Evie Muir is a nature writer, founder of Peaks of Colour, and author of Radical Rest. In this op-ed, they share their perspective on the importance of having ways to process our grief within racial justice movements.
As glasses clinked and Auld Langs Syne chorused across the UK, I instead rang in the new year alone and inconsolable. Unable to emerge from my partner’s bed, I found myself consumed by a sudden and unexpected grief: the loss of a friend. This friend, who I lived with at the time, did not die. She just announced with the coldness of a text message that she would be moving out regardless of the material and financial implications I’d shoulder, and with that, almost 30 years of friendship was over.
Though I can now reflect on the situation with clarity, at the time it floored me in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. Alongside the hurt and heartbreak, all at once I was struck by the overwhelming barrage of suppressed losses from past lives and lost loves; grandparents, parents, and ex-partners, whose absences I had grown adept at avoiding. Curdled with this was a stomach-churning guilt. I’ve always found it difficult to hold my personal losses without them feeling inferior next to the scale of global suffering that narrates our lives. It felt self-indulgent to be grieving my grandma who died of dementia during the spring of 2020, given the amount of lives being lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, for example. Similarly, mourning someone still living felt preposterous in the face of the insurmountable number of lives being taken in atrocities across Palestine, Congo, and Haiti. It was a brutal reminder of how ill-equipped I am to hold grief, and how the systems we must currently navigate do not offer the space and time which necessitates our healing.
“The lack of space for grief in the West has been a form of social control,” says Camille Sapara Barton. Camille is a Social Imagineer, artist, and somatic facilitator who is the author of Tending Grief, a book that shares embodied rituals for holding our sorrow and growing cultures of care in community. Joining me over Zoom we reflect on the state-sanctioned severing, fracturing, and bypassing that conditions us to package our grief into a socially acceptable container so that we can continue being productive under capitalism. The UK government can be really good at organizing memorials when they think it serves a patriotic purpose, for example, but there hasn’t been any initiation of collective mourning since the pandemic despite the thousands of lives lost. Similarly, when George Floyd was murdered, our expressions of grief, such as protests and vigils, were met with over 10,000 arrests, rather than support. And more recently, a community who have lost three children in a tragic murder in Southport, UK, has also been denied the opportunity to grieve. Instead of fostering unity and collective healing, their sorrow has been ‘hijacked’ by far-right groups, who manipulated their heartache to forward a violent fascist agenda.
“I think they recognize that our grief holds power,” Camille continues, “because when we’re numb, we’re less connected to our desires, and are less able to move towards them collectively. So when we think of it in a social justice context, the fact that racialized communities and those in racial justice movements more specifically, experience so much grief but are denied opportunities to process, it suddenly feels like a political tactic.”
“Since the violence [in Palestine] worsened last October, I’ve noticed our communities are holding space for each other to express how the grief and anger feels for them without fear.”
Nadia Abdel-Karim, British-Palestinian group facilitator
One practice that is increasingly being adopted in organizing spaces as a way for people of color to process the many violences that sit in our bodies, is somatics. Somatics refers to practices that center the body, also known as the ‘soma’. Recognizing the body as distinctive to the mind, these practices can include more established approaches such as yoga or qigong but can also include techniques that can be adapted to meet personal needs. They can be explored individually, with a guided practitioner, or in a group space, but the intentionality behind all embodied approaches is to allow healing to take place in the body — rather than being motivated by physical fitness and appearance for example.
Somatics “brings the body back into connection,” describes the founder of Lumos Transforms Nkem Ndefo. “So much that we do is informed by just the cognitive lens; and so, when we bring the body, a whole other arena opens up on everything that we’re touching, doing, and experiencing —alone, together, collectively.”
As someone whose somatic practice is rooted in Black feminism, ecology, and harm reduction, Camille tells me they feel that racial justice work is intimately tied to grief, and that embodied grief tending should be a practice we incorporate into our movement spaces as a revolutionary priority. “When we think of all of our ancestors who resisted, who’ve created policy reform, who’ve led movements that have made gains, and who’ve generated theory, this all came from experiences of loss and harm caused by systemic racism and white supremacy, and the lack of care and access to resources that have been structurally denied. There’s so much grief connected with this but it’s rarely talked about in this overt way,” they consider. “There really hasn’t been a moment to pause, reflect and address — not since the kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples, and the colonization and capitalism that has followed. This has been happening for hundreds of years and now we’re at a point where we’re recognising we need time to recover from the intergenerational wounds, whilst continuing to be impacted by many of the same dynamics that have evolved into the present day.”
This is something that Nadia Abdel-Karim also agrees with. Nadia is a British-Palestinian group facilitator who holds grief-tending spaces and mindfulness retreats in Devon. She relays how her family was displaced from Palestine after settlers took their land in 1948. While her parents came to England, her extended family members dispersed across the world, and as a result, we can find a global community fragmented in their grief. “There are so many layers of loss here; loss of family, land, culture, language. I can see the impact the loss and trauma of the ongoing genocide and occupation has had on my family and the community I grew up in, and the way it remains unaddressed. I can see it in their bodies. There’s so much resilience, love, care, joy, generosity, and kindness, but there’s also the fear that still lives inside of them and an inability to touch the grief of what they’ve lost. For generations it seems like there has never been a physically safe time to really open up to the grief that follows you as a Palestinian, especially as the grief is ongoing,” Nadia says. “I can see a shift in this though; since the violence worsened last October, I’ve noticed our communities are holding space for each other to express how the grief and anger feels for them without fear.”
