The Uses of Mourning

In Toni Morrison’s (1977 2004) novel Song of Solomon, Pilate and her daughter Reba attend the funeral of Reba’s daughter Hagar. Pilate begins to shout during the service, “Mercy . . . I want Mercy!” And soon after: ‘“Mercy?’ Now she was asking a question, ‘Mercy?’” Morrison continues, “It was not enough. The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note. In a clear bluebell voice she sang it out—the one word held so long it became a sentence—and before the last syllable had died in the corners of the room, she was answered in a sweet soprano: ‘I hear you’” (316–17). This call-and-response exchange is a circular framing of loss that includes the beloved at its center, an up-down-high-low that modulates between proximity and distance.Reba and Pilate must fill the space of mourning with the replication of Hagar’s voice. They enter the funereal space with the echo of Hagar, the missing space between them. Song of Solomon begins and ends with collective witnessing amid death. The question of mercy, in Morrison’s iteration, is the distance between thresholds, the boundary marker delineating the grieved, lost, and retrieved. Of the geographic illegibility of slavery’s mournable subjects Saidiya Hartman (2007: 108) writes, “It’s the place where the car hit the tree and your mother and brother died . . . but it’s just a regular street for everyone else.” Between the illegible and the retrievable we find collective recourses to mourning that tell us something about how different subjectivities live and love in the present.Audre Lorde’s (1984) manifestos on affective states of being—“Uses of the Erotic” and “The Uses of Anger”—script mourning’s many uses and capacities. With Lorde, the experiences of women of color are a means of identifying oppressive social structures, especially racism, but also of sources of strength and survival. Writing against the sublimation of eros into sexuality recovers the power of the erotic, a point underscored in the essay’s subtitle. By theorizing the erotic as “a well of replenishing and provocative force,” forms of powerlessness manifesting as fear, despair, depression, self-denial, and the like are rejected. Reprised in the “Uses of Anger,” this approach becomes even more explicit for its critical as well as reparative possibilities. Amidst the structures, practices, and discourses of racism, “everything can be used” (Lorde 127), and eros, anger, and other sensorial experiences can be sources of energy, replenishment, and change.This special issue on feminist articulations of mourning, “Feminist Mournings,” is our way of highlighting the oft-neglected work of feminism within mourning, in which the process of collective imagining is part of the product of the work of grief. Our purpose, then, is twofold. First, we reimagine mourning from its sway as a process of individualized grief-work, something to be worked through or overcome, to a collective condition. From this angle, mourning begins with acknowledging the spaces and temporalities in which the various manifestations of death abound—from racialized death and gendered death to national and transnational topographies. As a feminist analytic, mourning contends with the social and political conditions that exacerbate death, modulating which lives can be socially grieved and when grieving becomes a concerted state of being.Mourning is our response to a world in which death is tied to the structures of race, sexuality, gender, class, disability, religion, nation, and more. We seek to offer feminist genealogies of mourning that are anchored in the normalized conditions and legacies of slavery, settler occupation, colonialism, migration, and the violences of modern national states. At this moment of widespread loss and discontent, when large swaths of the world live at the edges of death and ongoing mourning—anti-Black violence, the expendability of refugee and migrant lives, military assaults and transnationally shared strategies for violent occupation, and the radically unequal distributions that shape the COVID-19 pandemic—this challenge takes on new urgencies. We felt the need for this special issue before the pandemic devastated Indigenous communities and Black and Brown peoples, and before the waves of protests that rocked the nation with the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, but these deaths, the targeting of trans and queer people of color, and ongoing sufferings in Palestine, India-occupied Kashmir, and other geopolitical contexts make this intervention more urgent than ever.1 A constellation of concepts—sorrow songs, wake work, critical fabulation, social death, grief and grievance, grievability, melancholy of race, postcolonial melancholia, biopolitics, necropolitics and necropower, queer necropolitics, mortuary politics, slow death—aid our task of mourning and theorizing its uses.Second, for us mourning is a wellspring that issues from loss and suffering while containing the seeds for renewal. To be sure, it derives from life taking and, much like conventional understandings of anger, is primarily associated with damaging effects. Mourning is