My Guide to a 21st Century Pandemic
By Nabih Ghani
During the fall 2020 semester I took a class called Interpreting Illness taught by Dr. Sheila Bock. Throughout the semester we learned about narrative patterns that surrounded certain illnesses and diseases. These narrative patterns were strikingly similar to some of those that arose during the current pandemic. One of our projects for the semester was to create a creative work that reflected how the course had affected our thinking and observations around health and illness, so I decided to make a zine. A zine (a small booklet of texts and images) was the perfect medium for me to capture what I had learned throughout the semester, because drawing is something that I enjoy doing for fun. I would often doodle on my notes in my general chemistry and biology classes to keep my hands busy when I wasn’t taking actual notes. In 2019, I started a notebook and filled a page with drawings and important things that happened to me each week. I continued this in 2020 (doing a page every two weeks so I could manage it better), and I plan to keep doing it for the foreseeable future. Instead of doodling on my notes, I created a dedicated place to draw and gather my thoughts. A zine was a great way to implement the ideas from my class in a way that I have been doing for the past two years.
All images and text/Nabih Ghani.
The idea behind my zine was looking at the pandemic through a personal lens and contrasting it with a larger view of patterns that I also noticed. I grouped the pages in the zine based on general larger themes where one page is focused on my own life and the following one about a more large-scale observation about the pandemic. I wanted to split it up this way because a lot of what we read about had to do with the interactions between larger narratives and their effects on individuals, like how narratives around HIV and AIDS can both have a profound impact on a person as well as the public perception of a whole group of people. The title I chose was “My Guide to a 21st Century Pandemic” and the title page is meant to symbolize the idea of taking a closer look at a world that has been thrown into a pandemic with the magnifying glass focused on an Earth that is covered in spike proteins.
The second page is meant to examine the idea of social responsibility despite mild discomfort. Wearing a mask with glasses often leads to the glasses fogging up. While this can be annoying there is real value behind wearing a mask. Videos of people that are vehemently opposed to wearing a mask despite the very minimal discomfort expose ideas about individualism and social responsibility that are culturally prominent in America among groups like anti-vaxxers.
The third page examines the blame that becomes associated with the description of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” This type of phrasing that has been used when discussing COVID-19 by people like Donald Trump deflects blame towards China for causing the pandemic that engulfs the world. Even beyond a perpetuation of stereotypes that portray Asians as backwards (seeing foreigners as bringers of disease is nothing new), there is a lack of responsibility that is being taken. Ultimately, the over 400,000 Americans who have died, have died as a result of poor management of the pandemic in America. The response of the United States to a pandemic is not the responsibility of the Chinese government just as those same people who have died are not citizens of China.
The fourth page is meant to convey the ideas of rumors spreading within my own personal networks. Rumors of disease are a huge way that people engage with disease in their daily lives. This page has a drawn screenshot of a Discord chat when someone in the chat found out our microbiology professor got COVID-19, which is an example of how rumors spread in the context of our current pandemic. Our professor had never actually disclosed this to our class directly, someone in the Discord server found out through someone they knew that took another one of his classes. This professor would end every lecture by saying “Stay safe, wash your hands, and don’t touch your face” and the last message in the chat reflects the irony that he ended up contracting the virus. Our personal networks are important in interacting with the idea of disease, and these networks have changed as technology has progressed.
The fifth page reflects the idea of rumors evolving into a larger conspiracy that shows distrust and intentionality behind the disease in the 5G conspiracy theory, that 5G towers were the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. In class we examined the origins of conspiracy theories about disease and how they often reflect a distrust in medical authority or the government, and we also discussed why these theories may arise. A similar distrust and intentionality that underlies the 5G conspiracy exists in conspiracy theories about the government creating AIDS and unleashing it on Africa as an experiment.
The sixth page’s caption reads “2-in-1 pandemic base of operations and current events distraction,” which is meant to reflect how technology has affected how the world functions in a pandemic. My laptop has essentially become where much of my life takes place. I go to my laptop to attend class, and I go to my laptop to take a break. The way this disease has affected the world would have been different if there was no access to the internet which allows for less in-person contact. The seventh drawing is meant to show the inequality that accompanies and is perpetuated by a pandemic where people who have less money and little access to healthcare are more likely to die even though they are the most essential to keep the world functioning. The arrow on the right side has a dollar sign near the top. People who have less money must work to survive and put themselves at risk to keep the world running while at the same time not having the same quality of healthcare. It is important to recognize that disease is not something that affects everyone equally.
The last page reads “Born into a changing world.” The drawing is of a baby wearing a face shield. In August, two of my cousins were born, one in Missouri and one in Pakistan. Thinking about them led me to wonder how the world will be different following this pandemic. I was born in early 2001, and I have had teachers in high school talk about how amazed they were that people in my class do not remember living in a world pre-9/11. The same kinds of things are going to be said to my cousins as they grow up about not living in a pre-COVID-19 world.This project and class were very applicable during this pandemic and have allowed me to consider disease in a context that is unfamiliar to many pre-med students like myself. Examining all these ideas and seeing many of them play out in real time has made me contemplate a lot about how I want to approach ideas surrounding illness as a future healthcare professional.
Nabih Ghani is an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas majoring in Biology with a pre-professional concentration and minoring in Neurology. In the future he plans on going to medical school to become a physician.