Kopkind Colony

by Divad Durant

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

Work in Progress

Or, Making a film together, alone, on two continents, in two languages, in a pandemic

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Who hasn’t come to terms with their own mortality over the past year and a half? So many people had life-changing realizations. Like others, I made a decision based purely on impulse. I went back to school. I hated the idea, in a way. Don’t get me wrong; I left undergrad with a deep appreciation for learning but understood that education can’t be bounded within an academic institution. The pandemic shifted my perspective. I needed a safe space to learn. My job with the New York Fire Department allowed me to stay home with my family for longer stints as I attended school virtually. Most important, I had something to do besides worry. I entered the screenwriting track at CUNY’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. I was processing what was happening in the world, and what was happening with me, and my family. And though communications about our works in progress were remote, I wasn’t alone.

February 22, 2021, 6:13 pm

Divad: I think the father should cry tears when he calms himself down. Not like happy tears or sad tears, more like repressed tears that have escaped. Like one or two tears.

Yera: I tend to think less is better in general. I think when we try to enhance, to point out that there is an emotion going on, it might kind of take the emotion out because the emotion is already there and it’s too much…

Divad: I was just thinking about masculinity and the performance of hiding emotion, but you’re right; the story makes that apparent in the last scene. There’s no reason to double down. I’ve also been listening to a lot of sad songs today, which may be influencing my judgment. [Insert: Kansas, “Dust in the Wind”]

Yera: Laughing out Loud with your depression song.

Yera Dahora is a talented director from São Paulo. For one of my classes, I wrote a short script that got thrown into a metaphorical hat from which first-year directors had to choose a story. Luckily, Yera chose mine.

[Insert: picture of the beach] Yera: Yes, you should be jealous that I am working on the beach.

Divad: You read my mind. I am jealous.

[Insert: picture of a mound of dirty snow] Divad: Greetings from New York.

Yera was based in Brazil and couldn’t travel to the United States. The film would be shot in Brazil, with Brazilian actors and crew. Almost all of our discussion took place via WhatsApp.

March 18, 2:41 pm

Yera: Things are tough in here. Really bad … we are not shooting on April 2 and 3. Lockdown is supposed to end on March 30 but they might extend it. We don’t know. The thing is, we can’t go on with preproduction while we are in the red phase in lockdown. We have to wait to get back to the yellow phase…. I don’t want to be pessimistic … we may not be able to shoot it within this term. On Friday I was like OMG OMG OMG lol, but in case we cannot do it this term we are going to do it, OK. Because I’m super into it, you’re super into it, the little girl [actor] is super into it, the cinematographer is super into it, the production designer is super into it. Everybody. The editor is super into it. He just read the script. So, we are going to do it. Eventually. I just don’t know if I’m going to do it in April, May, or maybe June, July…. So good news. But it’s bad news and good news at the same time. I don’t know what you think about it, but we’re going to do it.

I gave Yera the nickname Captain. She had control of the ship and was leading us to shore on the stormiest of nights. But before I received that message from her, I was a little shook. I had listened to harrowing reports on NPR. Doctors from Brazil spoke of the shortage of oxygen supplies. People with Covid were dying of asphyxiation. The new strain in Brazil was more contagious. I asked myself questions like, Is this right? Is it really possible to execute this safely? Am I the mayor from Jaws right now? We weren’t the only students experiencing setbacks. Scores of Feirstein students were not able to finish their thesis films. CUNY protocols enforced far more restrictions than film industry standards. All of the students experienced a collective anguish. From the outside looking in, these preoccupations seem kind of childish in the context of a pandemic. But creating art is more than just producing an object. I had a cathartic experience writing the script. The story was inspired by a conversation with my daughter—when I was trying to put her to sleep, and accidentally gave her an existential crisis while answering her questions about the universe. I called it Goodnight Sun.

FATHER: The star light we see comes from distant suns in galaxies far, far away.

OCTAVIA: Cool.

FATHER: Another cool thing is some of those suns no longer exist.

OCTAVIA: How do we see the light?

