| Popis: |
Among the final words of George Floyd during his brutal murder by a Minneapolis policeman, “I can’t breathe” captures both the experience of physical suffocation and, more abstractly, the sociopolitical stranglehold of brutal oppression. These literal and figurative uses of “breathing” implicitly overlap in Camus’s allegory of the Nazi occupation during World War II, The Plague, and during the Covid-19 pandemic when protesters masked against the lung-destroying virus defied curfews to demonstrate against racism, police violence, and brutality across the globe. Returning to Camus’s depiction of a world he called “unbreathable” from within our contemporary context of pandemic and oppression offers new resonance to the narrator’s experience, as well as to our own. This chapter takes breathing and suffocation as master tropes of life and death, freedom, and oppression, marking our own ordeal with Covid-19 and sociopolitical tyranny even as they define the suffering of Oran’s sequestered citizens. |
