“Narrate to Survive, Observations from Lit. of Pandemics

"Narrate to Survive" is a series of articles about the magic of Literature of Pandemics. This time of need, brokenness, and fear could contribute to creating a new humanity, a new rise from the ashes! Since the horrified spread of COVID-19, literature lovers or fans shed the lights on what is called the “Literature of Pandemics on one hand, on the other hand, many professors attempted to re-read the most celebrated works from the eyes of the age of unknown pandemic.

COVID-19 may be the main headline of 2020. It carried the forcing power sweeping everything. Quarantine, stay at home slogans, social distancing, curfews, isolation, and lockdown all of those mentioned terms re-defined our lives as if we are witnessing a new age!

Renowned Harvard University literature professor David Damrosch is known for his contributions to the World Literature field through his “Around the World in 80 Books.”

The tragic state Italy witnessed through the first wave of the pandemic drew the readers’ attention to one of the masterpieces of the Italian Medieval literature, Boccaccio’s the “Decameron” (10 Days).

The Decameron comprised a group of stories united by a frame story. As the frame narrative opened, 10 young people escaped plague-stricken Florence to a remote abandoned place in nearby Fiesole. Each day carried a new leader of the group who supervised a process of narrating stories and organizing the turns as narrating stories was their main way to survive, their only hope.

Every day was marked with a new theme, tone, and fresh feelings represented a completely new thing in the darkness of European Medieval ages. Professor Damrosch mentioned in his Around the World in 80 Books, "Boccaccio then began The Decameron, which he worked on between 1349-1352. Together with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’ La Peste, Boccaccio’s masterwork is regularly referenced today by people trying to make sense of the world turned upside down – a theme that has a premodern history of its own."

It could be one of the earliest portrayed quarantine in European literature. The stories depict the dignity of human lives, the love of life, passion, and welling to survive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6X4IMRZ3DY

According to Elyse Martin, "The rigid structure of the work—ten characters tell ten stories for ten days—seems at odds both with the chaotic setting of the plague and with the content of the tales, where characters tumble from fortune to misfortune to fortune again, with each spin of Fortune’s wheel. But this strict structure is intentional. Just as Boccaccio most likely wrote these tales as a way to understand and also escape the plague, so do his ten storytellers embrace this structure as an escape from the now ordinary chaos of their lives. The ten storytellers are stuck in one place for two weeks."

Martin expressed, "Boccaccio’s The Decameron offers not only a parallel, but a path forward. In this time of “social distancing” and sudden telework, where two-week quarantines are once again the norm, it can be easy to become fixated on the chaos of endlessly changing news cycles to the exclusion of all other activities. The act of storytelling can seem impossible."

The art of storytelling can be related to the modern means of communications such as social media for example. People escaped from despair to social media and documenting their home-life in different ways such as Tiktok videos, Facebook notes, and launching Twitter hashtags.

The Middle East faced various famous incidents of how home-entertainment such as "Marzoka and Abu Qaht" challenge in May. The story begins as a Best Captured Photo, the winner who gains the highest number of likes and retweets. Only two photos reached the final stage, ironically, the challenge turns to be a long-running man-woman debate.

Moreover, the hashtag witnessed wide participation of Arabic megastars such as Mohamed Abdo, Elissa, Ahlam, Asalah, and others.

To sum up, the will to survive and to return to life is forcing the human to show his own strength to beat the disease and adapt to the hard temptations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojL0dUApb_k