, further brings home the point that the key difference between memories of political events such as a war and those of a pandemic are rooted in the fact that personal narratives of past plagues are accentuated over time whereas this very distance in time grants us perspective and indifference in the political context of battles or other stately affairs. But it is in this regard that Agnolo di Tura’s narrative gains in its emotional depth and poignancy the more time passes, as the veil of the distances of time are removed to ground the constant anxieties of human existence, be it in medieval Europe or 21st century India. For even as we add to our knowledge in contemplating disease as a discourse which runs through human experience, we are confronted with the fact that Man and microbe continue to and will continue to shape each other. Despite the obvious epidemiological differences between individual pandemic events, in contemplating the recurring specter of disease as a discursive event we are forced into a reckoning of human existence down the ages. It is not merely a reckoning of human mortality, but also the resilience inherent in the equally human capacity for compassion and the networks of empathy forged through the experience of grief and mourning and why the remembrance of those people gone by will always speak to us in our time and space across history to point to a fundamental empathy that is also at the heart of the human condition and the forgotten memorials of the past are but a resurrection away from our consciousness. It gives truth to Voltaire’s words that, ‘History may never repeat itself, but Man always does.’
Illustration : Suman Mukherjee