From the Ashes: How Grief Shapes Our Struggles

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“The capitalist system also doesn’t care if we die. So insisting on the value of human life, insisting on grieving, particularly grieving publicly and collectively, is a real statement against this entire death-making system,” says author Sarah Jaffe. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Jaffe and host Kelly Hayes talk about the lessons of Jaffe’s latest book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This is a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about grief and how we experience it. How do we navigate, survive, and reconcile loss? What are the consequences of suppressing our grief? Should we treat the grieving process like its labor? We will be joined today by Sarah Jaffe, a writer whose work covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. Sarah is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back, Necessary Trouble, and From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. Sarah’s latest book offers an essential intervention, and one that feels particularly valuable for those of us engaged in movement work. As Sarah writes in From The Ashes:

[Grief] is threaded through our politics and our personal lives, the ways we behave and the things we repress. It is wound throughout our common sense. It is within all the moments of rupture that have taken the establishment pundits by surprise over the past few decades. To see this structure of feeling, one has to let go of a comfortable set of rules about the way the world is and open oneself to the possibility of it being undone. The comfortable struggle to do this; it is the grievers who see it first.

If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Sarah Jaffe, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Sarah Jaffe: Thank you so much for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

SJ: You know, it is a… as I said before we turned the recorder on, it’s been a week or two of some really awful news, and it’s been kind of rough to try to process that and function as a human in the world.

KH: Yes, we are in an ugly stretch of tragedy and disaster that is definitely taking a toll on so many of us.

SJ: Yeah, it really, really has been, you know? I click on a story, and it’s like armed militias driving away FEMA people who are trying to actually help in western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and people burning alive in Palestine. It’s really just been frustrating and sad. We try so hard and it doesn’t seem like… sometimes, it really doesn’t seem like we’re getting very far.

KH: Well, I really appreciate you making time to talk amid everything that’s happening right now.

SJ: Well, it’s always good to talk to you, and hopefully some of this will be helpful to everybody else who’s also trying to process all of these awful things.

KH: It’s always good to talk with you, too, and I think a conversation about your most recent book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, is right on time, given everything we’re experiencing. People are probably used to hearing us talk about labor struggles, but today we are talking about loss and how we experience and survive it. So, can you say a bit about why you decided to write a book about grief?

SJ: A lot of people probably know me as a labor journalist, and my last book was called Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, and that’s still true. But I have been, well actually since before I wrote that book, dealing with sort of grief in my own life. My father died, which was now six years ago, and so in the background while I was writing this very sort of focused book about work, I was also thinking about grief and experiencing grief, and that really led me to see it kind of everywhere, in all the stories I was working on. I would see, oh wait, people are grieving. That’s what’s happening here.

And it started to make sense to me not only as a way to sort of understand the transformation that was happening in my own life, but also some of the political crises that I was just referring to, and the things that feel really big and intractable in political discourse in the world these days. They all really struck me as being issues about grief, and that we don’t have space to understand and talk about, let alone to fully experience grief in this world, because we’re all too busy trying to make ends meet.

KH: That resonates so much. I think our communities and our movements are so overwhelmed by feelings of loss and powerlessness. There is a sense of impotence, because we don’t have the power we need to stop a genocide, and also ineptitude, because we don’t know what to do with ourselves or these feelings. Our society doesn’t make room for those feelings. Our movements don’t make room for those feelings. So, people thrash about, and all of the emotions that are bound up in grief, including rage, just come firing out of us, in all sorts of situations. I think it’s turned the left into a sort of omni-directional firing squad, and I hate that for us. That’s why I was so grateful for this book. I really experienced From The Ashes as a call to reckon with the enormity of what we’ve lost in recent years, and how those losses are shaping us, our work, and our relationships.

In sharing your own personal journey with grief, in the book, you said something early on that I thought was really important. You named that grief wasn’t something you could “work through.” Can you talk about that realization, and why you couldn’t translate your experience of grief into a kind of labor?

SJ: I mean, it’s interesting, right? Again, because I was thinking about this stuff while I was working on a book that was about work, and in that book, I was making arguments about the unpaid work that gets done in the home, and the way that emotional labor is labor. And so it was kind of interesting to come around at the flip side of it and be like, okay, but grief isn’t work. And then trying and thinking about grief to try to sort of theorize like, okay, what’s not work? If I will make a certain argument about certain things being work, like, I also want to reclaim some things from work.