Back when I was starting to transform the story, I contracted Covid-19. During my recovery and isolation, I lost my aunt Hope Johnson. She had health issues from serving as a chaplain during 9/11; those health issues were exacerbated by quarantining. I had to wait several weeks to mourn with my family. I didn’t need more time to worry. I remembered that Hope and her twin sister, Janice, had borne witness to my transformation into fatherhood. Hope had always shared with me stories of her late father. My favorite was about how he made sure to let his daughters know there was no Santa Claus. “He wanted us to know that a black man bought these gifts,” Hope said, with a cackle. All of these things had been in my head and heart as I wrote.

March 28, 12:31 am

Yera: The governor has extended the lockdown period until April 11…. Two weeks ago we had about an average of 2,000 deaths per day and now we have nearly 4,000 deaths per day which is just crazy. But I’m rehearsing with the kid via Zoom. It is not ideal … but we are having a good time and she’s advancing.

Yera shared casting videos and pics. We talked through each tension in a scene. The script was translated into Portuguese. I worked with my friend Michi Osato, who helped me read through the translated version so that I could continue to share notes with Yera.

May 15, 11:09 pm

Michi: The father says, “You used the bathroom, right? I don’t want you to pee the bed from a tickle attack.” In the translation, it says, “I don’t want anyone peeing the bed.” I don’t know if it matters to you.

The film was finally shot. It is currently in post-production. Yera will be traveling to the US soon. My first year of grad school is over, and even as I rummage through WhatsApp messages, all of it feels unreal. What we managed to do together…

I told Yera that I felt like crying after seeing this.

Divad Durant is a father, partner, screenwriter/director, social media strategist, and a community organizer with Justice Committee. He’s currently obtaining his MFA at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College/CUNY. To keep posted on the development of Goodnight Sun follow the film’s Instagram account, @goodnightsunfilm. Divad was a participant in Kopkind’s political camp in 2011.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece orig-inally appeared on The Nation‘s website on June 23, 2021. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and the Nation crew.

Bonus: Kopkind Alum Buffalo’s Likely Next Mayor

Two years ago, India Walton was at Tree Frog Farm, a ‘camper’ in Kopkind’s summer session for political journalists and activists. The theme that summer was Democratizing the Economy, and India, deeply involved with organized sectors working to establish land trusts and permanent affordable housing in Buffalo, New York, came with the rest of that year’s crew to exchange ideas, learn from one another and experience the combination of intellectual stimulation and radical relaxation that are Kopkind’s hallmarks. On Tuesday, June 22, 2021, she made headlines all over the country and the world, upsetting Buffalo’s four-term incumbent mayor in the Democratic primary—a victory fueled by a plain-talking grassroots campaign, the combined experience of those organized sectors, the Working Families Party, the teachers union, 1199, DSA, a host of newer organizations and the considerable savvy and charisma of the candidate herself. Leader writers have been emphasizing the fact that India calls herself a socialist; more central to her victory, she is also a coalition builder, an organizer, a passionate advocate. This was a low-turnout election won by retail politics. There’s an old saw in politics that never dulls: ‘People want to be asked for their vote.’ India and her team asked and got their voters out. With a mind-boggling combination of arrogance and error, the incumbent mayor did not. (He’s thinking about doing that now, contemplating a write-in campaign being encouraged by an unalluring claque.) Neither the Republicans nor any independents will be on the November ballot, so India is on the cusp of becoming the first woman to lead the Queen City. See indiawalton.com for more. Go India!

by Malkia Devich-Cyril

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

Loss Runs Like a River Through My Life

Oakland

Dedicated to my mother, Janet Cyril; my wife, Alana Devich-Cyril, my aunts Sandy and Marion, my godsister Kafi, my Uncle Tony, my cousins Javana, Njuzi and BJ; my friends Margo, Sia, Art, Yulanda, Elandria, Lana, Rahwa; and all those lost but here, unnamed.

Before the bodies overflowed the morgues and required trucks to house our dead, before the ventilator shortages and the mask of vulnerable witness worn by journalists and medical professionals alike, loss ran like a river through my life. It wasn’t just my young adult experience of watching my mother die from sickle cell anemia or, thirteen years later, holding my beloved wife in my arms as she died, at 42, from cancer. It wasn’t just that the pandemic struck only one year after Alana’s death, and one month after I left my organizational role of twenty years as founder and director of the Youth Media Council and MediaJustice. It wasn’t even that in the eighteen months before the Covid-19 virus became one of the ten deadliest pandemics in history, I had somehow weathered the death of seven close friends and family members, with another five dead during 2020, not one from Covid. No, it was about so much more than my dead alone.