I ask how she’s finding ways to navigate this harm and she sighs. “I can feel it in myself, how can I not? When I’m watching my people go through a genocide. We’re all sitting and watching videos of people starving to death, people holding their murdered children, and bombs desecrating neighborhoods before our eyes. Being exposed to this incites helplessness, a rage, and despair. This is a shared grief we’re all experiencing as witnesses. But for me, it’s personal and ancestral too. The lineages of new and old grief unfold in my body, and recently I’ve been noticing how this presents as contractions and tensions.”
This leads us to explore the ways that grief is often framed. Under a neoliberal system that idealizes efficiency over personal wellbeing, we have been made to feel like grief is something we must deal with individually and privately like it’s something shameful. Whilst there seems to be more understanding around a new, sudden, or unexpected loss, at the same time there is also an expectation that we get over it quickly. The reality is that grief is a lifelong experience, one that comes to us in waves of intensity. Nadia recalls the traditional and cultural grief practices of Palestine that honored the reality of such loss, but which have now been lost due to colonialism. How Bedouins in southern regions for example would take part in wailing as an embodied release of their inner pain and would have visible ways to show that they were in mourning by altering their appearance, tearing their clothes, removing their hijabs, and messing up their hair. To grieve in such a way now would risk pathologization and institutionalization and so we have learned to suppress and internalize these emotions, resulting in the ancestral grief being carried through our genes, our DNA, through inherited illnesses, and learned behaviors.
That processing these compounding losses requires an embodied and communal approach, was something Camille and Nadia both advocate for. Nadia for example tells me how her experience as a grief space holder has helped her realise and meet her own needs during such a painful time. “Recently I’ve been able to recognize that the sense of loss I hold around Palestine is too big for me to meet alone. I can’t do this myself. My grief practices have to be communal, and with that comes a discernment and a choice of intentionally not touching it whilst I’m on my own because I don’t feel like I have the strength just yet. But, rather than avoiding it forever I intentionally return to it, and I do so in community, so we can hold it together,” she says.
“A teacher once taught me to understand grief as a river — when a river has strong, solid banks it can flow with ease without risk of causing destruction or harm. So when we hold spaces for grief we spend time building the banks by connecting with each other and nature, resourcing and building capacity with ourselves and as a group. What I’ve learned, and what I find comforting is that there are so many ways grief can show up in our bodies and the breadth of our emotions, but there are just as many ways we can hold space for it and express it.”
“Recently I’ve been able to recognize that the sense of loss I hold around Palestine is too big for me to meet alone. I can’t do this myself. My grief practices have to be communal…”
Nadia Abdel-Karim
Similarly, Camille shared some of the personal and collective practices that she has found effective as an embodied practitioner. “Witnessing the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement when I was based in Oakland allowed me to experience the candle vigil as a blossoming grief practice. They would often have vigils in honor of people killed by police brutality and I remember thinking how powerful it is to gather publicly and create spaces for collective release as a form of resistance,” they say, smiling as they remember. “The second is intentional dancing. Dancing is often rooted in the African diasporic experience and I find it to be a great pathway because it’s joyous and celebratory, but can also support us to feel where the grief is inhabiting us, allowing our bodies to be in conversation with it through movement. Doing this in community is a really beautiful technology. Any kind of embodied, collective practice that creates intimacy will build stronger bonds that will sustain us. By regaining feeling, we can hopefully resource ourselves and begin building a future that feels healing.”
What Camille, Nadia, and I all agreed upon is that this healing isn’t going to come from the state. It’s something we need to create for ourselves. Though this may feel like a daunting prospect, we can also understand this as an opening. In a context where many of us are feeling helpless and despairing in the face of so many unknowns and uncertainties, perhaps cultivating healing, communal grief practices that allow us to hold the inevitability of loss is how we unite in our respective fights and how we actively show solidarity and allyship.
Perhaps developing this connection in the present will forward futures where we are able to find balance, where instead of being weighed down by our grief we will also be able to hold joy and pleasure with greater capacity. Perhaps in this future how we experience loss and therefore grief is also different. Where life isn’t seen as negotiable under capitalist systems and colonial regimes marred by health injustice and state violence, meaning we are able to feel safe in the knowledge that our loved ones will pass having lived a long, healthy, and fulfilling life. This should not be beyond our imagination. Nor should the possibility of having tended to our intergenerational grief through regular spaces so that new losses don’t cause us to buckle under the Jenga tower of ancestral trauma.
Perhaps when we talk of resistance, it is not only the tearing down of harmful institutions and oppressive systems that we speak of. It must also include the revolution that starts within and amongst. The quiet and internal pausing, where we reclaim power by carving out time stolen from us by the distractions of capitalism. In these intentional moments, we commit ourselves to feeling everything, even that which hurts. To grieve in this way is an honoring. It honors our dead, it honors our bodies, it honors our communities and it honors the generations who will follow us. Then perhaps, it is only by recognizing our mutual dependencies and saying: I commit myself to my grief, I commit myself to your grief, I commit myself to our grief, that will allow us to become the healed ancestors after all.
This article was originally published to Unbothered UK
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