And you know, this first, again, occurred to me as a very personal experience, which was that I sort of thought… My father had been sick for a while when he died. I was like, okay, I’m going to go back into therapy, and I’m going to focus on this, and I’m going to be good at grieving, you know? I’m going to do my homework. And wow, it does not work that way, you know? And you can’t get away from the word “work,” right? It’s kind of everywhere. We trip over it all the time. I sort of start the book beefing with Sigmund Freud about what he describes as the work of mourning, because I think it is neither work nor is his description remotely accurate.

But to think about things that aren’t work, and how we experience sort of processes that happen in the body, and that happen between people, and that happen in social spaces, that aren’t quite conscious, that aren’t quite volitional, and then thanks to the wonderful Dave O’Neill at Bookforum, I ended up interviewing Namwali Serpell, who had written this beautiful, beautiful novel called The Furrows, which is all about grief. And she and I were talking, and we were talking about how Freud is wrong, and she recommended to me this essay by a, I think performance studies scholar, called Bronislaw Szerszynski, and I apologize if I’m pronouncing that wrong.

But he had written this piece about drift, and it was in the context of sort of climate and ecology, but in the piece, he points out that there is a middle voice in a lot of languages, and particularly a lot of ancient languages that we don’t really use anymore, that is somewhere between active and passive, you know? And we’ll talk a lot in active voice, and particularly as journalists, we’re supposed to use the active voice, and then there are certain situations where the passive voice gets used a lot. See what I did there? And that’s often when there’s a police killing, and it’s like, oh, “A teenager was killed today,” or when Israel is doing something, somehow 200 people in Gaza died in a hospital bombing. Well, who bombed the hospital, y’all? You know?

But in-between these two things, and he uses the word “drift” as an example of this, right? Are things that we are doing, but not really, kind of that are being done to us, but not quite, and they sort of happen in-between. It had struck Namwali Serpell, and then of course me, after I read the piece that she sent, that this was a good way to understand grieving as something that happens somewhere between sort of active and passive, that is sort of always working on us, whether we are working on it or not. God, you really can’t avoid using the word “work.”

KH: I really appreciate this idea of grief as something that’s always working on us, whether we are acknowledging it, or making room for it, or making sense of it or not. I also really appreciated the personal journey that you shared in the book. The sections where you talked about your experiences with the loss of your father, who died in 2018. I lost my father in 2017, and a lot of the words you used to describe your experience felt like words I could have used to describe my own. You really captured what it feels like to be undone by loss, and to be remade in its wake. I feel like I was completely reconstructed in the years after my father’s death. I wasn’t the same person, after the early months and years of learning to live with that loss. And that process of being unmade and remade takes so many shapes.

I’m thinking about how, less than a month after my father’s death, I found myself in D.C., at the Capitol, where hundreds of disabled people were protesting a Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It meant a lot to me to be there, covering that struggle, and amplifying the voices of disabled people who were pulling the batteries out of their wheelchairs en masse to shut down the Capitol. They were causing the most righteous havoc and, in that moment, moving through the chaos they were creating felt right. My friends were saying, “What are you doing there?” Because they didn’t believe I was up for it, but it felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, making my father proud.

But the reason my friends didn’t believe I was up for it was that, on most days, I couldn’t leave my apartment. Visiting with me meant sitting somewhere near me, staring at whatever I was staring at, which was usually a television show, but sometimes, just the light coming through the window. I had nothing, absolutely nothing to offer the people I loved or the world most days. So, it was shocking to them to see me on social media, zipping around this protest, energetically reporting on what I was seeing.

Then, of course, those activists were victorious, and the Graham-Cassidy bill was stopped, and it was time to go home, and pretty quickly, I was back in that zone of not having anything to give.

The only thing I can compare it to is my experience of physical disability. There are days when I get up, I feel strong, I walk two miles, I laugh, I have great ideas, and I don’t even think about the wobbly state of my spine. Then, there are days when I barely make it out of bed, when the pain is at the center of my world, and there really isn’t room for anything else. It’s like negotiating with a current, if you’re a swimmer or a surfer. You don’t get to decide what the waves give you. You just have to respond to the reality of that momentum. You live in that flow, and you organize and reorganize your life in response to something you can’t exact control over. Because you can’t control the waves.