It was the fact that before the pandemic ever hit, complex and long-term bereavement resulting from a pattern of premature and traumatic death was already an utterly routine experience for the 46.8 million people who identified as black in the 2019 census. As the pandemic heightened the overlapping crises of resurgent white nationalism, unfettered police violence and the discriminatory distribution of climate disaster impacts, it also split open a vein deep in our collective body politic to reveal a truth black folks have been living with for generations: grief is endemic to the black experience in America, and the effects of living inside a shared context of grief, one in which loss is not simply an experience but a mechanism of racial disadvantage, are often disregarded. The injury is profound—socially, economically, culturally; it can accelerate your own death.

In the pandemic, we have started to talk more about it. One bright afternoon during quarantine, when I finally tired of my failed attempts to cut my own hair, my barber and I claimed the back porch to fade me up. As usual, we got to talking politics. We got to talking about feeling pressed and violated from every direction. As he readied to leave, the conversation turned toward grief. I asked how he felt. Many things from the past year are hazy, but I remember how he shook his head, slowly, and said, “Bottom line, there really ain’t no justice for us.”

There’s no justice in the fact that in April 2020, a month into lockdown, 70 percent of the deceased in Louisiana were black; or that, nationally, black, Native and Pacific Islander Americans have suffered the greatest per capita death tolls. Black people were up to four times more likely to die from the disease, when adjusted for age. For every death to Covid or related complications, at least nine additional people are affected. Nearly one in three black Americans knows someone who has died. Grief could jeopardize black health for years to come. Yet now, in 2021, as we attempt to stem the wave of Covid deaths, disinformation targets black communities, exploiting our long history with medical racism by comparing lifesaving vaccines to eugenics atrocities, such as forced sterilization. Despite our disproportionate deaths, we’re told to reject science, medicine and journalism and to embrace conspiracy theories.

Covid aside, black people are exceptionally acquainted with death. By the time we turn 60, we are 90 percent more likely than our white counterparts to experience at least four deaths of family members. By age 10, according to one study, black children born in the United States were three times more likely than white children to have lost their mothers and twice as likely to have lost their fathers. Debra Umberson’s research concludes that “exposure to death is a unique source of adversity for black Americans that contributes to lifelong racial inequality.”

My pandemic experience has taught me that our collective grief is a morbid symptom of racial capitalism; that the mechanisms of grief’s racial disadvantage are structural, widespread and historic; that deep in our living bones we know that when it comes to grief’s unequal racial burden, there can be no comfort without connection, no relief without reparations, no healing without justice. It also pushed me to move closer to the hollowed-out loneliness of the grief that had become my familiar, to welcome the shadow I couldn’t shake instead of running from it.

In February 2020, when news of the pandemic spread across the country, my wife’s death was so fresh, one year gone; I could still smell her life in our silent apartment. I already knew how the internet could connect people. Our wedding had been livestreamed. Our renewal of vows and Alana’s last time outside were broadcast on Facebook Live. So was her funeral. I knew from the two years that we had spent fighting for her life that the internet could provide isolation’s antidote. That it could democratize care. That it had helped me survive the death of the person I loved most in the world. I turned to it again.

At first obsessively, my fingers and eyes hunted for facts, for deaths, for escape, protection, something. Then I got more intentional. Sitting in the room where Alana died, my silver laptop open and glowing, I remembered how the internet had joined us to a beloved community. To my right, atop the dresser we bought to hold Alana’s hospice supplies, was the altar that held her sparkling red slippers, her ashes, the corsage she gave me on our wedding day. To my left, a wall of family photos, mine and hers. Ours. It was there, suspended in mid-life, six feet from everything I loved, that I decided the internet would help me negotiate survival through the current of black death and resulting collective grief that seemed to shock every community Covid touched.

With the light fading, I upgraded my Zoom account and created a weekly series that would later be known as Pandemic Joy. The third Sunday in March 2020 was our first meeting, just a few squares of people I trusted and loved.

