In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Edna Bonhomme. Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. Her book is A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Edna Bonhomme: My book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, is a social and literary history of epidemics from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. I lay out how various marginalized groups—the enslaved, the colonized, and the incarcerated—coped with their captivity in the face of multiple epidemics. The first half of the book focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when microbiology and public health were poorly understood, and the second half of the book is the (near) present, after antibiotics and vaccines have become a standard feature of modern society. While humans have made herculean progress in the natural sciences, these advances have not been evenly distributed. My research indicates that when people are continually unguarded and consistently denied access to medicine, they may develop a distrust of authority. By focusing on outbreaks and periods of extreme duress, my book addresses the core issues of racial inequalities in health and shifts perspectives on contagion and freedom. In the prologue, I recount my own experience of hospitalization during early childhood and expand on various poignant accounts of those confined during an outbreak. I also wonder how we can create public health policies that do not proclaim empty promises of freedom but offer concrete solutions to ensure everyone has the right to a salubrious life.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
The poet Maya Angelou once stated, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” In general, my writing deeply reveres science and humanity for the subtle and overt ways people try to find reprieve from mass illness and death. I write about people’s untimely encounters with disease, particularly during the 1918 influenza outbreak of World War I, and I consider how the lockdown of a Liberian neighborhood during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 was stark and cruel for the working-class West Africans who faced confinement without much warning. While I focus on the biological consequences of disease transmission, I also demonstrate how major societal forces shape an epidemic. I illustrate how, over and over again, marginalized people are sidelined, provided with less care, and witness sorrow in their communities when an outbreak occurs. At the same time, I reveal how communities organize mutual aid, peer counseling, and self-care. Even in periods of polarization, writers and activists have remained steadfast in their survival. This current political moment is revealing the fault lines in American public health. Still, if people stay engaged, informed, and coordinated, this moment of chaotic authoritarianism, like so many other periods of repression, shall pass.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
During the decades that I have studied and written about microbiology, epidemics, and public health, I have read testimonies from survivors of unethical medical experiments, the eugenic policies that mandated the sterilization of women without their consent, and the psychological damage that arises when people are colonized. When physicians or scientists deem certain lives more valuable than others, there is ample reason to be startled and troubled by humanity’s terror. At the same time, I hope that my readers can unlearn cynicism, despair, and disillusionment. Part of what I explore in my chapter on HIV/AIDS is how the incarcerated women at Bedford Hills in upstate New York organized and supported each other during the height of the AIDS epidemic. They self-organized to support the HIV positive women who were in prison and found ways to counsel one another and share their experiences. Even when people lack the autonomy to manage their time or movement, they can discover ways to show compassion for the most vulnerable. A sustained practice of world-building can feel harrowing, but with fellow travelers, we can find ways to free ourselves from tyranny.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
We live in a moment where political polarization may leave one feeling paralyzed or lost in oblivion. The anecdotes we recount and the environment we inhabit can shape how we make sense of the world. The communities we engage with may also influence our responses to the world around us. In developing a thorough understanding of myself and the world, I regularly turn to a cast of characters: feminists, Marxists, and psychoanalysts. The works of Black feminists, such as the Combahee River Collective, prompt me to explore Black women’s philosophical and intellectual contributions, past and present, to social theory. Whether it is a manifesto or a dialectical critique, I am inspired by the possibilities imagined by Black feminists. Marxism enables me to see how class structures seamlessly shape our relationships and highlights the extent to which working-class people have fought for women’s struggles that many might consider benign, such as the 8-hour workday. Psychoanalysts challenge me to think deeply about everyone’s quirks, including the ways some individuals may remain hostages to their past. Part of the tension in reading through and engaging with psychoanalysis lies in working through the visible and invisible layers of the psyche, with the hope that we can improve ourselves.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
Although it was originally published in Arabic in 2017, the English translation of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli in 2020 is one of the best books I have read in the past two years. This work of historical fiction traces a Palestinian woman’s attempt to travel from the West Bank into Israel to access archives for an article she is working on. As the story progresses, the reader becomes aware of the subject of the story: the sexual assault and eventual death of a Bedouin-Palestinian girl who was murdered by Israeli soldiers in 1949. The retelling occurs through the narrator’s stream of consciousness and provides flashbacks to the incident. In this particular moment, during the assault in Gaza, the book offers the language and emotion of what it means to live under occupation, as well as what is lost when people are dispossessed. My second recommendation is Hernan Diaz’s novel, Trust. The four novels in one articulate how different classes of New Yorkers relate to wealth and power. Focusing on the life of a financier and his upper-class wife in the 1920s and 1930s, Diaz marinates the narrative with vitality by showing the beguiling qualities of the elite. We, too, feel condemned, conflicted, and fully immersed in a dynamic New York City. Diaz can shock and entertain; he is a versatile author who has the presence to rattle your soul. At the same time, I admire the moments of subtlety and the cast of characters that tell the same story with weariness and wryness. It is a novel about the pitfalls of capitalism, as it is about marital woes, early Communist movements, and love affairs. Like Diaz, I hope to experiment more with my writing and keep the reader fully engaged.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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