to the bone
mourning amidst collective grief
seedgiver scatters reflections on life, community, resistance, and liberation. You’re invited to join seedgiver in reciprocity as a paid subscriber or by sharing a one-time gift.
Dear Beloved,
It’s a grim joke to poise election day right after Halloween. I understand having it in November (it fits well with November’s other colonial event) and avoiding December altogether. Political campaigns are nasty business - better to be done with it before the winter holidays. But you have to admit…there is something a little too on the nose about celebrating a night of friendly fright days before the electoral college chooses which genocidal fascist gets the nuke codes.
This year, though, I am not thinking about Halloween in the context of a fun, frightful holiday. This year, I consider Halloween as the end of harvest, a blurring between worlds, a time when doorways open. I stand in this season in all its rituals, its memories, its sacredness - a time to honor our deceased kin and welcome ancestors back home while the veil is thin.
I think of Samhain. I think of All Saints Day. I think of Día de los Muertos. I think about how tomorrow is Día de los Angelitos, the Day of the Little Angels: the day to honor deceased children.
In March, it was reported that more children in Gaza have been murdered by Israel in just 5 months than in 4 years of worldwide conflict. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, a child is murdered by Israel every two days. Judging by the Lancet report, the numbers are far higher than any official statistics we have on hand. What we do know is that 70% of Israel’s military budget is funded by the United States.
Meanwhile, over 1.8 million children under 5 in Sudan have been displaced from their homes. In Lebanon, 400,000 children are already displaced by (again) Israel. In Congo, children as young as 6 work in cobalt mines to supply green colonialism, and still the United States court system absolves global tech companies. In the belly of the beast, domestic terrorists attacked children in at least 58 school shootings this year and firearms sales are surging nationwide.
This is not a light time.
The world is heavy on our shoulders, Beloved. We are still in a pandemic, and price gouging is starving us. Swinging from crisis to crisis to another goddamn crisis, the world is spinning and we’re still expected to keep going, keep moving, keep producing, keep consuming, keep the empire moving.
But do nothing, they tell us. Do nothing and say nothing. If you’re lucky, you may get bereavement leave for a family member but no time off to grieve for genocide. No time off to grieve for a worldwide, mass-disabling pandemic. No time off to grieve for climate collapse.
No time off to grieve for a drowning world on fire.
I struggle to find the words, let alone string them together and write coherent sentences. How do I write about unspeakable horror, Beloved? What words can do justice to those stolen from us?
This grief has been like a veil draped over my every day, lingering in corners and perching on my shoulder. It sits silently next to me as I work, walks beside me as I push a shopping cart at the grocer, and curls up like a cat on my chest when I go to bed at night and listen to my sleeping loved one’s breathing. My mind is filled with dust and rubble.
When I listen closely, I hear the cries.
“…you realize grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. And I think, you know, this is the last act of loving someone. And you realize it will never end. You get to do this for the rest of your life.”
- Ocean Vuong
Grief as Communal Care
Grief demands that we sit beside it and feel. More than that, it is necessary because grief is not an individual issue. Unaddressed grief evolves into communal harm which in turn can spiral into cycles of violence.
“Within the Dagara cosmology, the suppression of grief in the West means that we have a huge amount of harm spreading and rippling as a result of what has been left alone to fester,” wrote Camille Sapara Baron, inspired by the Indigenous wisdom of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso.
Where does empire come from? It is fueled by ceaseless hunger and destruction, dehumanization and unchecked greed. But where does it come from?
If we analyze empire through a grief lens, we see the connecting threads: Living under conquest, feudalism, and the apocalyptic Black Plague, decimating a continent’s population and taking centuries to recover, would make for a traumatized, scarcity-minded people without regard for others if there is no communal healing. A Holocaust, preceded by generations of pogroms and ethnic cleansing, would create a militant, distorted understanding of “defense” in a people if there is no communal healing. Descending from generations of marginalization would birth political candidate grasping for power at anyone’s expense, even their own, if there is no communal healing.
What about the violence we see in our neighborhoods, introduced and sustained by empire’s policy but propagated by unaddressed generational grief? Lateral violence is when people who endure oppression direct their anger and pain not to their oppressors but to their kin. These abusive cycles are the legacy of colonization, marginalization, and oppression.
It is how empire perpetuates itself. Pain is a political tool, and generational trauma is empire’s deepest wound. Collective grief is our path for liberation.
For the sake of our community and future generations, we must tend to our grief and mourn for those lost. In empire, grief is also an act of protest. Grief reclaims our humanity from mass production and hyper-consumption.
Public lamentations were banned in India under British rule. Before India, keening was reprimanded and banned in Ireland to “civilize.” Even remains have been withheld by empire to desecrate revolutionaries and disrupt communities’ grieving. Empire’s capitalism further hinders our bereavement by turning the care of our dead into profit, charging absurd prices for burials and monetizing mourning rituals.
How do we reclaim our humanity, living and dead? We mourn together, imagining and co-creating a world where funeral costs or bereavement time is no longer a concern. We write elegies and songs for our martyrs; obituaries should not be short clippings in the corners of papers. We return to cultural mourning rituals and funeral rites - our graveyard quilts, our shivas, our mortuary totem poles, our jazz funerals, our keening, our public grief. We entrust the care of our beloveds to death doulas, and we take care of each other.
We honor death anniversaries and take time off. We light candles and build altars for them. We remember.
تقبرني
In Arabic, one way of saying you love someone is تقبرني - “bury me.” It expresses a love earth deep. It is a wish for a beloved to live a long life, longer than your own, so you may never live a day without them. It is a wish to be buried by your love.
تقبرني
I love you.
I love you to the bone.
We grieve together.
Seeds for Change
Create an altar space in your home or a public place to honor our martyrs and stolen revolutionaries
Read “Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?” by Malkia Devich-Cyril
Read “Grief Is a Rupture": Sarah Jaffe's New Book on Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire for a preview of Jaffe’s book
Host a vigil for your community’s collective grief and as an act of protest.
Visit a local cemetery, learn its history, and volunteer to tend to it
Write an elegy
Call for Mutual Aid: Help My Palestinian Neighbors in Seattle!
I’ve shared this campaign in my previous two newsletters. Since Tuesday, we’ve inched closer to our goal of $20,000 to support our new Palestinian neighbors in Seattle. We are now past $15,000!
To escape Israel’s genocide against their people, our neighbors had to leave their home Jenin in the West Bank and travel through Egypt, Jordan, and Türkiye before landing in Seattle. This long journey and the criminal 6-month security deposit their landlord charged dried up their savings. While they have found community support, they are in critical need of funds.
Your support will help both our new neighbors settle in and secure the safe evacuation of their parents in Palestine. They just need a little more help to reach $20,000. Will you donate and share this campaign with your community?
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