I acknowledge that the internet can be indecipherable to those who haven’t committed themselves to its study; scary and unmerciful when unregulated and unrestrained. On one hand, I experience it as this amorphous place with no definite rules or rights. It is, in a particular light, a brutal place where my black activist self, my black queer self, our many black selves, are frequently doxxed, harassed and discriminated against; a place where my dignity has been violated, and all the data that comes with me exposed or exploited for profit. As an avid user, especially of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc., I am, in some ways, a digital resident without citizenship in an invisible nation without democracy, owned by distant corporations and some of the richest people in the world.

And yet, less than a month after the pandemic went viral, there I was, at a kitchen table littered with unread books, my hands a poised arc above my laptop, rocking and clapping on a Sunday morning. Singing. What do you know about how a heavy song can lighten a load? My ancestors knew it: homegrown work songs torn from the diaphragm, pushed like a breath from the throat. And there it was, a song bleeding from the mic of my headphones. A red river of music refusing to clot. A melody bled out over computer speakers, across a video platform. And we were somehow together, pandemic survivors, quarantined and huddled each around our own bright screens. Despite the contradictions and dangers, in the chaos of those early days of confinement, we used an often-unaffordable internet to find ourselves and sing—defying the isolation called in by contagion and state neglect. We moved, as escapees often do, through troubled terrain to arrive at one another.

Despite a media ecosystem that drowns us in information but denies us insight, despite the fact that one in three African Americans and latinx people still doesn’t have home access to computer technology, the internet opened a channel through which hidden bereavement was transformed into a visible public health crisis. But to amplify our collective voice, we need the work of organizations: like MediaJustice, Free Press and others in the Change the Terms Coalition that confront Facebook’s failure to restrain violent white supremacists. Like Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror Project, whose livestreamed car caravan protests helped transform our grief into grievance. Like Marked by COVID, which uses social media to lift up the faces of our dead and hold the state accountable. We need the powerful leadership of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, which create space for us to mobilize collective loss into collective action.

Quarantined, we sang together, we cried, we remembered. Using digital apps, I created a socially distant swim team, launched online grief groups, an online Freedom Cleanse. This creativity, wielding what cultural tools are on hand in simultaneous service to grief and freedom, is part of a lineage of black radical resilience. Just as enslaved Africans once went to the “meeting place” to build community and plan rebellions, we found our pandemic meeting places. The internet, the one I spent decades fighting for, helped accompany me in loss and to turn toward grief, and turn grief toward life.

Malkia Devich-Cyril is an award-winning activist, a writer, and a public speaker on the issues of digital rights, narrative power, black liberation and collective grief. Devich-Cyril, now a senior fellow at MediaJustice and the organization’s founding executive director, was a participant in Kopkind’s political camp in 2002.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece orig-inally appeared on The Nation‘s website on June 16, 2021. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and the Nation crew.

Bonus: Oh, ‘Tis Love, ‘Tis Love …

As we near the close of June and the fifty-second anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, which began June 28, 1969, we celebrate not just the pioneers and present-day activists of the modern lgbtq freedom movement but all those who for all time, in all parts of the world, followed their heart’s same-sex desire. Here, below, a few clips from John Scagliotti’s wonderful film Before Homosexuals: From Ancient Times to Victorian Crimes, a prequel to Before Stonewall. For more information about the film, to arrange educational or other screenings and to view the trailer, click here. (Because these clips are high resolution, you may have to pause for a bit after pressing play to allow for buffering.) And now, the clips!

Click here: on Astypalaia’s ancient erotic graffiti.

Click here: on lesbian love spells in ancient Rome.

Click here: on Florence and the verb ‘to Florence’.

by S. Eudora Smith

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

Democracy on a Ventilator

Washington, DC

I wore two masks this past year—one to guard against Covid-19, another to hide my fear of the political violence that infected the nation’s capital.

