When the Façade of the Normal Falls Away

But what had [the pandemic] revealed about us? About our complicity in this façade? For too long, we have clung to our own roles in this pantomime, delivering lines written for us and wearing the masks assigned to us. These masks rather than protecting us, rendered us collectively breathless – serving a “normality” of entitlement and extraction … “Normality,” it turns out, was as flimsy and painted-on as a Snakes & Ladders board game, arbitrarily dealing out victory and defeat, life and death. The board has been flipped over by a stray strand of viral RNA in Wuhan, by a brutal viral video from Minneapolis, and something has been stripped away – the façade of it all. – Riz Ahmed (2020).