Journaling the Pandemic
The medical humanities journal RHIME has recently published an article detailing a local Facebook group titled Journaling the Pandemic. The group was created during the early days of lockdown to encourage members to share with each other art contributions whether in writing, poetry, paintings, drawings or photography – the members’ experience during the pandemic.
Mariella Scerri, the administrator of this group, a former nurse and a PhD candidate in Medical Humanities encouraged members to post relevant works of art: “Finding ourselves at home, we tried to make sense of this unparalleled scenario. Everyone had their own way of reacting to this pandemic and its emotional and psychological complexities. The idea of forming this group occurred to me after I carried out research on the collective narrative of the Spanish ‘flu and found that silence surrounds this pandemic. Few references to the 1918 pandemic exist in literature, popular culture or even in history books. For this reason, it matters now more than ever that we hold on to the stories that we narrate.”
Members of the Facebook group eagerly responded. Within three weeks the group reached over 500 members and amassed a good number of posts. Poems penned to express feelings of isolation, baking ideas and a shared connectedness were posted, while beautiful works of art tried to illuminate the universal through the tiny aperture of the deeply personal. This collective narrative will eventually present a rich portrait of how people coped over the arc of the pandemic and of the day-to-day impacts of policy interventions. It can also serve as documentation for future generations and a reference point to science and history.
A full write up of the paper can be found here:
https://www.rhime.in/ojs/inde x.php/rhime/article/view/340/3 27
Link to Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/gr oups/1321744848009254/
'Beauty and beauty' by Annabelle Vella