Not long ago, I was lucky enough to be invited by the publisher HarperCollins Brasil to write the preface to a small masterpiece of Brazilian adult comics: “La Dansarina”, by Lillo Parra and Jefferson Costa. The comic tells a little of what was the Spanish flu pandemic in Brazil in a visceral, lyrical and fantastic way, through the eyes of a child. It is with great joy that I share my preface below. And I strongly recommend reading Parra e Costa’s comics!
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The hand and the fire: parallel lives of two pandemics.
I was lucky enough to live with three of my great-grandparents until my early teens. The oldest and most talkative of them, Grandpa Chico, was born in 1900, which means that he was already a grown man when the Spanish flu arrived in Brazil. Among the many stories he liked to tell in front of the plate of pasta and chicken at Sunday lunches, the 1918 pandemic appeared here and there, in pieces, like interludes of darkness in the background of his memories.
He spoke of relatives and friends who had left long before their time, of hasty funerals, of the fear brought by the few trains that arrived in what was our little town at the time. In these conversations, the adjective “Spanish” acquired a peculiar resonance – and familiar, in the literal sense of the word: my great-grandmother, the late wife of old Chico, was born in Spain, near Zaragoza. When I was little, I wondered if there was some kind of sinister relationship between the two.
It doesn’t seem implausible to me that part of the tragedy of Covid-19 is linked to the fact that, for many people in Brazil and around the world, that kind of connection with the previous pandemic, personal and historical at the same time, had long disappeared when the current pandemic has begun. Speaking of a similar trauma, the experience of having lived through two world wars, the English writer JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) lamented the fragility of the threads that connect us to the past. “So short is human memory, and so evanescent are our generations, that within just 30 years there will be very few people with that direct experience which alone can touch the heart. The burned hand is the best teaching on the dangers of fire. “, he wrote.
The last few years have shown that not even the experience of sticking your thumb in the fire is enough for some people. Even so, one of the responsibilities of those who go through this period more or less completely is to do everything so that the chain of memories does not break. And, as Tolkien himself well knew, the stories we tell are among the most effective ways to reinforce this chain.
In this, as in so many other aspects, La Dansarina is exemplary, even if the graphic novel you have in your hands is much more than a lesson in history and epidemiology. I apologize to Lillo Parra and Jefferson Costa for leaving the core of the narrative for a few paragraphs and focusing on what she is able to tell us about what it means to face a pandemic.
One of the most obvious elements is the all-too-human tendency to blame an Other with a capital O – the unwanted, the danger that came from outside. We saw this with the “Spanish” flu (although the first cases, as we know today, appeared in the US), but also with the xenophobia against Chinese and other Asians that spread around the world from 2020. Some still insist on talking about the “Chinese plague”, without realizing that only biogeographic accidents and pure luck prevent an emerging virus from the Amazon from becoming a pandemic – at least for now.
Whether in 1918, 2020-2022, or any other historical moment affected by new and devastating diseases, these situations have the potential to reveal how potentially fragile the fabric of civilization is. Complicated societies like ours depend on the connection and implicit trust between their members. When these links are frayed and the state fails to do its job, the result is scenes like the desperate race for oxygen cylinders in Manaus in 2021, or the bodies stored in 21st century containers and early 20th century tenement yards. .
Another lesson that should have been clear by now is the connection between the impact of pandemics and inequality. On the one hand, it is true that some emerging diseases gain pandemic status because of the vulnerability of the population as a whole to a new microscopic enemy. As no one has yet developed natural immunity against them, everyone is susceptible to being infected, at least initially. But communicable diseases, especially those that travel through the air, such as the Spanish flu and Covid-19, depend on physical proximity between humans to reach their full destructive potential. And, of course, it is much more difficult to minimize this proximity, or to take other hygiene measures that delay transmission, for those who have to live in crowded tenements or slums, where access to running water is not even guaranteed.
None of these challenges are simple to face, but the story you are about to read is also a story of solidarity – between generations, between different groups of people, even between the living and the dead. In this and any other pandemic, past or future, this is the only way, after all. As long as billions of people continue to have no access to Covid-19 vaccines, for example, it will be useless for a privileged few to take the sixth, seventh or eighth dose. No one gets out of that kind of hole alone. Good reading!
