South Asian COVID-19 Memoirs: Mourning and Erasure of “Grievable Lives”

Abstract

This article analyzes how narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic are beginning to memorialize lives lost in the crisis. It juxtaposes the author’s personal experience of the loss of family members with emerging memoirs by South Asian women to explore the diversity of genres like the lyric essay and the graphic memoir that memorialize lives lost to COVID-19. While acknowledging that the current pandemic and its effects are far from over, the essay argues that these memoirs are a conscious attempt to mourn and thereby restore the humanity of lives robbed of traditional acts of remembrance due to the isolation and bureaucracy of laws governing COVID-19 deaths and funerals. These texts by Barkha Dutt, Kay Sohini, and Jhumpa Lahiri are exceptional because the great majority of deaths during this time have been consigned to erasure, lack of documentation, or censorship. These texts are resisting the dominant trend to leave the pandemic behind and resume normal lives. By committing to grief instead of a facile recuperation, these memoirs are not just charting a private path of healing but also transforming private grief into a statement of shared suffering and solidarity, even when the pandemic has affected individuals differently based on stratifications of race, class, and privilege.