Abstract
We are told that we can expect to live with an assortment of “new normals” at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also told that living through the COVID-19 pandemic has made us better able to face longstanding challenges such as climate change and inegalitarian social arrangements. In this paper I reflect on what we are being told by drawing on a lesson I have learned from Fazal Sheikh’s 2011 aerial photographic series to locate evidence of Bedouin villages in the Negev desert in the wake of Israeli campaigns in the 1960s to “make the desert bloom.” The lesson includes recognizing the importance of continuing what Asef Bayat has described as the “silent, patient, protracted and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful.” All things considered, I have learned to be distrustful of and resistant to new ways of living that encourage us to learn from past suffering and disasters so as to become ever more resilient and ready for future suffering and disasters in a post-COVID world.
Keywords
COVID-19 pandemic, Fazal Sheikh, Bedouin relocation in the Negev desert, gray space
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0048
Citation
Leeming, B.(2021) A Lesson from Fazal Sheikh’s “Desert Bloom” for Living in a Post-COVID World, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0048
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
A Lesson from Fazal Sheikh’s “Desert Bloom” for Living in a Post-COVID World
We are told that we can expect to live with an assortment of “new normals” at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also told that living through the COVID-19 pandemic has made us better able to face longstanding challenges such as climate change and inegalitarian social arrangements. In this paper I reflect on what we are being told by drawing on a lesson I have learned from Fazal Sheikh’s 2011 aerial photographic series to locate evidence of Bedouin villages in the Negev desert in the wake of Israeli campaigns in the 1960s to “make the desert bloom.” The lesson includes recognizing the importance of continuing what Asef Bayat has described as the “silent, patient, protracted and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful.” All things considered, I have learned to be distrustful of and resistant to new ways of living that encourage us to learn from past suffering and disasters so as to become ever more resilient and ready for future suffering and disasters in a post-COVID world.