SJ: Absolutely, and this is why a lot of disability scholars were really helpful to me in thinking about this book, but also in pointing out that this is why capitalism is happy to discard people like the people in ADAPT doing that protest, right? Because if your life doesn’t move easily into whatever sort of time clock day that the world of work requires of us, then you just kind of get tossed aside, right? We don’t allow people, most of the time, to have a life that goes in waves. We are only allowed to show up and do the work. And you got to clock in, you got to clock out, you got to get it done. Some of us are lucky enough at some point to have jobs that are measured by output rather than by hours clocked in. But still, I have to do the work, at the end of the day. If I put it off today, then I just have to do twice as much tomorrow, not that I’m talking about anything I might’ve done today.

And so that kind of living, that kind of experience of letting feeling, emotional feeling, physical feeling, have its way with you. That is in some way sort of anathema to capitalism and the way that capitalism works. And so I started thinking about grief as anathema to capitalism because it does not work on the clock, and you cannot sort of put it away. And oh, by the way, the capitalist system also doesn’t care if we die. So insisting on the value of human life, insisting on grieving, particularly grieving publicly and collectively, is a real statement against this entire death-making system. And I mean, we are definitely in a moment right now where it is very obvious that the system is death-making. Between COVID and the genocide in Palestine right now that is now spreading to Lebanon, to Iran.

We can see how little the world cares for human life. But that’s always been true, as my friend and comrade Nate Holdren, who is a scholar among other things of personal injury and workplace injury law, talks about. Right? He’s like, capitalism has always done social murder, a term that comes from Friedrich Engels. It just rearranges it sometimes, and it does it differently in different times and places. So I’m sitting in London right now, and I’m in a country that has a universal health care system and fairly decent workplace safety regulations, although they could be better.

And so there’s less organized capitalist death in England than there was in Engels’s time. But there’s plenty of it going around in Congo, Bangladesh, in the places that the awful work of whatevering is going on right now. Of mining, of making, of discarding. And then we see things like these hurricanes that have swept across Florida in one case, which we kind of expect. And then Hurricane Helene, which ended up making its way up the sort of inner southeast and destroying mountain towns that were not… Nobody expects them to flood, that in some cases are marketing themselves as climate havens. And we see that the world doesn’t care about those deaths, either. So in figuring out how to fight all this death-making, we have to incorporate this way of living by the waves, I think.

KH: What you’re saying makes me think about the rage that often wells up amid our sadness when we’re grieving. We feel rage toward governments for their violence, and toward the fossil fuel companies for ravaging the planet and creating climate chaos. We say, “fuck capitalism” and “fuck cancer,” and sometimes we break things or protest or lash out. But we also, sometimes, feel rage toward people who aren’t responsible for our pain. So, I’m wondering, in writing this book, what did you learn about how rage shows up in our experience of grief?

SJ: I say often grief isn’t an emotion. It’s all the emotions. And there’s so much anger and rage and just all of this overflowing emotion. And if we’re lucky, if we’re supported and we’re cared for, then we can express that in ways that aren’t harmful to us or to other people. If we’re able to do that raging and grieving in community, if we’re able to say in the George Floyd uprising, turn that rage into a political uprising, then it gives it an outlet. It gives it a direction, it gives it some meaning and shape. But I’m thinking about the article I was reading this morning about militias fighting FEMA or trying to attack government officials because of disinformation about how FEMA’s trying to, I don’t know, plow towns underground or something. And those are also people who have probably lost everything and are traumatized by what just happened. But their solution for a variety of political and emotional reasons is to believe the most outlandish thing they hear on the internet. And try to protect themselves and some small group of people that they have decided are enough like them from the government, I suppose, but also from anybody else who might try to take what’s theirs.

And yeah, there are a couple of ways we can go with that anger and you can turn it in a useful direction. I don’t want to say a hopeful direction, but at least you can aim it at a target that deserves it. Or we can turn it on each other in… Obviously those examples I’ve just given are really extreme ones, but we can turn it on each other in a lot of less extreme ways too, that are still sort of profoundly alienating.

KH: What you said about how organizing can become an outlet brought something up for me, in terms of the ways that we pour ourselves and our grief into struggle — and how that affects us. When my father died, it was sudden and unexpected. He experienced an unusual complication during a routine procedure, and within a week, he was gone. I was so caught off guard, both by losing him, and by the experience of not having someone to blame and crusade against. I remember thinking that, as an organizer, it would be easier if there were some unjust force I could blame this on and attack. I wanted to attach my hurt to a sense of purpose, rather than a tragic twist of fate. I eventually realized that it wouldn’t have been any easier, if I had someone, or some evil entity to blame, because what happens when we struggle? Most of the time, we lose, and even when we don’t, we don’t get back the people we lost to injustice. And when we fire all of the tumult inside of us at the opposition, and nothing changes, or it feels like no one cares — that’s its own kind of nightmare.