Eleven thousand people died from the coronavirus in DC. Nearly 50,000 were diagnosed with Covid out of a population of more than 710,000. And at the US Capitol, five people died when a white mob incited by then-President Donald Trump ransacked the building in an attack on democracy and the sanctity of the vote. As Washington reopens, it’s easy to celebrate survival, though it’s hard to claim real security from Covid and the other virus that has left American democracy on a ventilator. Even if the source of only one of those will be formally investigated—leaving prosecutions the only hope for answers about the unprecedented attack on the Capitol and capital—what happened mustn’t be forgotten.

District residents endured what no other place in the country has—a lockdown for a public health crisis and a crisis of democracy. After January 6, tanks had rolled into town. Twenty-six thousand National Guard troops were amassed. Surrounding waterways were patrolled by federal marshals. Armed soldiers and military vehicles mingled with the monuments and symbols that tell the official story of America, the postcard version that visitors from across the country and the world take home with them. Shortly before the inauguration of Joe Biden, I wrote a friend: “At the request of the Secret Service, the bridges leading to Virginia will be closed from the 19th-21st. (A main bridge has already been closed.) I immediately thought of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Manhattan is a penal colony, and all the bridges out are wired to explode if anyone tries to escape.”

We got a taste of living in a state of siege. I’d imagined the nearby on-ramp to the interstate as my escape route in the event of armed conflict … tanks blocked the ramp.

We got a taste of what it’s like to live in a state of siege. I had to go no further than the corner. My home was on the periphery of a sweeping secured zone that included the Capitol and the National Mall, which were cordoned off by a massive chain-link fence. To the south this zone included the offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is bordered by a major interstate. I had imagined the nearby on-ramp to the interstate as my escape route if the capital descended into armed conflict, but National Guard tanks blocked the ramp.

Like other Washingtonians, I looked at the troops and worried, “Will Trump leave without a fight? Will there be blood in the streets before it’s all over?” And, as important, “Should we even trust the Guard to oppose the insurrectionists? Might they turn on one another, and then on We the People?”

The first night I drove home from the grocery store, two young Guard members stopped me as I tried to turn at the light to enter my complex. “I live there,” I said, pointing at the complex, ready to provide proof of address. After a brief pause, I was let through, though I didn’t understand why I would be questioned in the first place. As a black woman, I wasn’t the reason the Guard has been deployed to the city.

Today the soldiers are gone. The last of them departed a few weeks ago. The metal fences that cordoned off the National Mall following the insurrection are gone too. I am leaving as well, for an ordinary reason, a different job. It strikes me, though, at this moment of reflection, that so much of what I love about DC has been eclipsed by memories of contagion and these multiple and still-uncertain efforts at containment.

Covid-19 cases have been reduced here. More than 42 percent of residents have been fully vaccinated. People talk of a return to normal, as if the crises we have experienced were just random interruptions in an otherwise predictable stream of events, not the movie trailer of disruptions to come. Health care experts anticipate a rise in cases in the fall and winter among unvaccinated people, and there are likely to be more variants, more pandemics in the future.

But for now, joggers leave puffs of dirt in their wake on the paths along the National Mall. Friends lounge on the bright green grass by the Washington Monument. Tourists pack the sidewalks on Independence and Pennsylvania avenues. People are out, masks off, while our democracy remains in critical condition.

S. Eudora Smith (a pen name) is a writer and editor. She is an advisor to Kopkind and was a mentor in 2009 and 2017.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece orig-inally appeared on The Nation‘s website on June 9, 2021. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and the Nation crew.

Bonus: Mimi Morton, a Memory

On Memorial Day weekend people gathered at Packer Corners in Guilford, Vermont, just up the road from Tree Frog Farm, to celebrate the life of Mimi Morton, a longtime friend of Kopkind, who died of cancer on January 10. Mimi had come to Guilford in the ‘old days’, visiting from Montreal—where she was a college professor, print and radio journalist—and living for a time at Tree Frog when Andy was alive. Many years later, she moved permanently to Guilford, married Rick Zamore, and the two have been great supporters of our project, regularly gracing public events with their presence, raising incisive points or questions and bringing great dishes to every potluck. Before she died, Mimi completed Before the Age of Reason: A Memoir of Racism, a series of autobiographical vignettes tracing the obvious and not-so-obvious strands of racism growing up white and middle class in Riverton, New Jersey. Below, a lightly edited vignette. The book is available from Onion River Press/Phoenix Books.

