“Rebellious Mourning: the Collective Work of Grief” Edited By: Cindy Milstein
I’ve been slowly working my way through this book for nearly a year now and as a book-a-day reader, that requires an explanation. “Rebellious Mourning” is a compilation of grief from accumulated perspectives of social activists doing front line work. The stories collected range from the chronically disabled, migrants along the border, life in the wake of nuclear disaster to LGBTQ activism, racial violence and sexual abuse and every hard thing we humans experience in-between.
The aim of this anthology of grief is to give voice to the silent grief we are all already carrying, from living in a world so desperate for reform, not just the grief of bereavement we are most comfortable expressing. The editor of this work, Cindy Milstein turns to the question posed by philosopher Judith Butler, “What counts as a liveable life and a grievable death?” and allows the marginalized and those serving them to tell their stories in response.
These stories are excruciating to read. Many of them are gut wrenching and visceral. But is turning toward the suffering of grief necessary to galvanize change? Is it an act of political protest to honor the suffering of those deemed mute by the systems that govern us?
As Judith Butler reminds us: “To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief-‘Who have I become?’ or, indeed, ‘What is left of me?’ ‘What is it in the Other that I have lost?’ posits the ‘I’ in the mode of unknowingness.”
I don’t suggest this is a light and easy read, that you’ll learn something hopeful about yourself or our world from reading it. But I do believe those of us with the privilege of not enduring the oppression of these systems have a responsibility to witness the grief those systems are inflicting on our neighbors. This is an excellent resource for that humbling work.
