Gatherings with my family are synonymous with food and, mostly, noise.
Loud voices. The clatter of forks and knives on plates. Resonant belly laughs. Screaming matches and impassioned debates. Colorful and theatrical retellings of daily adventures or quirky work stories. Parties full of music and dancing. I suppose it comes with the territory when every occasion brings approximately fifteen people around the same table.
We try to get together as much as possible, with a particular effort for birthdays. It’s always joyful and exhilarating but the brouhaha can make it hard to think. Nevertheless, all that energy swirling around has made us a tight-knit group.
When the pandemic arrived and lockdown was enforced, all noise stopped. Outside, the streets were quiet and empty. My boyfriend and I spent those two months in a 90 square-meter house in Paris’s Northern suburbs in a gated residence where nothing outside could be heard. Coming from a 30 square-meter apartment in one of the French capital’s busiest neighborhoods, the space felt empty and incredibly large for the two of us. The silence stood like an additional wall distancing us from everyone we knew and loved. The prospect of staying in that silence for weeks — or who knew how long at the time really — was daunting, to say the least.
Having lived abroad for extended periods, I thought I had the right baggage to deal with physical distance from loved ones. But the doomsday mood weighed heavily on me and I found myself longing for more contact.
Luckily, in my family as in many others, Zoom, WhatsApp and Skype (the come-back kid of this whole mess) came to rescue us and bring back some of that comforting noise.
In this new digital format, we had to introduce method to our usual cacophonous madness if we wanted to hear each other and enjoy each other’s company rather than just catch glimpses of our ungroomed faces in small rectangle boxes on a screen. So we introduced games, thanks to a suggestion made by one of my older cousins, Mialy.
“It was a way to keep our family link, make it stronger. I thought it was important,” she says. “I was doing a lot of video calls with my mother and our grandmother and thought we could expand them. But instead of just ending up just looking into a computer screen — which we weren’t all used to — I suggested a different mood with a Harry-Potter-themed game.”
Up until then, games only came up occasionally during our gatherings. They’d made more frequent appearances when my cousins started having children, mostly when the little ones wanted to show off their new card or board games and find a way to feel included. Some family lunches in the past had led to very intense rounds of the observation game Dobble or makeshift music tests. Following those, we often told ourselves that we should organize a Family Game Day. It never made it to the books.
“In the end, it happened only through video,” my cousin notes. “It feels like a funny contradiction: when there are no restrictions around seeing each other, our schedules are all always full.”
To start, she chose a game we could all enjoy, no matter our age: Harry Potter trivia. The only person who would be left out was my sister, but she didn’t care, she can’t tell a Dementor from Casper the friendly ghost.
We swiftly chose a weekend evening and ended up playing around dinnertime. Some of us were eating traditional dishes of rice and meat from our home country, Madagascar. I showed off my new sourdough bread baking skills through the screen as my boyfriend and I sliced down a fresh-baked loaf to wolf down with mountains of cheese.
Over the course of the two months of lockdown, we only organized two game sessions, the second being a Disney trivia game on a Sunday afternoon. “We didn’t manage to make it last, because eventually everyone had their own organisation and schedule with all the video calls with friends”, Mialy explains. But they’re the moments that stand out the most for me during that time of constant digital contact.
These game sessions were never a time where we shared much about our daily lives — what was there to say really, “well, still working from home and not going outside”? — but I did learn a lot about everyone who showed up.
I now know who stopped watching Disney movies in 2000 (the childless cousins, or those who don’t like babysitting) and who has seen spin-off Tinkerbell movies I didn’t even know existed (and no, it wasn’t a child). I saw my ten- and eleven-year-old little nieces show their competitive side, giving themselves facepalm taps on the forehead for not answering a question about Disney’s Brave quickly enough. I was impressed by my cousin Aina and her boyfriend who, underneath their calm and detached attitude, were full of specific knowledge of the Harry Potter Universe and made for fierce competitors. I smiled at my own frivolous relief when I won the first Potter trivia game, knowing I’d lived up to my obsessive Potterhead reputation. My ever-so-lovably loud cousin Landy also offered a fair dose of comic relief. The (already weak) speakers of my computer were stretched to their ability each time she complained about not being able to hear anything or yelled “Man, I can’t remember, why can’t I remember?” when it was her time to answer.
In this setting, none of us got drowned out in the usual lunch table noise. Question after question, each one of us had their own chance to shine.
“With a game, no one has to feel like they have to say anything in the conversation, especially since we don’t all have the same interests,” says my cousin Mialy. “But it can help us connect more with those with whom we talk less often.”
It’s hard to say for sure that our family is stronger or even different after those four hours of Harry Potter and Disney trivia. But having those games and learning to gather online made it less awkward when one day my cousin Hasina organized a last minute regular, game-free Skype call to announce she was getting married a month later, once lockdown ended. In the old world, this was news for real life, with hugs and champagne, but in Covid-19’s world, we e-cheered for her. We were also quicker to accept that most of us wouldn’t be a part of her intimate June ceremony, even when her big wedding party wouldn’t happen in the foreseeable future. It was just how things were now, and post-online games and social distance, we knew our family link wasn’t in question even if this was going to happen without us.
Strict lockdown was lifted mid-May and since then, we’ve been able to go out again. All of us went on holiday — some of us even went abroad! — and we managed to meet up a couple of times for some noisy Sunday family lunches and catch-up birthday celebrations. We could almost have believed that life was headed back to normal.
But on October 17th, we were put under a 9pm curfew and our government gave the country a stern recommendation not to have more than six around the table at home. Our usual lunches became a risk. It all reeked of déjà-vu. On the 18th, we canceled the lunch we’d planned to celebrate two of my little nieces’ birthdays, especially since the previous family lunch saw one of our cousins infect another with Covid-19.
On October 30th at midnight, we were back in lockdown.
None of us wanted to be in this situation again, but future family gatherings seem like an impossible prospect now, even as Christmas creeps up on us. After almost a year of struggling with this pandemic, a lot of us are tired. Of not knowing. Of always needing to be adaptable. Of seeing people through a screen. Fewer video calls are being organized, fewer friends are joining sports challenges, mixing their first sourdough starters or doing any of the things with which we filled our time in the first lockdown. For us, no new game day has been set yet. But it’s time one of us revived that WhatsApp thread.
Sedera Ranaivoarinosy (website, twitter) is a freelance writer, journalist and translator based in Paris. She writes about social change and family ties. She studied journalism in New York and worked in the philanthropy and social economy sectors for 5 years before going freelance to focus on writing, in French and in English.
Photo adapted from “TV hell” by Paul Stevenson, under a CC BY 2.0 license.