Speculative Grieving As Resistance | Resham Mantri
December 5, 2024
image: Resham Mantri
The power of grief to connect us to others is profound. Our griefs are unique to our circumstances, but from their depths, we can often begin to recognize the overall language of loss in others. These connections can be truly transformative and awakening. When we allow grief and longing to transform us, softening us and our fears, there is potential to be released from generational trauma stemming from colonial violence and mass migrations. Allowing grief fully within us preludes a disintegration of the walls we have built around us to define and protect us. Many of these walls mimic the nature and shape of colonial borders we are taught to live in from a very young age. Grief and colonialism’s capitalist frameworks are diametrically opposed. The collective fear and avoidance of griefwork can actually bring forth further violence in a tortured cyclical cycle of unhealed trauma. As Gargi Bhattacharyya writes in We, the Heartbroken,
the turning outwards of our fear of grief and its disorientations can result, so obviously, in the violence that scars our world. The will to assert and to invade, to conquer and to quell. It is not hard to see how these recurrent motors in human history reveal a need to demonstrate power and to pretend to be impervious to the pains of loss.
Taking the time our bodies need to grieve losses creates the conditions for care. Grieving fully we become less productive under capitalism’s measures because grief takes the time it takes and because the measure of success in a grieving body is a question incomprehensible under a capitalist framework of understanding. When we rest into our grief, we rest for the first time in our lives. This rest has profound consequences. Griefwork and the speculative imagining of our collective futures are intertwined and necessary for the world we live in, one of genocides, ongoing violence against Indigenous people, and a fundamental disconnect from the land, air and water.
A death doula – also called a deathwalker, deathworker, end-of-life doula, death midwife – is a person who supports a dying person, their caretakers, family, and friends through all aspects of the dying process. A death doula is not a medical professional, and as such, does not weigh in on medical determinations of the dying. But almost every other aspect of dying is available to being held by a deathworker. I found this work, which was more like a calling that found me, in 2019 when my grandmother died in Mumbai followed by my father in Brooklyn a few months later. When my father was dying, a birth doula friend recommended I call a death doula. Jae was the first person in almost two months of the medical nightmare – finding out my father had a brain tumor – who held space for my mother, sister and me to comprehend what was truly happening. She sat at a table with us and asked us separately what we were feeling. She met my father as he was, respecting that he was still fully human despite his impairments. She guided us in practical and spiritual ways to care for his body once he passed. My father was dying and she was the first person who did not look away from that truth. She met us with kindness exactly where we were, with the clarity of a deeply embodied healer. This allowed me to not look away either, to instead fully immerse myself in the present moment.
I can’t express in a few sentences what I learned and saw in Mumbai when my grandmother was dying: it was everything. Brushing my grandmother’s hair, changing her undergarments, massaging her legs, all these tasks we often deem to be caretaker work, utterly menial and devoid of importance, were imbued with belonging and love. The belonging was the belonging of the generations-long variety. In the confusion and grief of death, performing tasks for the dying and their loved ones lends purpose and a rare intimacy between caregivers. As a first-generation Indian-American, I have come to understand the ways America brainwashed me into believing modernity and capitalism improve everything. I witnessed my grandmother die in her own home surrounded by family who treated the work of caring for her body as a task of the highest honor. I can only describe it as a portal I was led through. There were medical professionals, doctors and nurses who came to her bedside but ultimately respected her process of dying and the wishes of the family. These medical professionals did not run the show, they were supporting characters.* Watching my own father die months later in New York City gave me the harsh and immediate contrast of being truly awake to how much we as Americans have lost through forced migrations and the complex mistruths of immigration to the colonial “land of opportunities”. Deathwork exists in America as a profession and topic, unlike India, partly because in the U.S., we have been dying in hospitals, in highly medicalized conditions wholly removed from our homes and the natural processes of our bodies.
I needed a death doula desperately in Brooklyn, because of the trauma my father had been subjected to in the hospital that recommended and performed a massive brain surgery on a 77-year old man with a terminal diagnosis in order to give him slightly more life. My sister, mother and I were wholly unprepared for how we would need to protect him. Many of us are traumatized by witnessing from the sidelines or prevented from witnessing our loved ones’ deaths. The way we grieve our dying and dead loved ones is negatively impacted when their deaths are devoid of care and agency. Returning to our cultural and familial death practices is one way to lift the fog of colonial, capitalist and Western modernization’s supremacy.
Briefly, the Word “Grief”
The word “grief” is used throughout this essay and in the cultural discourse of this moment. When I use the word “grief” I mean it as the condition of feeling what has been lost, destroyed, or taken from us. Grief can be felt as both a sharp pang in your chest that makes it hard to breathe, or a forever shadow that tells the stories of our greatest loves. It is both, and it is neither. Grief actually defies all attempts at definition, making it challenging to write about with integrity. Grief can be invisible until it isn’t one day, awoken by circumstances beyond our understanding. Sometimes if we follow the trails of our grief we can unearth family lore, lineages, and a sense of our place.
