Guyana is currently plagued by two pestilent emergencies demanding immediate and effective collective action which is imperative for the health of the nation. One is international – the worldwide threat from the COVID-19 pandemic. The other is of local manufacture – the unwholesome canker threatening the body politic which arises from the crudest and most open election rigging that the nation has ever witnessed.
The urgency to deal with the coronavirus has been expressed in public statements. There is a particular reasoned plea from Dr Mikhaila Puran-Xavier, general physician attached to a private hospital in George-town, who did not mince words in imploring the public to take COVID-19 seriously. “For once in our history since independence we need collectively to get together as one” to prevent its spread or “a lot of people are going to die,” she said. She sees the need for the imposition of “a mandatory lock-down . . . because people aren’t listening.” Guyana, with its limited capacity, will struggle to contain it. “Look at Italy”, in particular, Spain or the UK; “first world countries with first world health care systems [that] are buckling to their knees,” she added.
There are similar pleas from different quarters, locally and internationally, for simple sanity to prevail to forestall the imposition of an illegal government based on a fraudulent vote count. The solution here is simpler and more manageable than the containment of the Coronavirus. All that is needed is a straightforward count from genuine official, uncontaminated Statements of Poll, or a recount of ballots that have not been tampered with. That can save the country from a fate similar to what threatens if COVID-19 is allowed to run rampant.
The urgency has been captured in the world’s literature. Both the plagues of health and those of politics have been repeatedly brought together in other world situations in literature as they are brought together today in Guyana. One has been seen as a reflection of the other. Writers have seen one as just as devastating and situations have been captured where each has similarly led to a decimation of the population and the corruption of a state.
It was certain death in Europe when the most terrible and devastating epidemic the world has ever suffered – the Bubonic Plague, referred to as “the Black Death” decimated the populations of many towns in 1348. The horror and seriousness of that pestilence can be imagined when it is considered that medical science in the 14th century was nowhere near what it is today and once contracted, there was no hope of survival from the plague. The horror and seriousness of COVID-19 today can be imagined when it is considered that even in the presence of medical science today, it is feared, and if allowed to run rampant, can indeed sentence multitudes to certain death. Look at China and Italy.
The world’s literature reflects that. What is significant and ironic is that some of the best of this literature came from Italy, which became the cultural capital of the western world when the dark narrowness of the Middle Ages gave way to the dawn of enlightenment in Europe by the rise of the Renaissance in the 14th century. Much of the relevant literature to be examined here was written in or set in Italy, or France or other parts of Europe – territories that are caught in the grim grasp of the Coronavirus today. They also point to an organic integration of the physical health of the nation with its moral health; its social attitudes corrupted, or its existence poisoned by totalitarian despotism which kills as many as any other pestilence.
Start with France and one of its greatest writers, Albert Camus. Two of his novels are the most revered in French literature and equally acclaimed in world fiction L’Etranger (1942) and La Peste (1947). Camus (1913 – 1960) became the second youngest winner in history of the Nobel Prize in 1947 (the youngest was Rudyard Kipling). L’Etranger has been translated into English as The Stranger and also as The Outsider, and critics have chosen to use one or the other depending on what they argue is the interpretation of the novel.
The title and interpretation have to do with a reading of the hero in this existentialist and absurdist fiction. It is set in France in 1942 and is considered to be political allegory. That is because of the way it reflects the kind of environment that prevailed during the German occupation of France in World War II, and the fact that Camus worked actively in the underground resistance.
La Peste was also published in English as The Plague. It is supposedly based on a cholera epidemic which, in 1849, ravaged the city of Oran in French Algeria, where Camus was born, and probably on the earlier plague of 1556, and is an echo of the Black Death and literary works based on it. But the novel is set in Oran in 1947 at the time of an epidemic that shut down the city. Its main character is a doctor who fights the disease, and dramatises the work and attitudes of other characters.
But it is political allegory because of the way it treats the situation in the country and the effect of this plague on the human condition. There is a suggestion in the novel of the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War, also recalling Camus’s involvement in that struggle. There is heroic resistance among the characters in the novel as they fight an enemy to human life and national stability. The Holo-caust, which was one of the evils of German totalitarian oppression is a preoccupation of the work, as a parallel devastation of life to what obtains in an epidemic. Camus might also have been striking at French colonialism, given the history of French Algeria.