therefore linked with the temporalities of stages and phases, and the need to move through and past them. This, in turn, accounts for Freudian cautions against becoming melancholic and sociological concerns with when mourning is over. But Audre Lorde compels an understanding of the sensorial that emphasizes pain as well as survival, in which suffering raises questions of what is to be done, how is justice to be ensured, and how are different todays and futures to be secured.2 Akin to the erotic, mourning is endowed with the possibilities of not just life taking but also life making. In this sense mourning is a location that is as much about the lineages of loss and grief as it is about their possibilities. We are committed to theorizing mourning as an orientation to the world where the past, present, and imminent futures are not dead or destined but contain the potentialities for lives that were or are yet to be.Our aim in this special issue is to understand mournings from the vantage point of quotidian life, the ones that exist in plain sight, and that animate the artistic and scholarly productions of a range of feminists, queer, and trans people of color. The question of mourning—how it functions and whom it serves—has been a fixture of Black, women of color, Indigenous and postcolonial feminisms, and queer and trans of color scholarship. Ongoing settler racial projects, genocide, the effects of HIV/AIDS, mourning, melancholia, and histories of loss (as well as lost histories) are among the ways that mourning constantly intrudes as well as inspires scholarly and artistic productions. Following Morrison, Lorde, bell hooks, and other critical feminist scholars, it is a means of disrupting dominant epistemologies, while centering a conceptual frame issuing from the contributions of people of color. Our commitment to centering feminist knowledge production, in which feminism is defined in and through women/people of color, aligns with Meridians’ location at the edges of race, gender, ethnicity, and nation. The journal’s interdisciplinarity, its hospitability toward the many forms of feminist knowledges, makes it uniquely suitable to the essays gathered in this special issue. The personal, intellectual, prose, poetry, critical, creative, ethnographic, close readings, and intentional writings are woven together in the essays to center women/queer/trans people of color, while also decentering Eurocentric feminist theories of mourning.The task begins by rethinking established readings of Antigone, the quintessential figure of mourning in (White) Western thought. This myth has been deeply productive for theorizing affect, kinship, and the state, while promoting Eurocentric views of mourning that begin with grief as aberration and as an exceptional (individual) state of being. Taking issue with Western feminist readings of Antigone’s radical politics rooted in opposition to the state, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2010) argues that women are all too often caught between state and community, conditions of postcolonial modernity, and gendered citizenship. Offering agonism in place of antagonism, Sunder Rajan explores how women concurrently oppose and engage with the state, a position that sheds fresh light on the ways that Darnella Frazier and other state witnesses seeking justice for George Floyd transformed the iconic space of the courtroom into a wake.Feminist mournings inculcate lament as wail, from the Latin lamentum (weeping, wailing), and generate new avenues of expression therein. Contemporary renditions of Antigone offer a glimpse of the trail of grief following human engagement. The photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s 2017 performance Past Tense is a combination of music, spoken word, cinematic interludes, and meditative offerings that riff off of the Greek narrative in which a sister is determined to bury her deceased brother rather than allow him to remain unburied as a punishment for treason. She does this knowing that she, too, will be punished with death. In Weems’s version, musical mournful lows, subtle and soft, open the performance, which is an extension of the story, though this time steeped in apprehension. In this version, then, collective voices unify to give the central figure, Antigone, shoulders to lean on. And the lament is also a protest, one steeped in the critique of power and its multi-valent refusals. What Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to as “wake work” is the affective engagement with our ways of communing with the dead and understanding the propulsion of this desire.In another kind of wake work, Kamila Shamsie’s (2018) novel, Home Fire, reimagines Antigone within the setting of contemporary Britain, the twinned wars against terrorism and Islam, and the politicized lives of dead bodies. Structured around this canonized Western myth about the political theatres of death, the novel explores the protagonist Aneeka’s suffering at the loss of her twin brother. As much a commentary on grief-work—grief’s grinding effects, its proximities to rage, and its pulls for justice—it is too a commentary on the