“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
"One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives.”
Workshop Part One:
Softly Breaking Silence: Grief, Ritual and Decomposing Coloniality with Foluke Taylor.
An exploration of the relation between decolonisation and grief cannot proceed without first considering colonisation and its material relationship to land and knowledge. This workshop is for therapeutic practitioners who are curious about what (and who) is missed when the ways that we understand and attend to grief are deeply bound up in colonial logics. Participants will have the opportunity to listen and respond to a presentation that draws on the intellectual and creative labours of Black women to highlight Black feminist poethical responses to multiple, transgenerational, and planetary level griefs. Who (and what and when) are we understanding as grievable and how, in our therapeutic practices, do we invite andmake room for more?
Workshop Part Two:
Grief Remixed, Reclaimed and Rearranged with Robert Downes.
Given that we are already born into worlds of grief, what does reckoning with grief look like beyond the dominant narratives? How might we contend with a grief born of becoming racialised embodiments in a precarious and often cruel world? What are our personal and collective grief narratives and how might we tend to them beyond the impingements of a white hetero-patriarchal neo-liberal order that continues to “produce our losses” and limit grief over and over again? In this workshop we will consider the personal and collective weave of grief and refrain from packing it away for a while. Let’s think of it as a ‘grief sit’ as we reflect on grief, what it reveals and how it might guide us to live and practice otherwise.
Resources, references and further study:
Embodied Racialised Trauma
Joyful Militancy Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Carla Bergman & Nick Montgomery.