https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.084
The Sovereign Allocation of Life: A Necropolitical Reading of Roopa Farooki’s Everything Is True: A Junior Doctor’s Story of Life, Death and Grief
GIFTY MARIAM ALEXY
Assistant Professor
Department of English
St John’s College, Anchal, Kerala
Email: giftyalexy@gmail.com
PROF (DR) TOM THOMAS
Professor and Research Guide
Postgraduate and Research Department of English
St Thomas College, Kozhencherry, Kerala
Email: tom.zemeckis@gmail.com
Abstract: Written during the UK’s first forty days of lockdown, Dr Roopa Farooki’s pandemic memoir, Everything is True: A Junior Doctor’s Story of Life, Death and Grief (2022), provides a searing archive of how state-sanctioned abandonment reduced healthcare workers to “bare life”. This article explores the memoir through the intersecting theoretical frameworks of Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics”, Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” and homo sacer. Farooki’s raw narrative exposes the frontline hospital not merely as a site of medical emergency, but as a politically manufactured death-world. This study argues that the state’s mismanagement, underfunding of the National Health Service (NHS), and withholding of adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) constitute a form of biopolitical abandonment that renders frontline medical workers and vulnerable patients as disposable subjects. Furthermore, the article examines how the pandemic structurally enforced a profound loss of dignity. This paper also demonstrates how Farooki’s text acts as a counternarrative to state-sanctioned necropolitical control.
Keywords: Necropolitics, State of Exception, Homo Sacer, Slow Death, Slow Violence
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