Seeking a creative grief response that allows us to stay with the trouble.*
We continue to find out about the rising death toll in Palestine. Some outside sources say their estimates are much higher than the Gazan Health Ministry’s numbers of over 10,000 dead, over 4,000 of those being children. Many of us with colonizer ancestries and settler lives are tempted to look away, to cite the need for self-care, to evade the overwhelm and pain we see. We find ourselves in a constant state of panic, outrage, guilt, and confusion, not sure what to believe or what to do. Western white culture has only modeled "fixing" (or interfering or dominating, if we're honest), and in this case we're unable to slip into a savior role or heroic trope to save the day. We can't even provide material support that feels meaningful.
This isn’t surprising, that we want to look away if we can't fix something. We settlers tell ourselves many stories to deny and excuse our role in history, and to assuage our fears. We have to face that we've historically championed the violence of the ruling class, rather than recognizing the land and the indigenous peoples as our kin (humans as well as plants, animals, and other beings). When we traumatize others we always end up traumatizing ourselves ... and yet we need to center those who are being massacred at this moment.
My clients with European ancestry - not all of whom would be racialized as white in their day-to-day lives - are wrestling with this overwhelm and guilt, and the isolation that comes with. Other clients, whose ancestors have survived and resisted colonization for centures, work to honor and continue their generational legacies.
ID: a grey and black illustration of a person with long dark hair covering their head with their hand in a posture of grief. Credit: "Something has died forever (the grief)" by Iskaeldt on DeviantArt, shared with Creative Commons license.
Creative Grief Response
Together we are working on some questions and explorations. Together we form the question, what would allow us to have a creative grief response? I envision this as a keening pledge that arises from within us. To break that down a bit:
Creative: this is arising, growing, active energy.
Grief: this is keening, loss. This names that life is so beautiful yet fragile under these violent systems.
Response: the root word means “pledge back,” a commitment. It links to the word "responsibility."
But what does a creative grief response look like and feel like? Here are some questions we’ve been exploring.
How do we not look away? The first and most important step. Stay, feel, be aware, and hold ourselves and each other while we do so. What if rather than look away, my clients and I recognize that the living, dead, and dying of Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Pakistan, and elsewhere deserve to be honored and remembered as kin? Instead of shutting that down, what if we assume this is possible, in some way and to some degree, with the capacity we have?
How could we make kin? What if making kin involves making relationship? So while we are educating ourselves on the current news and the history, can we also reach toward Palestinian people in respectful ways that they have requested? Can we bring their keffiyehs, their olive oil, their soap, into our homes and give them as gifts? Can we read their stories and their poetry, listen to their music? Can we bring Palestinian presence into the soft and contemplative spaces of our lives, just to honor it, not to appropriate it? Can we recognize that we'll never understand their context fully, but still work to remove our Western frame of domination? Can we respectfully enter spaces (only those that welcome us) that contain Palestinians, and there can we listen and consider? Can we grow space in the world and in our psyches where their voices are heard?
How can we open ourselves to the grief? Cindy Barukh Milstein, an anarchist Jew and organizer, says, “All anarchist(ic) spaces should routinely include grief altars.” How can we explore what grief really is? Grief, as hard as it is, is also love. It connects us back to our love for the people we have lost and are losing. From my own experience of my mother's sudden death a few years ago, I learned that deep grief is a process and a container experience. Grief contains outrage, fear, guilt, loss, sadness, and more in its complex rhythms and cycles. How can we see our grief as community, as growth? How can we make spaces for it, honoring it in everyday life? Altars, mementos, regular times of reflection, bringing it up in our conversations ... once we commit to our grief, there are multiple ways to honor it, which honors the people we are losing.
What are our options for overwhelm? How can we imagine differently about our own upset and overwhelm, especially if we experience trauma, neurodivergence, and/or mental illness? One idea: I recently heard an IG reel from, I think, a Black death doula (if you know who, please comment and I’ll add the attribution) talking about dysregulation. Dysregulation is when a person’s nervous system is in a trauma or panic response, which can lead to shut down, self-harm, harm to others, and other consequences, like sabotaging or destructive choices. The person said, “The opposite of dysregulation is not regulation,” meaning, it’s not being calm and detached from the pain going on in the world. They said, “The opposite of dysregulation is expression.” Ah. Wow. Right. How then do we express our grief, our outrage, our commitment, in a way that is unique to our talents, to the way our particular body and soul move in the world? How do we express in a way that is respectful and engaged with community? This leads to the next three questions.
How does grief physically move? How can we honor traditions of keening, wailing, moaning: whether through our open mouths, our art, our rocking bodies, our direct actions, our writing, our vigils, our altars, our music, our walks in nature or neighborhood, our time spent on social media or researching? What framework helps us recognize that the time and energy we spend on grieving is essential collective work? What feels generative for us, creating connection in a way that's meaningful to us? Because if it's meaningful to us, it's more sustainable. Even if we are confused or panicked, how can we stay with the disruptions? The disruptions may be body-based - shaking, lack of sleep or appetite, groaning. Or the disruptions may be something we participate in - direct actions like marches, sit-ins at our local representative’s office, walking out of our jobs, joining a boycott. How might these actions with our bodies allow us metabolize a little more of our grief? How do these actions honor those we are in kinship with?
How do we live into our responsibility? Does this grieving process allow us to stay with the trouble better, to stay responsive and response-able (responsible)? How can we become committed to the grieving and all that it represents and allows? How do we intentionally move into expressions of that grief, and into care for that grief, in ourselves and others?
