For a historian with an interest in the intersection of factors that propel an epidemic, 2020 offered a living case study. Edna Bonhomme, a historian of science with a PhD from Princeton, was living at the time in shared housing in Berlin, one of 11.7 million foreigners in Germany. As a person of Haitian descent, she is acutely aware of the complexities of Black life in a country where racism has its own face, similar but also different from anti-Black racism in the U.S. 

She began speaking to Black women with different experiences from hers: a kink-positive sex worker from the U.K., an asylum seeker, a cancer survivor, exploring the strange ways that the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns interacted with a wide variety of privileges and privations, histories of oppression and struggle against it. 

From Berlin, she watched the Black Lives Matter demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd, and she read Virginia Woolf, and histories of plagues: on plantations in the U.S. south; in Liberia, where a crisis of resources for public health exacerbated a 2014 outbreak of what turned out to be Ebola; in German-colonized East Africa. "From Berlin," she wrote, "I was afforded the space to write, breathe, and be debt free." And to write "A History of the World in Six Plagues," a new book which traces human history through our relationship with illness.

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Delving into childhood memories and the history of her family, migrants to Miami from Haiti, literature of all kinds, and historical accounts of plague, Bonhomme's account is indeed structured around six historical and modern plagues, but in each section she follows where the subject takes her. This approach results in nuanced, grounded examinations of the actual, material conditions in which the epidemics of sleeping sickness, cholera, influenza, HIV, Ebola and COVID-19 she describes took (or continue to take) place. Not leaning on any one interpretive framework that might exclude relevant factors, Bonhomme considers the highly intersecting and variable impact of colonialism, racialization, gender roles and attitudes towards the human body, and, most strikingly perhaps, class, specifically in its intersection with race.

Bonhomme weaves in engaging and poignant personal experiences as well. Her traumatic experience of quarantine in an extended hospital stay in Miami as a four-year-old with typhoid fever becomes a motif as she addresses the infection-limiting benefits of isolation and confinement — and the loneliness, dislocation and even chaos to which confinement can lead. Connecting forced and chosen quarantines with experiences of incarceration, she explores also the solidarity that can arise in situations of the greatest difficulty and oppression. Also woven through the text is that surreal experience of living through the early pandemic years in Berlin, of leaving shared housing to live more traditionally with her partner (a kind of chosen quarantine at the time), of being Black in Berlin (a different kind of isolation), of choosing to get married — an impulsive and rebellious choice, at a time when isolation was the rule — and of experiencing a miscarriage minutes before they were expected at Copenhagen City Hall, where they'd absconded to wed.  

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you settle on the six examples of illnesses you chose? 

I decided to focus on epidemics that were also tied to important historical events and institutions. And so I started off with the plantation as a site that, on the one hand, I would describe as a torture camp, a site in which people were forced to work, and it was quite difficult, and it was also profitable for some people, but it was also a site that made people sick [with cholera.] Various scholars have looked at that and unpacked [questions like] what was happening to Black lives on plantations, and how do we make sense of people's ability to survive? 

Part of the reason that I wanted to think about sleeping sickness is because it was considered a massive epidemic, and specifically because it interfered with, or at least Europeans thought that the disease interfered with, labor. The other diseases — the flu, HIV, Ebola and COVID — are ones that we live with today. With each of the epidemics that I chose, it wasn't just a case of thinking about what was the most popular, or perhaps even what had the most impact, but rather, how did people who were tied to these various institutions, in which confinement was very much part of perpetuating some form of oppression at different times... how do people figure out ways to survive in spite of those various forms of oppression and those various institutions?

You talk about the labor impact of sleeping sickness. That immediately made me think of the intersecting issues with COVID of frontline workers who would typically be racialized, and often women who have had to assume higher levels of risk, and often without a lot of clarity or ability to confront the fact that they're at higher risk for a whole other range of structural reasons. So I wonder if you could could address those parallels.

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Yeah, so I think they are two very different diseases. COVID is a highly infectious airborne disease that was quite novel to us in terms of when it emerged in 2019 and it's something that we're still living with and still learning from. With long COVID, there are the studies suggesting that [sufferers are] more likely to have cognitive difficulties and so forth. So COVID is still fresh. It's still new. It was quite global in terms of its impact. 

By contrast, something like sleeping sickness is spread through a fly, the........

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