It’s hard enough when we need one person to show us empathy and understanding, and we don’t get it, but when it feels like the majority of people are failing us, in that regard, that’s an extreme experience. And it’s an experience that I think imperils us, because it can lead us to give up on other people.

So, I’m really thinking about the different ways we wind up grappling with feelings of futility, and how we live with the harms we can’t stop and the wounds we can’t close.

SJ: That reminds me of two of the stories of two of the people that I spoke to for the book. One was Nyleah Stewart, whose cousin Darius had been killed by the police in Memphis in 2015. And she got involved in organizing in a group called Decarcerate Memphis that was working on ending pretextual police stops. And that work had been going on. And then Tyre Nichols was killed by a group of police right after a pretextual police stop. And so suddenly there was a lot of energy behind this organizing that this group had been doing. And they were able for a little while to actually pass some reforms in the city of Memphis.

And then in their infinite wisdom, the state legislature overturned them because the state legislature of Tennessee is full of reactionaries. And it was an awful sort of follow up. And I ended up writing about it, the overturning of the laws, separately for In These Times. It didn’t make it in the book, but even when I spoke to Nyleah when the laws were still in place, and she was like, “I’m glad that we succeeded, but it shouldn’t have taken people dying to be able to do that. And it doesn’t bring my cousin back. And I don’t feel…” She didn’t feel good. She didn’t feel closure. She didn’t feel like a victory. She felt like something important had been accomplished, but also something important she should have never had to do in the first place. And then in the COVID chapter, Kristen Urquiza, whose father died of COVID in Arizona after Arizona had reopened. And he had sort of been like, “Well, why would the government tell us it’s okay if it’s not okay?” And of course it was not okay.

And she said to me… I’ll never forget this. She’s like, “It felt like a category five hurricane had been put inside my body, and if I didn’t find something to do with it would kill me, too.” And so she formed an organization called Marked By Covid… Her father’s name had been Mark… That organizes bereaved families of people who died of COVID and organizes around public policy demands. And she did, again, take that energy and put it towards something. And also, when she and I spoke, I think we were hovering around a million COVID deaths in the U.S. and we’re obviously well past that now. And to think about that, of all of the demands that people made… And particularly with COVID, the way that some of those demands were met in the early days. That there was expanded unemployment and all of the Trump checks and expanded access to Medicaid, health care… I remember being struck by New York, [which] basically just took all of the hospitals under public control for a little while.

There was a change. And then that has all been shoved down the memory hole. These things that people have been asking for for years and years. And that frustration, that it’s like not only have we not improved our health care system since then, we’ve actually taken the brief improvements that happened out of real necessity and sort of thrown those in the garbage and been told that everything’s fine now. We can just go back to normal. So yeah, I mean, there’s definitely those moments when the political work feels like a balm. Like something that would… Again, somewhere to put that rage, somewhere to put your energy. But as we all know, organizing is imperfect and a long, messy road toward things. And sometimes you need a break from that to just actually feel the grief.

KH: Absolutely. We have to make space for ourselves to be human, outside of the constant rush of movement work. We cannot jam every human emotion that we need to experience into a productive context. We just can’t. And when we fail to make space for what grief is building up inside of us, I think there’s always a cost for that.

What you’re saying about COVID makes me think about conversations I’ve had with people about grieving the hopes they had, early in the pandemic. There was a lot of talk, back then, about how this moment of tremendous loss and suffering could become the context for transformative change. As you’re saying, we saw what could have been the beginnings of some of those changes. We got a whiff of what was possible, and the hope of so much more. Then, the system doubled down on everything that’s rotten about this society, and life went on.

I’ve also talked to people who experienced a profound loss, in terms of what they had believed about other people. A friend recently told me that she always thought, if there was some major crisis for humanity — something on the scale of the pandemic — we would come together. We would find each other and find our shared decency, and work through it together. And of course, we saw flashes of that, early in the pandemic, when a lot of people rallied to take care of each other. But over time, the majority of people chose normalcy and abandonment. And some people were reactionary and violent in their opposition to any kind of culture of care, in ways that have helped fuel fascism.