What kind of self-care feels acceptable? When we think of where community care and self care come in, are we practicing them, not as avoidance, but as a part of the commitment to grieving and action? If we have cried so hard we’ve run out of tears, could we stop to drink water so we can cry again? If we have marched so long we risk falling over, could we stop, eat, and rest, so we can march again? (These are somewhat metaphorical examples, I hope it's clear.) If we are becoming frozen, self-harming, or harmful to those around us because our nervous system is stuck in a trauma response, could we use our skills to activate our parasympathetic response, so that we can function more intentionally, not away, but into our grief? If we have practice in DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) or Somatics as skills that help us maintain our kindness and our intentions, could we practice those within this larger context? Do these skills help us make a plan for expressing and acting upon our grief in material, meaningful, and helpful ways? Could we hold a space where all that can happen, rather than using self-care as an excuse for evading the difficult realities?
How do we fight urgency and savior tropes rooted in white supremacy? Can we remember and acknowledge that none of this is fast? Our actual psyches, conversations, relationships, and communities don’t always move at the speed of social media. Can we stay mindful of the urgency brought about by guilt, confusion, or savior impulses - all of which may drive us to evade the feelings by engaging in ill-wrought action? Can we plan for the creative grief response - the keening pledge that arises - as a process, not an end product? Can we find ways to allow our psyches the time we need to take in the enormity of the violence? Can we envision ourselves in our own community, able to address one small piece of it in collaborative expression? Not delaying or dithering, but taking a moment to discern?
How can we connect to others who are also grieving? How can we feel our grief and kinship with those who are being oppressed, both during our contemplative times, and in our more active times? Are our processes continual, messy, imperfect, growing? If so, does that mean they are alive? Are we enacting pre-figurative politics, that is, are we practicing the world we want to live in, in the here and now? When it comes to action, are we reaching out to local communities - Palestinian, Jewish, Congolese, Sudanese, Haitian - to offer support and to enhance their safety in our local geography? Not in an urgent way, and not as "one and done," but as ongoing and sometimes slow change?
How can we actively support #LandBack? As we work to make kin, are we actively practicing #LandBack by following the directives of local indigenous folks resisting settler colonialism? Are we dismantling settler narratives within us and around us? Are we using our skills and conversations to reckon with our participation in settler colonialism and its violence?
The Right Action in the Right Moment
Through these questions, my clients and I are making our action plans, finding the right moment for the right action - not out of perfectionism, but out of feeling the flow of the moment, where grief takes us, what the voices of the affected folks tell us.
If an example would be helpful: recently I was invited to support a civil disobedience arrest action. It was a small action but with the potential for a measurable disruptive impact. A group of activists were going to sit in at Representative Hillary Scholten’s office in the Federal Building in downtown Grand Rapids, refusing to leave until she called for a Ceasefire in Palestine.
The group had a livestreamer, but as I joined the livestream from my computer at home I could see that it wasn’t drawing a lot of attention. I felt like it would be a shame if the group got arrested without bringing more awareness and attention to their statement of solidarity.
The group had given me access to their public statement and I had permission to be their press contact, so I went to work. I called and emailed local press outlets and agreed to an interview with one. I made sure journalists could access the livestream as well, even though there was not much to see as the police had maneuvered to keep the arrests out of sight.
Then I created a graphic for social media that drew attention to the livestream, the action, and the statement of the activists. I posted it on a solidarity group account. The livestream went from 3 viewers to 50, then 80. The livestreamer did a good job of narrating the action and its purpose, and I was able to add the activists’ statement in the comments for viewers.
ID: a busy black graphic with photos of local U.S. rep and senators, the federal building in Grand Rapids, a Palestinian flag, and Palestinian children smiling. Text reads "Grand Rapids Activists Occupy the GR For Federal Building! #Ceasefire Now! Fund Our Community, Not Genocide."
The graphic I made and posted drew over 200 likes and reached over 1200 accounts, bringing viewers to the livestream in real time. The local news covered the action and the statement on their evening and morning broadcasts, centering the calls to Free Palestine.
How did I get to this moment? Over the last few years I had learned from other community members. I learned the basic skills of interviewing, being a press contact, and making a simple graphic, and I had built relationship with local activists. I did all these actions as part of an ongoing process to metabolize and live into my grief for so many people lost to violent systems. This was an example of the right action at the right time, or being in the flow, with very little preparation in the actual moment.
Supporting behind the scenes, from my home, allowed me to be in local community while also honoring my other community commitments that night and my need to be COVID safe for myself and disabled neighbors in my community. There truly are no unimportant roles in community work.
This is also an example of “small is all.” The livestream did not go viral. Reaching 1200 accounts is a lot for the groups I’m in, but of course Instagram features many posts that are seen by over a million accounts. And yet ...
One Thread in the Fabric
What this action did do was to further activate our mid-size community to learn more about direct action, civil disobedience, and what they could do. It opened imagination and possibilities.
This action also transitioned into a local email push - also disruptive - that is more accessible than direct action to many local disabled folks.
Every single action is one thread in the overall fabric of our resistance. As DiDi Delgado says, "this work is like each of us being one patch in an enormous quilt… One patch- that’s our responsibility. And if we do that together, we can make sure no one gets left out in the cold."
In a Westernized culture that emphasizes the individual hero narrative, this takes a lot of getting used to. But what we do on a small scale weaves together into a larger scale, and this is why my clients and I spend time with the questions. The questions lead to the actions we can actually do: actions borne out of our deep, unfathomable, rebellious mourning and fierce love.
* The concepts of "staying with the trouble" and "making kin" are drawn heavily from writers Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), and Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene). I am not linking Haraway's book here because, though many of the research, explorations, and ideas are creative and helpful, Haraway seems to feel strongly and urgently that we should be encouraging more people toward population control. Though she doesn't advocate coercive means, she also doesn't recognize the history of eugenics methods that have often been forced upon or "encouraged" in Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized populations. I just can't quite abide it.