Dear Eula Biss

By Jazmina Barrera

Alejandro Jiménez-Flores,  tús labios —deseo, 2019, Flower petals dye, soft-pastels, plaster, and pins on muslin, 9 1/4 ” x 11 3/4″ (detail)

I had a panic attack while reading your book. On January 24th, 2020, one day after China closed all access to the city of Wuhan and four days after the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in the United States, we boarded a flight from Baltimore to Mexico City. I was reading your book, On Immunity.

I was supposed to participate in a talk with you a few weeks later, and I thought that the hours on board the flight were ideal to begin your book. I’m ashamed to admit that, at first, I was a bit skeptical. Even though the back cover featured praise from two of my favorite writers (Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson), I had never thought much about vaccinations, I was not particularly interested in them, and I was imagining a more or less boring book, full of medical jargon. My opinion changed a few pages in: I got hooked on the stories of vampires, bovine experiments, and antivaxxer mothers as you narrated and unraveled them. I identified especially with the maternal fear that you describe so well, that desperate need—almost maddening at times—to protect your children from the infinite dangers, visible and invisible, that lie in wait in every corner of the world, at all hours. I was particularly interested in the sections where you explain how the human body coexists with an incalculable number of microorganisms, within and outside of it, and that when we are in equilibrium with them, they are not merely beneficial but necessary. A noise from inside the plane or some semi-ominous turbulence distracted me from my reading and made me think of the precarious ecosystem within an airplane and of all of the viruses that passengers share through the air, circulating through our lungs again and again, recycled, and cycled through again. I have always suffered from mild hypochondria, almost amusing or quaint, I would say, but never before had something like this happened to me. That morning I had eaten two orange Airborne gummy vitamins, of the sort that are, in theory, specially designed to strengthen the immune system before a flight. I tried to think of that, but it didn’t do me any good, I was out of breath, I felt as though I were drowning, that I needed to ask for an oxygen mask or get out of that plane however I could, yelling at the pilot to make an emergency landing, stealing one of the stewardess’s red high heels—on that flight I realized for the first time that here, in the middle of the 21st century, they’re still forcing stewardesses to wear heels—to break one of the windows and let fresh air come in. I managed to control myself a few minutes later, ironically, with the old trick of focusing on my breathing.

Three days later, my family and I began feeling symptoms of an unbearable flu. After a few stratospheric fevers, a lab test confirmed it was influenza type A. Those were horrible days. My son said “snot” every two seconds, and I had no strength for anything. We had not gotten our flu shots. Several times we thought it needed to be done, and several times we put it off. I became furious with myself. After reading your book it was clear to me that it was idiocy not to have done it.

I have no way of knowing with certainty that we contracted the flu on that plane, but instinctively I have no doubt.

We met 15 days later, Eula Biss, on the 15th of February, after COVID-19 had been baptized and France announced the first death in Europe. I liked you immediately. It was an engaging conversation that lasted only an hour, although I would have liked to extend it. With everything that has happened since then, I have kept imagining conversations with you. Conversations that are more like soliloquies, because I try to imagine how you would respond to my questions, but I never get too far. We were supposed to meet again, to have another conversation in May, in Chicago, during the tour that they had organized for me in the United States that was, of course, cancelled.

A few days ago, my two-year-old son dreamed this: “Because the street was empty there was a giraffe, and all the houses were falling.” It must have been because of a video that my uncle took in Berlin, in which he filmed the adventures of a fox in an empty garden in front of the Bellevue Palace. Though we talk constantly about the pandemic, my son had not weighed in on anything until, several days later, he asked me: “Mama, where are the people?” Then I thought to ask you, Eula Biss: What does your son ask you? What do you answer?

Since the time I was pregnant with my son, since I lived that fascinating and disconcerting experience of being two bodies in one, I have been looking for and discovering other ways in which our bodies are part of a plural organism, a little like a garden. A year earlier, before reading your book, I wrote this sentence at a conference: “We are not islands; it seems to me that women, humans, and books are something more like gardens in the jungle.” I almost jumped out of my seat—this a few days after the flight, already with the flu but without a panic attack—when I read a nearly identical sentence in your book in which you say that our bodies are like gardens within a bigger garden, which is the social body.

In your book, you explain that we do not vaccinate our children to protect them from viruses. Antivaxxer mothers are correct in this: if our children did get ill from many of the diseases against which we vaccinate them, they would probably not suffer too much, nor would they die. We vaccinate our children to protect more vulnerable populations, so that the virus cannot jump from body to body until it arrives at a weakened body that cannot withstand the illness. We vaccinate our children, we vaccinate ourselves, because of a feeling of community, because of the idea that we are a plural organism.

You don’t know the desire I’ve had to share your book, that it should come as part of a care package that all mothers receive after birth—alongside those soothing ice pads, chocolates, nipple creams, and friends with kids. After reading it, it is impossible to continue believing those charlatans who speak of dangerous vaccines that cause autism. Perhaps if more people had read your book there would be no new outbreak of measles, a disease that not long ago had almost been eradicated from the planet.

The more than 20 days that we have spent in quarantine have been a mix of unbearable Zoom meetings, devastating accounts of solitary and unbearable deaths, videos of animals in empty cities, failed attempts to establish routines and do work, more or less successful attempts to potty train our son, invisible birds that sing in the silence of the street, the neighbor who has taken advantage of quarantine to remodel his house with furious electric table saws and drills, the other neighbor—I still have not found an insult to do him justice—who organizes “COVID parties” with karaoke at night, and moments of anguish, of reading, and of play.

I think a lot about the social body you describe. About the way that, for lack of a vaccine—while they invent or discover and test and distribute the damn vaccine—we need to distance ourselves for the same reason: so that the virus cannot jump from body to body until it arrives at a weakened body that cannot withstand the illness.

I think also about gardens, in how the garden that my mother has in the house next door has saved our spirits. For a two-year-old child that space, that interaction with soil, air, and leaves—my son would probably add earthworms to that list—is invaluable. I’m conscious of the privilege inherent in having access to a garden, a luxury that uncountable families are just now missing. I think of the homes without gardens, of the empty gardens in Berlin, of your metaphor of the garden within the garden, of my metaphor of the garden within the jungle and in the wild gardens devastated by deforestation. At the origin of this pandemic lies these felled forests which, when destroyed, bring us closer to new viruses that had previously lived in equilibrium with their ecosystems. Other illnesses, like avian and swine flu, emerged from the insatiable food industry and are transmitted from pigs and hens to human beings. Behind this public health emergency is the social and environmental sickness of wild capitalism that is ending life on Earth, and my feeling is that we are not speaking enough about these things, that they do not preoccupy or occupy us enough. I comment on it to family and friends, and nearly all of them tell me that I am exaggerating, that I’m making it up, that it’s not so bad. And maybe I do exaggerate, like with my hypochondria, maybe the articles lie and the abundant scientific evidence is mistaken, maybe I am exaggerating, and I hope I am. Everywhere, I hear people saying that they want to return to a perverse normality, to an infected system that is killing us. When I think about all this, Eula Biss, I can’t catch my breath, and then I worry it’s a symptom of COVID-19 and that makes it worse. I need to focus on my breathing.

Translated from the Spanish by Alejandra Oliva.

This essay was originally published by La Revista de la Universidad de México as part of a special issue capturing writing on the pandemic, Especial: Diaro de la pandemia (April 2020).

The live conversation with Eula Biss which is referenced above took place during MAKE Literary Productions’s Lit & Luz Festival in Mexico City, February 15, 2020.

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