My grandmother outlived her husband, her resentments, many conflicts, and siblings, to survive to the age of ninety-two. She died, a true embodiment of love, one who allowed, who expanded with time, who was curious and accepting. I have many photos of her hands aging over time, passing over flowers that she seamlessly threaded to make daily garlands for her altar. There was hardly a day she missed. She greeted all those who entered her space with a warmth you could feel. Her birthname was Gulab which means rose.
image: Resham Mantri
Grieving as Resistance
It remains impossible at this moment to not speak about the global outpouring of grief and despair for Palestinians suffering from violence that many people from colonized, casteist, or apartheid lands can recognize. What is the nature and quality of collective grief? What does collective grieving look like in the context of collective violence? How does it make us act towards others? How does it pull on existing wounds? What is the particular violence of not allowing for certain groups of people to publicly grieve? In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable, Judith Butler writes:
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.
Who are “we” when we dare to grieve? The dominant narrative surrounding the conflict that has raged for years on the colonized lands of Palestine tells us that naming Palestinian grief and suffering is not only not allowed but akin to anti-semitism. The suffering of some is the only grief allowed to exist. We resist the dehumanizing conditions of genocide by publicly mourning despite everything, because of everything. Who is allowed to speak of grief in this moment? Who is allowed to grieve?
When we consider the worldwide protests and use of social media in the fall and winter of 2023-24, the condition of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere in Israeli-controlled areas such as the West Bank, part of what feels evident in this moment is that we are witnessing protest, yes, and we are witnessing mass public mourning for a group of people that have historically been without the ability to publicly grieve all types of losses. What is the power of public mourning as solidarity? Many of us can do little else but publicly mourn which in effect, confirms to our minds and hearts “the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own,” as Butler writes. In the in-between time, as we amass power, strategy and sheer numbers to end state violence, what can we, as citizens, do for one another?
Through our public mourning we affirm, not only to ourselves but to our communities, that we are embodied, and that we are powerfully and heartbreakingly implicated in Palestinian life. As Americans, we are responsible for the actions of our government; its use of our dollars to destroy life, its power to annihilate in our silence. If we are implicated in Palestinian lives, we are implicated in life in general. The line between mass mourning and mass resistance is porous. Many mass protests emerge spontaneously out of the need for our mourning to be witnessed and held en masse. Our grief across multiple genocides – spanning regions like the Congo and Sudan – alerts us to the true condition of our interconnectedness. We can grieve it all at the same time. My true prayer is for grief to promote life amidst genocide’s madness. The possibilities of this work lead us toward the type of speculative imagining we need to combat the small-mindedness of borders and ethnonationalism. It is through the deeply creative outstretched arms of grief’s longing and our lonely hearts that we find connections across lands previously closed off to our minds. This is a form of resistance. This is a form of world-building.
What If We Insisted On Our Grief?
I am six years into the biggest break from my family and life-long socially constructed communities. I have left the security and expectations of heteronormative Western and South Asian-approved marriage structures. To do this, I grieved for years while in the marriage, and afterwards, but this evolved to include moments of absolute freedom and ecstatic joy, as well as the specific grief of losing easy belonging. This is the same type of easy belonging that exists in our knowing or unknowing participation in dominant structures like white supremacy and patriarchy. While easy, these structures, whether within traditional family roles or nation-state borders, are not actual belonging. Letting go of these harmful structures, while often a grief-laden process, can connect us to the larger network of life on this planet, both human and otherwise. Letting go of easy belonging is, for a time, intensely lonely, and this loneliness breeds its own lovely form of longing. My sudden family breakage, coupled with the deaths of important people and relationships, created a deep longing in my body for queer family and a new type of kin. I believe that grief opens a portal to the kind of longing that pulls deeply at our essential purpose. Griefwork made serious emerges from simply recognizing grief as a necessary emotion worthy of investigation. Taking it seriously means relieving ourselves of shame or silence around a powerful emotion that can awaken long dormant desires. We can make art about our grief, cry into pillows, scream in the streets, speak about it with strangers, travel the world with it, and notice how things look through its lens. We are unmade by our griefs. In coming undone, what other systems will also unravel?
* The death of my grandmother involves pieces of a medical story that are beyond my capacity to tell fully here. The medical system in India has serious problems like anywhere else. My point is that in matters of death, the Indian healthcare system presumes a certain willingness and capacity in familial caretakers to provide deathcare to our loved ones.
Resham Mantri is a writer, artist, death doula, and single parent living in an intergenerational home in Brooklyn, NY. Their website is reshammantri.com and their Instagram is @reshamgram.