I think we need to make space for the grief people are carrying about the unrealized potential for transformation that we experienced, and also for the grief people carry because we, as human beings, have disappointed each other. I think when we don’t make space to address those feelings in real ways, or feel the fullness of them, we get stuck in our anger. Because anger is easier than the rest of it. But getting stuck in our anger can hold us back, and it can also be really isolating. I think the angriest periods of my life, when I was just stuck in overwhelming cycles of anger, and not making space for all of the other feelings that grief entails, were also the loneliest periods of my life. And, as we know, loneliness kills.

In your book, you also talk about how, even prior to COVID, people were already coping with a crisis of loneliness. Can you talk about that crisis, what caused it, and how COVID has compounded the situation?

SJ: I think it’s interesting. The subtitle of Work Won’t Love You Back includes the word “alone.” The grief book is in so many ways about loneliness. And then my next project is also about loneliness in a different way. Perhaps I’m writing about this a lot for a reason. But the term “alienation” that we take from Marx, among others, it’s such a profound description of what life is like under capitalism, and particularly in this period of capitalism where we don’t really have the mass employment factory the way we used to in a lot of places. There are exceptions to that, obviously, but deindustrialization has come across the world. Instead of working on an assembly line, you’re working in an Amazon warehouse where you’ve got a little gadget strapped to your arm that sends you down this row of shelves and somebody else down that row of shelves. You basically never run into anybody at work, which of course they want to do to avoid people getting together and forming a union. But it has the side effect of just being really, really lonely.

When I was writing the deindustrialization chapter of this book, I spoke to folks who had been coal miners here in Britain before and during the big strike in 1984, and then the destruction of the nationalized coal industry in Britain where they closed most of the mines. And this was not an environmental move on Margaret Thatcher’s part, right? It was an attempt to crush the union. But what it crushed alongside the union were the social centers of everyone’s life. So the miners welfare hall where you would go, had a pub and you would go have a drink after work with your buddies, and they had a football field outside where your kids would play on the weekends and it would be where you had your wedding and it would be where you had your funeral. And that’s all gone.

And some people would move away and try to get other jobs, and some people sort of stayed and the towns fell apart because their kids had to leave to get other jobs. And this entire social world that was built in large part by the miners union, not by the company, falls apart when the company goes away. And that kind of alienation has been really, really intense and a product of deindustrialization in all sorts of ways, not just coal mining obviously. The mining industry in Britain just makes a particularly useful focal point because there’s this big dramatic strike that Margaret Thatcher provokes in order to try to crush the union, and she succeeds and then proceeds to just destroy the industry.

So we have, for so many reasons, even the sort of social spaces that one era of capitalism allowed to exist because they were at least for a little while useful or at least not getting too much in the way of profits, those are gone. A lot of us are freelance, a lot of us are temporary. A lot of us are working jobs for a short period of time. The average job tenure in the US now is somewhere around four years. All of these things mitigate against forming deep connections. At the same time, we have to spend more time at work than ever, and people are cobbling together two and three jobs, which mitigates against having a social life outside of work. And so many of the social spaces that used to exist outside of work are also being destroyed. So we’re in a really profoundly, profoundly isolating time, which I do not think is a coincidence, comes hand in hand with a rise in right-wing sentiment and politics and violence because we’re literally being alienated from each other.

We’re living in this really profound crisis of loneliness. And then along comes COVID and shoves us back into what I started calling “Margaret Thatcher units” because Margaret Thatcher, always the problem. But because she had that famous line where she said, “There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.” And that’s how we were living in lockdown. We were either individually on our own or if we were lucky, we had a family or maybe some roommates that you didn’t end up wanting to murder. And that ratcheted the isolation that we were already living with just way, way up. And I think particularly this kind of trauma from that moment, we have really not dealt with.

[musical interlude]

KH: I want to talk a bit about the relationship between fascism and grief, or the absence of grief. In your book, you talk about how some people and communities are treated as “ungrievable.” Can you talk about what it means to deem people “ungrievable,” and how this tendency manifests itself in fascist movements?

SJ: Ungrievable is a term that I borrowed from Judith Butler, and they write about this in terms of war, in terms of racism, in terms of homophobia and transphobia where certain people, certain groups of people are rendered sort of ungrievable. And it dovetailed really well I think with Ruthie Gilmore’s description of what racism is — it’s “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” So if we’re thinking about that and we’re thinking about what does fascism do, it group-differentiates and renders people vulnerable to premature death. It creates groups of people who it is not only not permissible to grieve, but whose death we actually celebrate. And you can see this happening in the state of Israel right now, where every awful death of civilians, children in Gaza, and now in the West Bank, in Beirut is justified because they’re Hamas. Somehow they’re always Hamas. Everybody is Hamas. We can always tell who is Hamas.