Catholics on my mother’s side, Baptists and agnostics on my father’s side, constituted the religious diversity of my family until my paternal cousin and his wife took the trajectory from Agnosticism to Unitarianism to Amyway to AA to Born Again Christianity and the conservative politics that went with it. Eventually they dropped off the family roster beyond holiday emails.

Economic diversity was inevitable during the Depression and the 1950s, when my father quietly supported his indigent mother and brother and a few divorced sisters before more solvent marriages got them back on their feet. 

Racial diversity would have been unlikely had this not been America, where many families identified Native Americans somewhere in their rural nineteenth-century background. By the twenty-first, some families identified African Americans in their genealogy, but my family was not one.

My father was of Scots descent. He spent his adolescence in Jockey Hollow, a nearly unpopulated locale in the Southern Tier of New York State which I have never been able to find on a map. He spoke of Clifford Cellam, a cousin who was, according to family lore, “crazy headed,” my father’s way of alluding to behaviors, particularly drunkenness, which indicated to my father and other relatives that Clifford carried Native American blood. Were alcoholism the mark of First Nation identity, nearly every man and woman in my father’s family could be identified as Indians.

Unlike now, the early twentieth century was relatively easy to ascend in class. My mother’s family was Methodist English until my grandmother married my Irish grandfather and converted to Catholicism. My grandfather worked his way up from bricklayer’s apprentice to carpenter and finally to a partner in a building firm that he ultimately passed on to my father. Like my father, my grandfather supported his sisters when they were out of seamstress work or abandoned in marriage. The exception was his sister Mary, who married above herself, to a dentist. The dentist was South American; the grown-ups never said which country, much as Americans have referred to Africa as a country rather than a continent. Dr. Andrade and his Irish-American wife lived in a four-story brownstone on East 95^th Street in New York, where my mother spent several magical Christmases (servants, lighted candles on a towering fir tree, midnight mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, transported in a hansom cab).

But there was the case of Natalie, Great Aunt Mary’s only child, a squat, dark girl with, according to my mother, “Indian blood” via her father from a nameless South American tribe. My mother’s stories of Natalie depicted her as the family scapegoat. “Oh mother, I’d rather die,” Natalie wailed when her mother insisted she wear every one of her three winter coats so as to lighten her suitcase as they returned from a trip to her father’s homeland.

After Dr. Andrade died, the family would never again order additions to their mono-grammed Tiffany flatware and Limoges dinnerware. But appearances must be kept up, and it fell to Natalie to cull the lesser of the family possessions for Christmas presents for my grandmother, such as poultry shears with remains of a fowl still stuck to the blades, and a pair of desiccated men’s suspenders (her father’s?) which, when stretched out, stayed that way. 

I saw the interior of Aunt Mary’s 95^th Street house as a small child after she died. We stood in the foyer, the smoke from my father’s and grandfather’s cigarettes swirling in the shaft of sunlight between heavy window drapes. I couldn’t read the funny papers splayed on the floor, but I was fascinated by an object on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs: a plaster camel, draped in fringed and tasseled velvet, atop which sat a little turbaned black boy similarly dressed in velvet and holding in each hand a round white electric globe. This object suggested wealth, in dwindling supply now that Natalie’s father and mother were gone. Years later my mother interpreted for me: “The neighborhood was changing for the worse into Spanish Harlem.” I pictured an elderly Natalie sitting on her stoop with neighborhood women. “She says the neighbors steal from her but where else can she go? She speaks their language.” A non-English language, a language of the conquered. “She was a throwback,” my mother explained. “Not our blood.”

by Zia Jaffrey

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

A Prisoner Videotaped Covid Conditions Last Year. Where Is He Now?

New York City

Out of one dream, another dream is born:

Yesterday, I heard someone from the West Bank say that denying Palestinians the vaccine is another act of genocide.

I thought of you, Dion, and the video you posted from federal prison last year, in Michigan.

Are you alive? I don’t know what happened to you.

In a green knitted cap, a white mask, and your dreads, you took us around with that contraband phone, saying: 

I fear retaliation for doing this. I’m putting my life on the line. 

