It Is Still Monday
Gabriel Noel
“Mirages of Modernity” —mural at the National Library in Bogotá. A collaboration between Colombian muralist Guache and Americal muralist Gaia. source: Rayhaan Vankalwala
It seems as if every day is Monday in America.
The Monday before last, George Floyd was strangled on the concrete under a cop’s knee. This Monday, the president of the United States ordered the tear-gassing and forceful removal of protesters from Lafayette Square for a biblical photo op and threatened to unleash the U.S. military on its own citizens. I can’t help but wonder where next Monday will bring us, but it seems sure to be the same as yesterday and the day before: sure to be in some way violent and inextricably tied to our torturous racial history, reverberating continuously.
I’m reminded of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a Monday that eventually drives Jose Arcadio Buendia, the family patriarch, insane. Consumed by his endless quest for new inventions to improve the fledgling town of Macondo, he stops sleeping. After several days of insomniac delirium, he is visited, in typical Marquezian fashion, by the ghost of an old enemy, and speaks with the dead man until dawn. Buendia later goes to his son Aureliano and asks what day it is.
It’s Tuesday, Aureliano answers.
“I was thinking the same thing,” he replies, “but suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias,” he says. “Today is Monday too.”
So begins Buendia’s descent into madness. “This is a disaster,” he says on Wednesday. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.” Various people attempt to comfort him, but he is convinced that the ‘time machine’ is broken, and on Friday begins to smash all the equipment in his laboratory. It takes twenty men to tie him up to a chestnut tree in the courtyard, where he is left for the remainder of his days, speaking a language that no one in Macondo understands.
The feeling that our time machine is broken has had a deep effect on me lately. The endless images of violence bombarding my psyche have begun taking their toll. I find myself struggling with a tight knot of anger pulsing in the middle of my chest, following me everywhere. It is an anger that seems to have latched itself onto me like a virus, multiplying and threatening to unbalance my entire being. I find it hard to focus on tasks simple and complex, including writing this essay. I feel it eating at my humanity when I read posts and op-eds dismissing peaceful protesters, calling looters ‘animals,’ and refusing to acknowledge the poison that is at the heart of our American experiment. That anger makes me want to not only dismiss those people out of hand but to fight back with the same poison they spew, in thrall to the same virus that is trying to erode my own sense of moral balance and humanity. That anger says that it will always be Monday, that the pattern I’m seeing will repeat in perpetuity, that there is nothing to be done but to smash everything in the house and be tied to a chestnut tree. The only difference between Buendia and I is that I’ve been sleeping far too much.
The pattern threatening to repeat forever is excruciatingly familiar. First, a black person dies. It is usually on camera; it matters little whether the death is from a hail of bullets to the back, an illegal chokehold, or a knee to the neck for nearly nine straight minutes. The outrage sparked by the death turns to protest; people take to the street, in the thousands, with their hands up, screaming Don’t shoot! or I can’t breathe! or any other variation on the last words of murdered black people. Protests boil over, riots erupt; plumes of smoke choke the air, billowing out of fires set to buildings across a city. The police, with the gesture of an occupying force, rush in to crush the anger, and restore “order”; those smoke plumes, in turn, are replaced by the milky, stinging fog of tear gas, the canisters skipping across the pavement into the crowds. Civilians scatter in every direction, blind from the gas but also perhaps from a rubber bullet shot into an eye or a throat. They are beaten with batons and pepper sprayed. They are run into by police cars. Our screens are filled with these images, and the talking heads on those screens have an endless supply of commentary. There is finger-waving, empty words, insincere calls for ‘peace.’ People get tired; fatigue sets in; bills have to be paid; children have to be watched. We declare to ‘do better,’ to have a ‘national conversation,’ and everything goes back to normal. Everything quiets down. That is, of course, until the next one is killed.
Look at the air, look at the walls, listen to the buzzing of the sun.
It is still Monday.
Gabriel Noel was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He is about to finish his undergraduate career with a degree in Political Science from Boston University, but lapses into literature from time to time. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons. @GabrielNoel6