The World Poetics of Lockdown in Pandemic Poetry

“The World Poetics of Lockdown in Pandemic Poetry” is an academic article by Indian world literature scholar Anhiti Patnaik that responds to two international pandemic poetry anthologies: Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown edited by Nishi Chawla and K. Satchidanandan, an anthology with a focus on Indian poets written in English and various Indian dialects; and And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the Covid-19 Pandemic edited by Ilan Stavans, an initially digital publication that collected poems written in or translated into English. Singing in the Dark draws attention particularly to the phenomenon of “lockdown migration” between various cities in India, where migrant laborers lost their jobs as they were unable to “work from home,” and were forced to walk hundreds of miles to their hometowns. Specifically, the poem “Walking Home” by Sanjukta Dasgupta features the question, “Are we citizens / Or are we refugees / In our own country?” (Dasgupta, qtd. in Patnaik). Patnaik reads this as a critique of Indian governance during the pandemic which neglected the wellbeing of migrant workers and undermined their citizenship. She adds that the government selectively provided support to those who remained employed and had a secure place of residence, “that promotes – in Darwinian terms – only the survival of the least precarious in a global digital economy” (Patnaik).

Patnaik raises the concept of the “social sublime” by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, or the sense of horror or awe in the face of the incomprehensible worldwide disaster and resulting death toll, that the two anthologies express in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the “social sublime” describes a subjective reaction, Kai Erikson’s “‘social dimension’ of collective trauma” to outline how subjective, individual trauma from a shared event can compound and manifest differently within a collective. Judith Butler’s idea of mourning mass death proposes that in the face of mass death, mourning becomes universalized, shifting from the loss of close individuals to the sorrow towards lives cut short. Drawing on these theories, Patnaik reads the anthologies as pieces of collective testimony for the traumatic events of the pandemic, allowing readers to experience the pandemic as others have experienced it, as a planetary phenomenon.

A strength of And We Came Outside is its inclusion of poets’ races, regional origins and the location where they were situated at the time of writing, information that Singing in the Dark and most other anthologies did not provide. Patnaik praises this practice as she argues the unique conflux of ethnicity, background and region where poets experienced lockdown, usually not their home region, illustrates the hybridity and multiplicity of identities that characterizes the modern world, and conveys a sense of alienation from one’s home. “Rather than set up an anthology that creates a false sense of cultural equivalence, Stavans truly engages with the universal fear of dying a refugee” (Patnaik).

Amid the death and disruption brought by the pandemic, the emergence of pandemic poetry anthologies shows that the pandemic has provided common ground for people from all cultures and backgrounds. The two examples that Patnaik outlines and analyzes demonstrate the power of literature in allowing readers to learn and empathize about the inequalities people in different countries faced, in which people in poverty, whose jobs and lower accessibility to medical care render them inherently more vulnerable to disease, must struggle with the combined threats of COVID-19, unemployment, and displacement.