Mourning the Sick Flesh in Tunisia during the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 crisis in Tunisia manifested differently across regions and social classes. The “oxygen” crises during the second wave of COVID-19 cost many families their loved ones. Proper Islamic funerals and mourning rituals requiring gatherings were prohibited. The bodies of the deceased were ‘managed’ by hospitals or private clinics and buried swiftly. Institutional management of death and grief processes were sped up and systematized, leaving no time for the family to mourn or fathom the death of their loved one. The fear of COVID-19 contagion led to extreme caution in dealing with the corpses. In fact, in some places people protested the burial of COVID-19 corpses in ‘normal’ cemeteries. At the height of the crisis, the municipalities denied families the right to even wash their dead in accordance with Islamic ritual. Ignorance regarding the cycle of COVID-19 contagion spread fear across the country. The fear of COVID-19 contagion was transferred into the sick flesh, and the dead flesh. The flesh was isolated, treated, avoided, and besieged by medical and social rules; in the process, the grief and loss of the families of the deceased was subject to acute management and, at times, even suppressed. Based on a collection of interviews and texts written by Tunisians who lost family members to COVID-19, this paper explores the different management strategies of the COVID-19 crisis in Tunisia especially funeral and burial management. It also articulates the different experiences of grieving, of ‘paused grief’, for Tunisians who lost loved ones to the virus. Additionally, the paper investigates the temporality of loss and ‘paused grief’, as an embodied event happening perpetually in the present and questions the validity of articulating loss as a past event in this specific case.