Craig Santos Perez Tells a Story of Hawaiʻi Quarantine

Poet Craig Santos Perez shares his quarantine diary with Literary Hub, offering ruminative notes like, "Good Friday. I buy two dozen eggs from Safeway—the per-person limit. I don’t want to go back to Costco" and "Shouldn’t grieving together be our most essential business?" More:

May 2, 2020
My wife, who’s Hawaiian, tells me about the history of disease here. After the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778, epidemics flood the islands in the wake of foreign ships (reservoirs of disease). Cholera, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, leprosy. Ninety percent of the native population dies over the course of 50 years. No immunity, no safe place to hide.

As she tells this story, her voice breaks like waves of intergenerational trauma. Moments of silence between sentences. Each word: a quarantined island.

*

May 10, 2020
I call my mom for Mother’s Day. She visited grandma in the afternoon, sat outside, talked to her through the window, explained the pandemic again, why she can’t come inside.

“Grandma wants to go home,” my mom says. “She’s so lonely.”

I visited grandma when I was in California for Christmas. I was supposed to visit again this summer, but that trip has been cancelled. Will I ever see her again? Will this be her last Mother’s Day?

“I want to hug my grandkids,” my mom sighs, no longer able to hold her tears at a safe distance.

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