From the ashes, p.1
From the Ashes, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Jaffe
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First Edition: September 2024
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jaffe, Sarah, 1980– author.
Title: From the ashes : grief and revolution in a world on fire / Sarah Jaffe.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bold Type Books, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024002964 | ISBN 9781541703490 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541703513 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Grief—Social aspects. | Memorialization.
Classification: LCC BF575.G7 J34 2024 | DDC 155.9/37—dc23/eng/20240506
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024002964
ISBNs: 9781541703490 (hardcover), 9781541703513 (ebook)
E3-20240813-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION: Haunted
Break I
CHAPTER 1: Burn: State violence, solidarity, and rebellion
Break II
CHAPTER 2: Flow: Migration, home, and freedom
Break III
CHAPTER 3: Dig: Deindustrialization, work, and meaning
Break IV
CHAPTER 4: Breathe: Pandemic, communities, and care
Break V
CHAPTER 5: Weather: Climate catastrophe, the web of life, and salvage
Break VI
CONCLUSION: Walking with Ghosts
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Notes
For the grievers: Angelica, Antonia, Ethan, Joshua, Laura, Natasha,
Samhita, and especially Dania
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Where life is precious, life is precious.
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Introduction
Haunted
A police car on fire is the perfect embodiment of grief.
The smoke is darker than we are used to. It curls up into a 2 p.m. sky in Philadelphia and I think, This time is different. The burning car is an icon of a pain that feels like it can and will destroy the world, a symbol of the uselessness of power in the face of loss. The world as it is did not protect your love, your son, your sister, so what good is it, anyway? Why not consign it all to the fire?
The burning car is not just an expression of grief for a person or group of people but a release of the idea of America, of a particular consensus that had never really existed but was taught to us nevertheless as though the repetition could make it real. As though there had been a shiny and clean American Dream that was available to all of us if we tried hard enough. The burning spread around the world, because it is not just America in the flames.
The burning will be written off as rage, but the truth is there is so much rage inside of grief. Anger that boils up in your chest and demands to be let out. The target, if there is one, is probably out of reach so it will just come out when you least want it to if you don’t find a way to aim. What no one tells you about rage is that it is overwhelming, but it is not directionless; you can explain exactly why you feel it even as it makes your body shake and twist. Rage, they say, as if rage is for the less-than-human, a base emotion, as if it doesn’t take human comprehension to feel such a powerful thing. Rage is perfectly correct when you have felt a loss this big and when you know in your bones that more are coming. When you know the next one could be your brother sister cousin lover friend, could be you.
The police car afire was the most potent visual symbol of 2020, of a moment when so many people had so little left to lose. But 2020 wasn’t an anomaly or a freak year in an otherwise forward march of progress. The pandemic might have been new, but the unequal exposure to its ravages was formed centuries earlier, and the protests might have been bigger in 2020 than they had been in 2014, in 2016, but the world has never stopped reminding us that things can get worse as easily as they can get better. The crises outlasted 2020, and the pandemic was absorbed into the new normal much as the climate crisis has been, even as the death toll mounts, the heat waves rage, the violence continues. There is so much still to grieve, and we have taken so little time—we are allowed so little time—in which to do it. We are told to return to normal, and yet normal was already killing so many of us.
When my father died, in 2018, I was upended by grief. Nothing I had read or experienced before prepared me for how absolutely undone I would be, how shattered. How physical it was, how it affected my breathing, my heart rate, my ability to sleep and to walk and to be touched by the people who loved me, to make eye contact and hold a gaze. How it took the taste of food from my mouth, how I felt like a child again begging someone to make it all right and at the same time how I felt ancient wisdom at the back of my skull, the knowledge of something that no one could have explained to me, that I had to go through. Years later a friend would say, I am still in the land of the dead, and I would know how she felt. Ghosts walked with me.
It was an absolute break with what had come before, with who I had been before.
