Navigating Care

“We are all migrants through time.”

Eighty years ago, Albert Camus wrote, “I want to express by means of the plague the suffocation from which we all suffered and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which we lived. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to the notion of existence in general.” The chorus of interlocking voices heard in ROOM 2.23 echoes Camus's experience of suffocation, exile, and threat while challenging us to revisit the “notions of our existence” and make new use of what we find.

“What is it that makes us worry or wonder about each other? What are we tracking for?” Keiko Lane asks in “Viruses, Vaccines, and Proximities: A Story in Five Scenes.” “It's the evolution of a kind of queer epidemiological cruising. A relationship to risk. A relationship to proximity. Each virus,” she writes, “asks something different from us in how we navigate care and contact. They overlay each other, multiplying in complexities.”

The authors in ROOM 2.23 open the playing field and suggest that not just each virus but each war and each migration “multiply in complexity” and ask for something different from us.

Mireille el Magrissy reminds us in “The Coptic Saint of Lost Objects” that not everything can be integrated. “To resemble, to look like, to take from, to appear in reference to another is partial and fragmented.” As you will see, in this issue of ROOM, we might consider adding the word “uncanny” to this list.

Karim Dajani, Era Loewenstein, and Rachael Peltz each had parents who were forced to leave their homes suddenly. And for each, to quote Karim Dajani, “The wounds of war, forced migration, dispossession, and dislocation (have) never fully healed.”

Dajani was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family expelled from Jaffa in 1948. Along with carrying childhood experiences of irreparable violence, Dajani carries an early memory of being told that Freud was “a great Jewish philosopher who taught us that people forget what they alre