But really what it just boils down to is that all Palestinians in their eyes are Hamas, are therefore all guilty and deserve to be punished even when they are children, even when they are teenagers donating blood in a hospital, you become killable and your death becomes something to celebrate. And that, it is really, really painful for me as a Jewish person to think about that because of course, a lot of the theorizing around these things comes out of the Holocaust where it was people who looked like me who were being sent to the ovens. And now it is people who look like me who are trying to justify the deaths of people who are not guilty of the Holocaust by somehow appealing to that moment. And it is, yeah, it’s profoundly horrifying.

But it’s when we think about more subtle moments, I always think of the woman with the sign at one of the first sort of anti-lockdown protests that said, “I want a haircut.” And what she means in that moment is not just she wants a haircut, it’s that she wants to go to a salon and have somebody be required to wait on her because you can have a haircut. Teach your husband to cut your hair, whatever, cut your own hair. You want a professional haircut and you want there to be a service worker who is required to do it, and you don’t care what that person has to risk in order to do that work.

And one of the reasons I think that we started to see those kinds of protests was at first with COVID, there was a real idea that we were all in it together. And then it became very clear that certain groups of people were still having to go to work more likely and therefore more likely to die. People who were likely to live in a small intergenerational home were more likely to bring the virus home and spread it to the entire family. And the minute that you could see a race and class differentiation in who was dying, that’s when more and more people began to demand we open back up.

And what’s his face? Lieutenant Governor [Dan Patrick] of Texas who said that, “Well, lots of grandparents like me would be happy to die if it means getting the economy back going.” But he knew it wasn’t going to be him who was dying. It was going to be Black and Latino grandfathers who are going to be dying because that’s who’s going to have to go back to work in a workplace and not from home. And so there are a million little ways where we are told over and over that certain people are ungrievable. I think about the prisons that were not evacuated in the path of Hurricane Milton, that we see that all the time in the path of the storms, that the people who are in jails and prisons are just left to suffer.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, who of course was on the panel with you and I, Kelly, at the Socialism Conference, she writes about this in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the people who are in Orleans Parish Prison, which is technically a jail, were just sort of left there. And they still don’t exactly know how many people potentially died there because well, oh, well. And that is part of this process of just rendering people ungrievable and blaming them for their own deaths. Well, if you didn’t want to not be evacuated, then you shouldn’t have ended up in jail, right?

KH: I think the treatment of imprisoned people, during moments of climate catastrophe, is a really solid example of how norms about whose lives matter and whose lives don’t are amplified in moments of crisis. We saw this during Katrina, we saw this, as you mentioned when white people realized that Black and brown people were at greater risk of dying of COVID. And in this era of climate chaos, we are seeing even steeper escalations.

In your book, you write, “People in what are designated by capital as the sacrifice zones have been made expendable for hundreds of years and have no choice but to fight and fight now. While the leaders of rich countries dither and talk about their grandchildren, the grandmothers of the South and grandmothers of spaces relegated to waste in the North, like Faith Spotted Eagle are suffering now.” Can you say more about this disparity and the sort of reckoning we need?

SJ: It’s been striking to me. A lot of the writing about climate grief I think is often really writing about climate anxiety. It’s writing about a fear of the future. And I wanted to talk to people in places where the disaster had already come, where they were grieving something that had already happened, rather than anticipating what might happen in the future. They were dealing with something really concrete. I live in New Orleans, so that was obvious. But I went to Puerto Rico to talk to people who had survived Hurricane Maria. I spoke with people who had organized in Florida after various storms, and I wanted to talk about the losses that have already come, and again, what it feels like to organize in those moments of crisis and how challenging it is to think differently when you’re sort of in tunnel vision, dealing with the immediate catastrophe mode. I talked to several people who would point out that it’s very easy for the systems, the structures of white supremacy, of patriarchy to be replicated when you’re dealing with crisis. You sort of start barking orders and taking charge, and suddenly the next thing you know you’ve built a totally hierarchical organization and nobody’s accountable to anybody. And here we are. And so thinking about the ways to prevent that kind of crisis organizing from going very badly requires us, I think, to take grief into account.

