"A writer is best read in their environment," the narrator of "Extinction" by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi tells us, and while she's saying this to explain why she's gone all the way to the Catalan region of Spain to study Joseph Pla, chronicler of the 1918 flu, the thought could be turned on the person who said it. After all, the narrator is herself an almost compulsive writer. She writes notes that she puts all over her wall. She handwrites snail mail letters to her bestie Beatriz. The narrator has come all this way to read Pla in their environment, but what is the right environment in which to read the narrator's work, which is the text of "Extinction"?
The narrator herself isn't sure. When it comes to which country she belongs to, she's never quite felt like she belonged anywhere. She was born in America to a family that had previously called Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan its homes--the three nations America was either conducting wars in or threatening to declare war against for most of the 21st Century prior to the outbreak of the COVID epidemic. Her family resents her because, as an American, she cannot identify with the suffering they have endured and continue to endure. The whole family suffers from a variety of illnesses they blame on America's wars against their previous homelands, but they deny that the narrator might have some share in their suffering, because she is a healthy American.
Speaking of citizenship of various countries, the narrator has an interesting notion concerning sick and healthy people. She thinks all of humanity--or at least all of humanity outside her family, anyway--holds dual citizenship in two kingdoms, the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Most people prefer to forget that they are dual citizens, and prefer to only use the "well" passport. It's only sickness that forces us to remember our essential fragility, that as much as we try to forget, a tiny virus can make us very sick and a simple slip can incapacitate us. Only in the narrator's family, though, her family does the opposite. They only have citizenship in the kingdom of the sick, a place to which they deny her citizenship. It's a kind of cultural Munchausen Syndrome that the narrator can't take part in.
The family is so wrapped up in its own woes, they are unable to see that the narrator has woes of her own. Some of those maladies include a share in the suffering of watching their former homes be invaded. The narrator's share might be less than her family's, but she still has some share, nonetheless. Because she's been denied the ability to claim her "sick citizenship," she doesn't even realize that she is sick. But both friends she comes across, Beatriz and Paz, can see it rather easily. Paz calls it being "always in your head," but Beatriz calls it what it is: depression.
The two friends and their two countries
Beatriz and Paz each have their own way of dealing with their dual citizenship in the countries of Sick and Well. When we first meet Beatriz, it seems like she is a gaudy tourist from Well trying to appropriate the culture of Sick. The narrator meets her in a death cafe, a volunteer-run space for people to talk about death, eat cake, and drink tea. Without offering any personal judgment about death cafes, since I've never participated, I think it's still fair to say that there's a possibility for a downside with them. At their worst, they might be a home for people who fit the description that goes with the worst meaning of "goth," a sort of fabricated fascination with the macabre. I'm sure real death cafes have plenty of good, too, but what's important is that for a reader meeting Beatriz and learning that she's a well-off woman who's lived her whole life in the ancestral home in Madrid, we could see her fascination with death cafes as sort of slumming for kicks. But that's not what it is. Beatriz is really sick. The narrator has noted her "arthropod" fingers. The narrator associates arthropods to things that are rotting, as seen by her pondering the "corrupted exoskeleton" of society soon after. It turns out that Beatriz really is sick. She's dying, actually. Her participation in the death cafe was her trying to come to terms with her turning in her Well passport and claiming her Sick one.
Paz, on the other hand, hates to think about her Sick citizenship. She kvetches about how her looks are fading, although the narrator thinks she's quite pretty. Paz goes out looking for men to make her feel desirable and young. Unlike Beatriz's trendy activity of death cafes, Paz chooses contact dancing (also known as contact improvisation), which is all about moving and "gaining momentum in life." Paz can't even stand to have the narrator sitting in her room, which is apparently on the other side of the bathroom from Paz's, thinking about plagues and sickness:
“I can’t live like this!” she exclaimed. Her tone was more severe now, anxious and breathless. “With you next door,” she sighed while stomping across my room to the wall where I’d pinned my favorite quotations. She squinted in preparation to read out loud from them. “With you,” she repeated, “writing these bizarre things on the wall, like what’s this,” she said in a demeaning tone, her finger squashing the words as though they were gnats, “illnesses solipsistic grip, and what kind of question is this, what does it mean to speak illness?” Then she turned to me and said, “What do you mean, what does it mean?”
