Interview 019 with Shanina Robinson

Listen to Black American Shanina Robinson who also identifies as Jamaican-American share what it was like to work-from-home in Queens, New York while raising two sons under six-years-old and how she engaged in active-compassionate communication with her husband during the State stay-at-home orders, which helped them in the process of buying a home during the pandemic. She grew up in South Jamaica, Queens. Shanina shares how she sadly lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s a week after the stay-at-home orders to stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus. She shares how she sadly lost her younger brother who had a seizure disorder during the pandemic. While she wasn’t able to visit the hospital where her father needed heart surgery and her sister needed an organ transplant because of the hospital’s policy prohibiting visitors to prevent the spread of Covid-19, she was able to visit her brother because he was on an “end of life list” at the hospital. When he passed away his organs were donated to his sister who was about to be on dialysis. Shanina and I met in the Prep 9 program when I was 13 and she was 12. We reconnected in college when she was a student at Amherst and I was at Smith College. She suggests: “Allowing yourself the grace to fall apart and to lean on family.” The first half of the interview will be part of The Zip Code Memory Project which “seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.” Thankfully, Leah Kogen-Elimeliah invited me to share my interviews of residents of Queens, New York with The Zip Code Memory Project. Leah is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at City College of N.Y.