You pleaded for our help, showing us bunk bed after bunk bed, in close proximity; suits and ironed clothes hung neatly on hangers from any rim they could find.  

I got a few little symptoms, but I don’t know if I’m gonna make it—they just sittin’ on us, waiting for us to die.

And the mattress, covered in clear plastic, where somebody had been really sick.

They ain’t sprayed the bed off, or nothing. They just left it like that.

Dion, is that your real name? I have looked for you everywhere. Are you alive? 

Look at these conditions? How can we practice social distancing when they got us all on top of each other like this?

You showed us the nearby area where men lay covered in thin blankets, shivering. The sick area. The men, barely responding. The checkered floor.

Did you meet the fate of the others?

Another image, now: a young man, whose sentence was two years, for possession; eyes closed; on the upper deck of a bunk bed. “Felon.” 

I can’t breathe. 

The price he will pay.  

Or did I dream that, Dion, from another video? Not from FCI Milan, but FCI Elkton, or Gaza? 

We need you all to be a voice for us.

Your deep vibrato. That cough. The mask.

Had to have a hunger strike to get these masks.

Heads of young people pop in and out of the frame—one, two, in sky-blue knitted caps; matching scarves, covering noses and mouths.

You take us into the bathroom: the unwashed windows, with unknown splatter—beige, the color of who knows what—the few sinks, the few shower stalls. Three stalls, to be precise. For eighty-plus men. Maybe ten sinks.

The showers—look how nasty and filthy it is—they ain’t sprayed it down with no bleach.

We see leftover scum, soap, rivers of it, overflowing from the neighboring stall, and sitting idly around a drain.

We had to go on a hunger strike just to get these masks—and get these little cleaning supplies that we do got.

You show us the SHU, outside the window:

People in there just waitin’ to die.

Out of one dream, another dream is born:

A different video, now. A journalist in Gaza. She explains that everyone was given an hour to leave the media building. Twelve stories high. “Hamas intelligence” target. Lawyers’ offices. Doctors’ offices. The journalists made way for the residents and their children who lived on the six floors below. Two warning missiles, fifteen minutes apart. Time’s up. So they took nothing. Building obliterated.

On the road, the next morning, the car in front of hers is destroyed suddenly. Had her driver not paused to answer his phone, she would not have survived.

What is the name of that thing? A drone? A hellfire missile?

We need y’all help out here, man.

Dion, where are you? 

And what will she tell her children, should anything happen to her? 

“Forgive me … this is my duty … I have to deliver this message to the world.”

Another video, now, of a little girl in Gaza. She was sleeping beside Mama, she says. When she woke up, she was surrounded by ash. 

Where the Jay-Z’s at, man? I thought black lives matter.

Ain’t no disrespecting this. This is lasting genocide. 

“We are just an ordinary Palestinian couple. Between us, we have lost thirty relatives.”

I fear retaliation. I am putting my life on the line.

Dion? 

Dion, where are you? 

Are you alive?

I don’t benefit from any of this. My mom always told me, sacrifice is greater than blessing.

Zia Jaffrey is writing a book about the Holy Land Foundation case. The form of this piece is an homage to Mahmoud Darwish‘s Memory for Forgetfulness. Zia is a friend of Kopkind.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece orig-inally appeared on The Nation‘s website on June 2, 2021. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and the Nation crew.

Bonus: There Is Still Beauty in the World

From California, Kopkinder Josh Wilson sent us some pictures (above and below) that he took in the mountains and at Bassi Falls. “I find myself continually amazed,” he writes, “by the water cycles of California and the West. The snow, the melt, the water rushing in clear, cold sheets and carving out these stream and riverbeds, and tumbling down waterfalls. This in contrast to the incredible drought of the present moment, and the dependence and vulnerability of human civilization in relation to these cycles. Being here, far beyond the city, makes us more aware of our place in these cycles. Observing the infrastructure built to control and channel this water is to glimpse marvels of engineering and hubris. … Bassi Falls, there are two of them, one 130’ high, and fed by Lake Tahoe. It was cold and clear the day we were there, even as the temperatures climbed, hitting 106 degrees just fifty miles west in Sacramento. Even with the water so low, it was early enough in the season that the flow was strong. During a high-water year the whole area would have been submerged.”