It was wrenching. But it also, in moments, opened up a vast space of possibility. Having lost someone I could not fathom a life without, could I picture instead something totally different? Could I imagine my life absolutely otherwise? Could we all, if we acknowledged our grief rather than shambling on like zombies, imagine collectively something new?
As I picked up the pieces of my life, I began to see traces of grief everywhere. And yet the world as we know it makes so little space for mourning. This fundamental contradiction seemed to me suddenly to be at the heart of every rebellion, every political battle, every bit of the spectacular violence speeding up all over the world. I found it at the heart of every story I was covering as a reporter, even before the pandemic began. I went on a journey through the land of the dead, learning about grief, my own and other people’s, and this book you hold in your hands is the result.
It is a more personal story than I have told before, and I remain uneasy with this. Uneasy with taking up space, and uncomfortable with my own vulnerability. I could and indeed have gathered theorists and experts around me, clothed myself in their brilliance and hidden myself from you to a degree, but it was in reporting this book that I found I had to share my story first. It was cruel to sit with a stranger as they told me the most intimate details of the worst moments of their lives and to pretend at objectivity. It was impossible to hold to some kind of journalistic distance, to not reach for a hand when tears came to someone’s eyes, and it was impossible to ask the questions I wanted to ask without offering my own story first, my own pain, so that they knew I was not simply rubbernecking but was a fellow traveler, and that maybe together we could understand our own hearts better. And that I had to offer my story on the page as well, that I had to be brave enough to offer myself up first for examination. To counter, as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe have written, “the violence of abstraction.”1
My own griefs were, in a word, ordinary. And yet they turned my life upside down. Losing a parent who had been ill a while, the end of a relationship that had long withered, these are the kinds of unavoidable losses in any human life. They attuned me, in a fresher, sharper way, to all the unnecessary grief around me, to the crueler losses by far that other people were living with, to all the premature deaths and violence and dispossession that did not have to happen, not then, not that way. Janet Malcolm famously wrote, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” She may have been right; including my own story in this book is my attempt to be less of a monster.2
I needed to tell this story, to intertwine my own with those of others because, as Cristina Rivera Garza wrote, “We always grieve for someone and with someone. Grieving connects us in ways th
The bulk of it, though, is about those people who sat with me. About the transformations they have gone through, the ways they made sense of what had happened to them or learned to live with the senselessness. The things they taught me, the worlds they built on the other side of catastrophe. Their stories are grouped roughly into five chapters, five threads of reckoning with the crises of the twenty-first century. There are many, many more stories to tell than the ones I have woven into this book, and I made the choices I did in part simply to hold the scope to something manageable. I was also limited, naturally, by the willingness of strangers and friends to open up to me, to sit and excavate their heartbreak for my recorder. I am and will remain endlessly grateful to everyone who has chosen to tell me their story, for this book and over the years.
I also have five themes, five theses, or perhaps a grammar of grief, to lay out here before we dive into the stories.
1. Grief Is a Rupture
It is a sudden, abrupt, even violent break from the status quo—even if you were expecting it, even if you had felt it before. Before I experienced real grief, I thought that I would be sad for a while. I was not expecting the howling storm, the black hole it opened up around me and inside me. Grief is rage and anger and frustration and sadness and sometimes a kind of horrible joy; it is less an emotion than a state of being. It is a being-undone. It is a realization of one’s own vulnerability.