And again, on our panel at Socialism, Lydia was talking about, what was it, somebody who had put a sign-up in the window of some place where they were organizing after Katrina that was like “Less tears, more work,” and she points out that a lot of the people who come in with this attitude were actually not people who had lived in New Orleans before, and not people who had actually lost everything, but were people who had come in from the outside wanting to help, which is a great instinct that we need more of. But you come in sort of dictating to people how to feel and it’s neither compassionate nor particularly strategically useful because people are going to feel how they’re going to feel no matter what you tell them. I mean, I really, really wish that it was easy enough to dictate that I just put my grief down because it’s six years later and it still comes to kick my on a regular basis.

And so to think about, again, how do we have patience in these moments of urgency? How do we build resilience into our movements? Not the kind of resilience that says we just have to keep going no matter what, but the kind of resilience that says, “Kelly, if you are having a bad day, you can stay home and somebody else will take up your position in this moment because you need to take care of your health because we need you to be around in 20 years when we’re really going to still need your expertise.” And how do we build those kinds of movements that are generous and spacious and caring without sacrificing any of the sort of strategic sharpness that we need to get through these… I keep making the Buffy the Vampire Slayer joke about learning “the plural of apocalypse.”

KH: Apocalyptic television has provided a lot of useful shorthand for navigating these times.

SJ: I know. It’s Riley of all terrible characters, but it’s a great line.

KH: Something else I appreciated, in your book, was the idea that the capitalist system pathologizes grief in order to shrink it. Can you say more about that?

SJ: If you think about what kind of bereavement leave you get in this world, if you get any of it, you get a couple days off to go to a funeral, and then after that you better get your butt back to work. One of the people that I spoke to during COVID, a young woman who worked at PetSmart and her brother died actually not of COVID, but just her younger brother died very suddenly and she had a couple of days off to go to the funeral and she goes back to work and her boss basically told her to get over it and be a grownup and get back to work and stop crying. It’s like, her teenage brother just died. The fact that she’s shown up and you are not only not grateful that she’s shown up because obviously when is your boss ever grateful, but telling her to snap out of it is just horrific.

But I also think of the shrinking of it in terms of literally who we are allowed to grieve for. So she was able to take a couple of days off to go to her brother’s funeral, if it had been her friend who died, no bereavement leave for you.

At some point early on in the book, I say, “What is the family but the people for whom it is permissible to grieve?” And again, I think of this in the context of Palestine because the state of Israel really loves to talk about Jewish grief, but if you happen to be Jewish and grieve the wrong people, i.e. Palestinian people, your grief doesn’t matter at all because it’s not actually Jewish grief that matters to the state of Israel or to anybody else. It’s whatever they can use to further the propaganda aims of the Israeli state.

So we have these set of rules that dictate how you can grieve, who you can grieve, where you can grieve. At home basically, only, possibly in church or temple or mosque, but really is this sharply sort of delimited set of activities that are acceptable and no understanding at all about that thing we were talking about earlier about the way that it comes in waves and furrows, that it will take you when it feels like taking you, whether you like it or not.

Saturday night I had my London book launch and I was joking that it was pound for pound surrounded by more people that I love at that one than any of them yet. And they’re all lovely. And we went out afterwards and I just kind of needed to go hide in a corner and cry a little bit because even though it was all of these people who love me coming to congratulate me for writing this book and listen to me talk about it… It’s very hard to feel happy about this book because it contains all of this grief and it brings it back up over and over again and that I don’t get to take days off of work six years later for grief, even though it is still very much a part of me.

And so what does it do for capital to foreclose our ability to grieve for each other? It contributes to that alienation we were talking about. It separates us from each other. It narrows our feelings of connection and it cuts us off from the care that we need.

KH: Absolutely. Grief is an expansive, sprawling experience, and the ways that capitalism seeks to shrink and contain it constrain our humanity. In my favorite passage of the book you write, “Grief is excessive. So is revolution. It is a defiant yes when the rest of the world would say no. It is a refusal of the foreclosing of our time, an overflowing of humanity into the places where it is forbidden. We will not be machines anymore.” Can you talk about what those words mean to you and why you describe grief as an act of refusal?

SJ: I think the excessive bit… I was talking to Josh Cohen, who is a psychoanalyst based here in London about this, and he was saying, he said to me something like, grief is excessive. If it’s not, it isn’t grief. And I really liked that. I thought this idea that it is something that refuses to be bounded, as we’re saying, that it still sort of comes for you time and time again and years and years later. What if that is, I mean, look, I really would like it to leave me alone sometimes, I’m not saying that I enjoy it in any way, but what if that’s something powerful about it too, that it refuses to be stuffed into a neat little box?

