Covid-19

Arlinda Guma, a young Albanian novelist, satirically brings statues of historical figures to life in her poem “Covid-19,” written in April 2020 and translated into in English in July 2020. The poem explores the neglect of cultural ideals represented by these statues during the pandemic and comments on early COVID protocols. In the capital city of Albania, Tirana, the poem imagines the Unknown Soldier being turned away by emergency rooms for lacking personal information, reflecting how pandemic care is limited by bureaucratic concerns, excluding vulnerable people like undocumented migrants. Guma also critiques modern communication by symbolically disinfecting the statue of Pericles in Athens to signify the cleansing of both germs and the conceit of “freedom and democracy” in an era dominated by GIFs. The poem concludes somberly as ineffective emergency measures spread and dictators use tanks against the intangible virus. Guma shows how the pandemic undermines collective ideals, overshadowed by inefficient and bewildering attempts at mitigation, thereby suggesting that these ideals were already eroded before the outbreak.