107 Days and Counting...

Abstract

It has been roughly six months since my family and I started our quarantine in João Pessoa, Brazil, and to this day we are still at home trying to avoid physical proximity with people from outside. As Italian immigrants (proudly not “expats”) in Latin America, we experienced two main phases of the Covid-19 global crisis: in March and April, with shock and despair, we were following the daily death bulletins coming from Italy; from May onwards, the progressive easing of the situation in Italy coincided with the escalation of contagions and deaths in Brazil. In this essay, written from one of the current epicentres of the pandemic, I draw upon Achille Mbembe and Denise Ferreira da Silva in order to reflect both on the necropolitical governmental machine that literary seems to extract pleasure from this sustained tragedy, and on the self-destructive colonial logic that inscribes the ongoing trivialisation of deaths in Brazil. I discuss the self-inflicted racialised logic that makes such a reasonment possible and diffused, as well as the multiple layers of whiteness and privilege that permit the naturalisation and oblivion of these deaths both from internal (Euro-descendant) and external points of view. I conclude the essay by making reference to my track 107 jorna (107 days), written on the last 1 July (and to be premiered online by the Glasgow-based Lights Out Listening Group), where I combine Sicilian speech and electronic noise in order to articulate my own astonishment, impatience and indignation with the current situation.