It was Judith Butler’s writing on grief that first helped me understand what was happening, that first felt like something other than the terrible cliches that abound. Butler, a philosopher of gender and the body, was able to capture something about the bodily nature of mourning, about the process that was happening unconsciously in my cells and organs. That it was an ecstatic process, like rage or desire, that brought me outside of myself, that seemed to loosen me from the physical world at the same time as my body’s mechanics insisted on my attention.4
I expected too that my grief would lessen by the day, that it would be a sort of process with steps and stages, maybe even identifiable ones, and yet it was profoundly nonlinear. Indeed, it disrupted my very sense of time, my perception of days or hours passing. I experienced some moments at a remove and lived others so fiercely I thought they would be the end of me. I still find it sideswiping me, five years later; it is distant enough now that it takes me a while, when it happens, to recognize it as my grief biting into me again.5
Researchers have documented all of this, I learned, eventually. The brain fog and the unevenness, and the fact that the “stages” don’t work that way in the least; that everyone will experience grief differently, even when they are experiencing the same loss. That other people can help but sometimes their attempts to help will hurt. I learned terms like “disenfranchised grief,” for a loss that “is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned,” and “ambiguous loss,” when a relationship is “disrupted or broken due to physical absence or psychological absence,” when the person being mourned is not present but still alive or still present but not themselves, from therapists and grief experts like Jess Kuttner and MaryGrace DiMaria, people who reached out to me after reading my first published attempts at grappling with the subject. Pauline Boss, the woman who coined the term “ambiguous loss,” explained that “closure” is all but impossible, a cruel expectation to place on ourselves. That rather than seeking an end to the process, we could heal by giving it new meaning, by seeking justice.6
The whole thing was outside of my control, and control was the thing I had learned to value the most. It was a lesson my father had taught me, and now he was gone.
It was not the experts who soothed me with their answers (even when their answers were “there are no answers”). It was the writers in whose pages I found my state echoed back to me. Walter Benjamin, a man who knew something about grief. I could not read his works without thinking about the way he’d died, a German Jew fleeing Paris ahead of the Gestapo, sending his books ahead of him, acquiring the visas he needed from the United States but denied an exit visa, trapped, opting to end his own life. Trying to read him without talking to his ghost was impossible. “Didn’t the dead person’s name, the last time you uttered it, sound differently in your mouth?” he wrote, of the moment we learn of a death. “Don’t you see in the flames a sign from yesterday evening, in a language you only now understand?” His books seemed gifts from the community of the dead; as he noted, “Ad plures ire was the Latin expression for dying.” To go among the many.7
“Rupture” is a political term as well as a personal one; as China Miéville pointed out, it is a key term used in the Communist Manifesto. It is the idea that a political transformation must be total, a complete break, a leap into a future we cannot see or even imagine from where we stand. The break that is grief, that is a death, a loss of a home or another pillar of one’s existence, is a similar kind of severance. It is a loss and an opening up simultaneously, an opening up that is terrifying and also necessary.8
In accepting loss we make possible the future.9
This book is animated by the living, but I want to say a few words about ghosts. Ghosts as the people and things that are both here and not here, the dead that refuse to stay dead. That return to tell us something is wrong. Ghosts hover along borders and hide in dark crannies and appear in the corner of your eye. A ghost is a trace of the past that won’t let go. Ghosts trouble the rupture.10
And our world is so very full of ghosts. It has to be, after all, because it is built on foundations of violence. Avery Gordon, in her book Ghostly Matters, makes this clear: “Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security).” Haunting is the way those experiences linger and refuse to be erased.11
So grief is a rupture, but the dead do not let go of us cleanly. The haunting demands something of us still, even after a change that we might believe could not possibly be bigger. We carry our ghosts with us everywhere. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his perhaps most famous piece, “On the Concept of History,” the dead have a claim on us. It is not just for ourselves and our children but also for the dead that we fight. So in telling the stories of the people I met in this book, I must also tell the stories of the ghosts that haunt them, the ghosts of loved ones and ancestors and decisions made by people who never loved them but nevertheless shaped their lives and all of our lives too. I have tried to do justice to these people I never met, to refuse in Peter Mitchell’s words to “reduce them to the trauma of their dying,” not to turn them into symbols or fetishes but always to remember that they were people just like me with loves and flaws and ghosts of their own.12
In this book I am writing about individuals’ grief, including my own, but I am also writing about something collective formed out of all those losses. About the way loss and death and destruction shape our society and have done since the beginning of the thing we call capitalism. The particular way it does so now, at this moment of many crises and looming planetary catastrophe. The way so many of us keenly sense our own disposability. I am, then, writing about grief as what Welsh critic Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling” that because grief is multiple can be seen in varying ways all across our world. It 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.13