And the thing that I kept thinking about when I was thinking about grief was Walter Benjamin’s line about revolutions being humanity reaching for the emergency break, that rather than it being about doing more, it’s about sort of screaming “STOP” at the entire death making machine. And in that moment of stopping, we actually find the ability to sort of create rupture with the existing system and our tendencies to go along with said existing system.

KH: I really appreciate that, and everything we’ve talked about today, honestly. Because I clearly need these conversations, as I think we all do. Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

SJ: I think one of the most, again, all the words I go to use, it’s exciting, not the right word, one of the most generative, I guess, experiences that I had working on this book was how many of the organizers that I interviewed were also thinking about grief and thinking about care, and thinking about how to sort of expansively incorporate those things into their organizing practice to make spaces where people can really talk about what they’re grieving and bring that into the room and process it together so that, again, when it comes time to make those strategic decisions, not only are we sort of capable of thinking clearly, but also we’ve built real trust and care because of that.

And so, yeah, I was just in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago launching the book there, and I had Rod Adams and Cat Salonek on the panel with me, and they’re both organizers in Minneapolis. Cat, who I’ve known for many, many years now. And Rod I just met in working on this book. And they were telling us, I asked, “Have you been working on this since we spoke for the book?” And so they were sharing the workshops and trainings that they were doing within their organizations that were giving people space to talk about these things. And the question that I sort of want to leave everyone with, because I certainly don’t have all of the answers, is what would it look like to make spaces, movement spaces that aren’t the places where the organizing decisions need to get made, but are the places where we’re taking care of each other and showing up for each other and letting each other grieve so that we can be more effective when we have to be by taking care of us as sort of whole humans.

KH: I really appreciate that question, and it’s one we’re going to be grappling with in an upcoming episode about creating the kind of spaces that you’re talking about, and accessing the tools we need to take care of ourselves emotionally in these times. So, if you’re listening, and you’re thinking, okay, I’m ready to deal with this shit, but I don’t know how to deal, we are going to talk more about that soon, I promise.

For now, Sarah, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I always get so much out of our conversations and I’m just so grateful for you and for your work.

SJ: Well, you as well, Kelly. And thank you once again for joining me on the very first panel about this book at Socialism and for all of your work on the subject that has helped me figure out how to think about it.

[musical interlude]

KH: Well, I am so grateful for that conversation, and for Sarah’s book, From The Ashes. I also appreciate your willingness to navigate this topic with us today. I know that grief is an emotion we are conditioned to avoid, and one that we often avoid discussing. Who wants to focus on the complexity of reckoning with loss? Our society has been structured in the avoidance of that reckoning. We are offered endless avenues of escapism and consumption, which are all paths of evasion — alternatives to moments of reflection, realization and grief. Too often, we trade away our reckonings for prepackaged fantasies and a constant cycle of forgetting. The capitalists who benefit from death-making conditions do not want us to mourn, because when we grieve, we fully appreciate the value of life. It is only in grief that the totality of what capitalism steals and destroys can be fully felt.

Some losses are so profound that we must reimagine and rebuild our own worlds in order to move on. That process of reckoning with destruction, of creating something new, from the ashes, is what our enemies fear most. They fear us adopting that practice of grief in collectivity, and remaking the world. They fear our capacity to recognize our worth, and the worth of every stolen life and ravaged ecosystem. They are afraid that we will reject their valuation of our lives, and that rather than accepting that “life is cheap,” we will make our losses costly for the people looting our worlds. There is power in grief. There is also potential. Because when we are unmade and remade, and when we remake the worlds we know, we can become more capable of loving each other, and fighting alongside one another, in the ways that this era demands. Grief can help set us free, but only if we acknowledge its importance in our struggles — and in ourselves.

We all deserve the space to feel the full spectrum of emotions that grief entails, and we all need to make that space. If we don’t, we will either live our lives in the avoidance of our grief, or be ruled by it. Sometimes, the emotions we refuse to feel can overtake us, damaging our lives and our relationships. Our tools of escapism can also overwhelm us, if we rely on them too heavily. So, let’s embrace grief, and its essential role in our lives. Let’s acknowledge that love, grief, and rebellion must co-exist, and that making change means holding all of these things together.

I want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Don’t forget to check out Sarah’s new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.
• You can learn more about Sarah’s work here, including her podcasts and ongoing book tour here.
• Kelly also grapples with the subject of grief, along with hope and revolution, in her book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care.
• To hear from Kelly between episodes, you can sign up for her newsletter.