‘Quarenta em quarentena’: (sobre)vivências em tempos pandêmicos

Abstract

The collection 40 in quarantine: 40 pandemic worldviews (2020), available in e-book format, free of charge, is opened and closed by poems. It begins at the end, signaling to the reader a horizon of dark months, caused by the expansion of the new Corona Virus. The end is, therefore, the beginning, that is, the direction of better times. The reader goes through the stories and chronicles gathered and divided by themes. Regardless of the rubrics – Fear, Solitude, Love –, the writings comprise a great narrative braid, whose threads display recurring subjects, such as political and social criticisms, the routine and reframing of domestic space, the impossibility of mourning etc. Both in its free offer and composition, the texts open up in a significant offer of dialogue. In this panel, many subjects are and have been hard explored by the media, however, when treated literarily, they prove that creativity and the willingness to touch the other “caged” quarantines can result in renewed facets. In terms of themes, we are close to imaginary journeys, or those that investigate rooms and objects, as in the classics of Maistre, Garret, and Sterne, as well as in Machado's masterpiece, which pays reverence to everyone. The therapeutic power of words, literature, and storytelling itself is reiterated, as advocated by Aílton Krenak (2019). As it is an invisible evil, Susan Sontag's (1989) essay reverberates, in which the theorist opposes tuberculosis to cancer. We think of the concepts of health and disease, both supported by a body, which is historical, discursive (FOUCAULT, 1978) and sign (FERREIRA, 1994), referring to a specific cultural framework. In this sense, Brazil today, in its sharp political, ideological, economic, and social crisis, is a sadly justified storehouse of troubling practices and (dis) beliefs in the face of the power of this virus that appears as the evil of the 21st century.