About the pandemic and yet not
So to review, we have a woman whose whole family lives in the Kingdom of the Sick, who is herself banished from that kingdom, and she's gone to Spain to study a writer who lived during the 1918 pandemic. That was the time of what used to be known as the "Spanish flu," but it had to be rebranded during the COVID outbreak. In order to fight a wave of Asian hate the pandemic brought, many people argued against calling COVID-19 the "Wuhan flu" or "Chinese coronavirus" or any of the other many things that circulated early in the pandemic. This led some people to ask what was wrong with tagging it as "Chinese," since the pandemic of about a hundred years prior had been called "Spanish." In response, many people belatedly stopped using the term "Spanish flu." But in any case, she's in Spain and writing about that pandemic, and this is all just a few months before the great pandemic of our age begins, although the narrator doesn't know it.
The narrator explains that her interest in plague literature has to do with what it teaches us about society: "The deeper my living-self delved into the subject of the 1918 pandemic, the more I came to believe that plague literature, literature produced in times of unfathomable collective crisis, was especially effective at exposing society’s corrupted exoskeleton, at revealing who was on the front lines of this war we call life; at revealing who was being sacrificed by whom and at what price, to what end, etc."
For a long time, the narrator is re-writing the words of others, penning quotes from their work and putting those words up on her wall. Unable to unlock something she can't understand in herself, she hopes that usurping another writer, or allowing herself to be usurped by them, will "bring (her) some depth of understanding, a key that would unlock for (her) the strange destiny of (her) life."
This is, it so happens, the path that most writers take early in their development. They find a writer they like, and they crib their work or write highly derivative pieces. The narrator has started her self-discovery by trying to simply retrace the work of others, but she won't stop there. "I wanted my life to mirror his to truly understand what it means to produce literature when the world is being annihilated, when people are dying on masse," the narrator says. But when is the world not being annihilated? When are people not dying en masse? Saying you want to learn to produce literature (write) when the world is being annihilated is the same and just saying to want to learn to write. As Beatriz and the narrator speculate, the pandemic isn't just due for a comeback (as we, the readers, know all too well it will soon come back), but "had always been there." So all writing is pandemic writing. All writing takes place as the world is about to collapse.
Learning to write under these conditions is what she's really come to do. She's come to learn to write, because writing is the thing that unlocks both her citizenships for her. Outcast from the Kingdom of the Sick, she's discovered one malady that will allow her in, and that is the "feverish obsession" of "writ(ing) when the world is on the cusp of vanishing." She intends, like Joseph Pla before her, to give in to "the diabolical mania of writing." Writing is the one Kingdom of the Sick where there are never illegal immigrants. Everyone is allowed in.
What it means to be dead in "Extinction"
When the pandemic started, a lot of people in literary circles were wringing their hands about who would write the great story for the age of the pandemic. Who would write Love in the Time of COVID-19? Some responded that the great story of the pandemic wouldn't come during the pandemic; it would have to wait until someone had time to put it in a little bit of perspective.
In some ways, "Extinction" is a great story about the pandemic--about all pandemics--that has plenty of perspective. But I don't think it's mostly about the pandemic. I know it's possible to read it in a particular way that places the emphasis on the pandemic. Something like this: A woman leaves America months before the 2020 pandemic in order to obsess about pandemics. She thinks about the cyclical nature of pandemics, how they might be punishment for wars, and indeed, her family has suffered because of the wars of the early 21st century. After she's been in Spain, the sort-of-origin site of a previous pandemic, for a few months, she and her friend both die. So she must have died just as the new pandemic was about to start, so her death is somehow symbolic of the cyclical nature of pandemics.
But this story isn't just about the sicknesses that kill millions. It's about how writing can help us survive them, how it helps us to push off extinction a bit longer.
Beatriz dies and leaves her papers to the narrator, meaning she has turned into words. And that's exactly how the narrator describes herself dying: "That’s when it happened. That’s when I began to disappear. When my turn was up. When I began to turn to ash along with her papers. To become words."
To write is a kind of death where we become words. All writing, or at least any writing that confronts "the world being annihilated, when people are dying on masse," is sort of writing "from the bard," from the limbic space that exists after the writer has died and become words and before the writer is born into the world again. The "extinction" in "Extinction" isn't just millions of people dying or the end of humanity, it's the extinction that happens to a human being every time she sets out to write something true.
After this death, while writing something authentic, is when the writer's true character appears: "Death can be very clarifying. It can help place blame where blame is due. I blame my family’s extreme emotional reactivity, their fragility, for my stoic behavior. My true character—tender, wounded, anxious, sensitive to the pain of others—was hidden, tucked away. It has only emerged now that I am dead." What has died is something fake, the thing that believes it is only sick or only well. It isn't just war and pandemic that is cyclical; it is also the ability of humans through writing to kill off what is false and make room for something new and true.
I love the Image
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