The kinds of conditions that now obtain in cities under siege in the sweeping threats of COVID-19 recall Camus’s treatment in these works. Furthermore, the close connections between the conditions enforced by the pandemic and their resemblance to the politics of an oppressive regime are apposite, particularly in the case of Guyana in 2020 under a government with a determination never to give up power and readily disposed to hang on to it by any means necessary.
The case of Italy also stands out. Italy is probably the country worst hit by the virus and Italy is where it all began in the case of the literature. Rome, of course, inherited the seat of the cultural capital from Athens, Greece in Classical times. And Rome was unsurprisingly at the heart of the Renaissance. Great writers of the early Renaissance, and of the history of western literature, such as the most revered of them, Dante Alighieri famed for The Divine Comedy (1300), Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio were Italians. They were followed by the great Englishman Geoffrey Chaucer.
But Italy is where the great works arising from history’s worst epidemic started. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron between 1348 and 1353. This is one of the great masterpieces, consisting of 100 tales told by 10 narrators, and arises from the Bubonic Plague of 1348. Ten young people, seven women and three men, decide to run away to escape the Black Death sweeping the city. They retreat to a country home where they spend two weeks, and to amuse themselves, each tells a story on each of ten nights, meandering around a number of rules and themes that they set themselves.
Against the backdrop of the plague, these tales touch on human life within the environment of the times they inhabited. The tales are governed to a large extent by wit, ranging from great humour to bawdiness to tragedy. Among the common motifs for which these narratives are famous are sex, adultery and debauchery, mercantilism, the middle class and a harsh criticism of the clergy, with religion and the Roman Catholic Church painted in corrupt colours.
The ravaging of the pestilence in Florence is thus echoed by these tales that reflect the worst clandestine relations of the clergy from monk to Monseigneur, who were at the height of politics, government and power over the populace. At the same time, those in the merchant class were rising as freemen with wealth above the serfs in a feudal society. The 10 fictitious youths were members of that class, and they represented the emerging middle class who would eventually infringe on political power.
There is another work of note, but it belongs to very modern times. Written in the twentieth century, it harks back to the Bubonic Plague. Red Noses is a play by British playwright Peter Barnes, written in 1978 but first performed in 1985 by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). This was a very successful performance at The Barbican, the RSC’s London tramping ground. It was done in all the pageantry of mediaeval drama with much costuming and colour, but on a post-modern stage.
Bloomsbury Publishing provides the most compact description. “Red Noses is a black comedy about the black death, a vibrant and slapstick hymn to the power of laughter and the human spirit. There’s no cure for the plague, and Auxere in France, 1348, is populated by the dying.” Marcel Float, a good Christian who wants to do good, starts a group which travels around the gloomy and afflicted countryside to bring cheer, joy and laughter to demoralized humanity.
It is black comedy, which evokes humour from the grim and the serious. The play is farce and sometimes slapstick – another hangover from the ‘Mediaeval Morality play’. It is indeed funny in many parts and satirises the religion of the times from the Flagellants – groups of pilgrims who whip themselves to atone for their sins, to the high order of the Catholic church. It dwells on the way an affliction like the plague can devastate a society, deteriorating it to ridiculous levels. It comments on the resurrection of the human spirit from the depths of spiritual and political degradation. It dramatizes the want of this kind of salvation from a politically and morally depraved society.
Among the most horrifying Gothic tales of the haunting collections of Edgar Allan Poe is the short story “The Mask of The Red Death”, which is one of the starkest condemnations of the abuse of power and the uncaring decadence of the mighty. Published in the USA in 1842, it is nevertheless a gruesome take on the black death of 1348. A dangerous plague known as the Red Death is wiping out people in the kingdom, and Prince Prospero selfishly decides to escape it. He gathers a company of many other wealthy nobles and goes off to hide in his abbey. While multitudes are perishing in the city, in his safe seclusion he hosts a masquerade ball. But an unknown masquerader, wearing the costume of the Red Death appears as a mystery guest. Prospero confronts him, but when the figure is unmasked, it turns out there is nothing but emptiness inside the costume. The Prince falls dead.
Obviously, it is the Red Death itself that invades the abbey, a citadel in which the Prince and the nobles thought they were safe from the plague. It suggests retribution and that the decadent wealthy will not escape their misdeeds or their callous indifference to the suffering of the unprivileged.
Of all the tales, this Gothic horror, “The Mask of the Red Death” speaks most plainly to the link between a plague which takes a toll on the health of a nation and political atrocities which do the same thing. It also suggests the need for action towards the common good rather than selfish pursuit of power.
