Equal in Death?

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new perceptions of death—dying has lost its disinterestedness and transpired to be a site of cultural, existential and political struggles, despite efforts to shelve the idea of an unavoidable death from everyday life. Moroccan media, in particular, has centered its focus on mass burials, over-crowded hospitals and spiraling death rates to amplify citizens’ fear of death and thereby coerce them to stay at home in concert with the WHO guidelines. Given their physical and emotional proximity to the virus, this article zooms in on semi-structured narrative interviews with COVID-19 patients from Fez, Morocco, to analyze the implication of their pre-, during- and post-contamination experiences on the novel perceptions of death and dying. It arrives at a pivotal result: the return of symbolic immortality upon recovery when ex-patients become heroes who have succeeded in sidestepping the horror that the media worked untiringly to convey.