Quiet Storm leads the way

It's not easy for students in the midst of a deadly global pandemic to immerse themselves in a novel about a deadly global pandemic, but I wrote the syllabus without being aware that the Coronavirus was coming and so here we are discussing Colson Whitehead's Zone One while sheltering in place, and even though we live in fear of an ordinary virus rather than the zombie apocalypse, my students have no problem finding parallels between their own situations and those of Whitehead's characters. 

Ten years ago Whitehead made some pretty accurate predictions about disparate responses to the pandemic both rational and irrational, raising questions about whether a global health threat would do more to unite or divide frightened people and suggesting that nothing--not chaos, not zombies, not desperate bandits wielding automatic weapons--can prevent the spread of PR, for he who controls the narrative controls the world.

It's a bleak world in Whitehead's novel but it's not without its moments of light. Today we reached my favorite part: the passage describing how the character who calls herself Quiet Storm creates art, order, and meaning out of scattered debris. Charged with using heavy equipment to clear wrecked vehicles from a stretch of I-95, she arranges cars and trucks in an order visible only from the air, where the wrecked cars form an "alphabet" arranged in a "grammar" that creates both beauty and ambiguous meaning:

Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching of an arrow aimed at--what? Tomorrow? What readers?

Asked to interpret the Quiet Storm's message, our intrepid protagonist responds, "We don't know how to read it yet. All we can do right now is pay witness."

And this, I think, is where we are right now. We don't know how the story ends or when we'll back to normal or even what new normal will arise from the detritus, but while we wait, we can make a mark in the chaos, rearrange the wreck of our lives, and aim an arrow toward a future reader who will stand befuddled and wonder what it all meant.