uses of mourning to foreground racialized state surveillance, anti-immigrant practices, and religious radicalization that continue to abound in places such as Britain and the United States. Suffering, loss, and the struggle to care for the dead take on new meanings when established canons are turned inside out.As editors, for us this special issue is about thinking and theorizing mourning as much as it is about feeling and living it together. Crafting the introduction has meant pulling from different lineages of loss, while also looking to these lineages and each other for ways of contending with nameable and un-nameable griefs. We have, in this vulnerable historical moment, markers of collective care that can be emulated—gathering to mourn together, jointly navigating resistance to violence and global indifference, and extending reciprocal forms of regard, in other words, the many uses of feminist mournings. Thus, this special issue has its emphasis on the enduring actions of mourning that necessitate the collaborative efforts of a range of constituents. These essays cohere to tenets of mourning narratives less discernable via a Western (read: White) framework, and thus they provide a wholly unique structure for understanding the plurality of loss. They encourage new viability over the binary between life and death and, in doing so, invent a new dialectic of mourning, one that emphasizes the connectivity of grief-work as a mainstay of affective kinship.If we consider the expansive methodological approaches to mourning deployed by feminist writers and artists, we witness the intertwining of self within a collective enclosure. A call. A response. K. Melchor Hall’s essay, “The Mourning of My Birth in the Wake of Grandma’s One Hundredth Year,” is one such meditation on loss and its gradations, nuances, and surprises. In it she communes with death to exert some control over it, some understanding of it that will allow her to process the exigencies of her life while also enclosing her mother and grandmother in the same space of understanding. Hovering over a series of recurring concerns, she wonders: Are we all ghosts temporarily inhabiting embodiment? How does loss shape access to language, to self-definition? What are the properties of care that we can practice in the instability of understanding? What can be made evident here?Courtney R. Baker’s article, “Mothers, Daughters, and the Lash: Mourning the Mother Tongue in Toni Morrison’s Mercy,” explores the contingencies of longing, loss, and reciprocity. Utilizing the symbolic register of the “lash,” the essay connects Florens to a figurative lashing (as betrayal), since she is bereft of mother love and believes this to be a purposeful withdrawal leaving her alone and full of self-loathing. On the cusp of so much possibility, Morrison shows how boundedness establishes a hierarchy that will establish the soon-to-be nation along racial lines. Severing, then, is at the center of the novel, and this is underscored by the wounds left where absence has made itself visible as lines on a body where lashes once struck. Kinship rituals in A Mercy move along a continuum of longing and care that sustain the characters in the text while also testing their collective resolve. Lives unfold in a loop, not a line, and the fragmentation of the novel illustrates a break in the concept of futurity that Morrison declares (“slavery broke the world”) as an ever-present monument to the past. These “mournings,” then, come from the breadth and depth of mitigation that often accompanies recovery from loss.That language and lamentation serve as repositories of subjugated histories of violence, massacres, and genocide is axiomatic in Asli Zengin’s intervention, “Caring for the Dead: Corpse Washers, Touch, and Mourning in Contemporary Turkey.” But what of death’s sensorial and sensual aspects—touch in the form of corpse washing and caressing and kissing the deceased—in quotidian practices of mourning? Theorizing the material and symbolic significance of touch in Sunni rituals in contemporary Turkey, the essay inquires what it means for transgender corpses to be denied such intimacies of caring for the dead. Such denials reenact the hegemony of the nexus of family, kinship, the state, religious actors, and normative gender and sexuality. Touch as mourning accounts for why members of the LGBTI+ community have established a social archive of claiming trans bodies, organizing funerals, washing the corpses, and negotiating with family members and religious authorities wherever possible.In the pattern and practice of feminist and queer of color mourning, cultural work sets the tone for the intimacy of engagement. This is where Nancy Kang’s reading in her article, “‘Rubbed Inflections of Litany and Myth’: Ciguapismo in Rhina P. Espaillat’s Feminist Poetics of Loss,” is located, within the enclosure of myth making that is invoked culturally. The Dominican figure of the Ciguapa, a nude, female-embodied creature with inverted feet that face backward, facilitates the negotiation of mourning via atemporal, circular movement. 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