Words and their meaning are never neutral.
“Grief” is no exception, but here we seek to unsettle its meaning and its powerful, politically embedded implications. In the past fifty years or so, the term has seen a rise in its everyday use in the Anglophone world, including the United States, compared to other possible terms such as “mourning.” It has also been widened to encompass further domains of losses in life, such as political grief and climate grief, or forms of grief, such as disenfranchised grief and suffocated grief. But even in these developments, while diversifying its potential, its usage highlights the power and prevalence of this language while the limitations of the term grief remain, its meaning largely left intact, re-inscribed rather than challenged or unsettled.
Climate Grief?
Responding to Tashel Bordere’s much-needed call for social justice in conceptualizing grief and loss, the underlying power of the small word “grief” bears further scrutiny, deeply embedded as it is within the cultural and structural whiteness of affluent Anglophone countries. As a result, key political issues of social justice are rendered invisible, in terms of whose lives count, whose lives are categorized as grievable, and whose lives are permeated by a continuum of death. Multi-disciplinary perspectives are needed to begin opening windows onto what is missing and marginalized in the current use of the language and rhetoric of grief. But to locate such windows, we first have to notice the limitations of this word and the power of the geo-political structures in which it is embedded.
Universe or Pluriverse?
We suggest that once we find and open such windows, the work of unsettling grief will enable new vistas towards wisdom from elsewhere, recognizing the spiritual, ethical, and material aspects of life and death as lived in “local moral worlds” across the globe. We argue for a cautiously enriched vocabulary beyond the English language and beyond ostensibly universal statements about human life and death. As George Yancy observes: "Embedded within that notion of ‘universality’ is white narcissism, a form of white nativism."
We also recognize the significance of those ways of living and being that do not depend on words at all. In these regards, this is not only a matter of how knowledge is created (epistemic justice), but of what we know and how reality is understood (ontological justice). An approach of pluriversality—embracing multiple versions of reality—can locate new windows of cosmologies, values, belief systems, and ways of being. This approach can take us beyond the fixed realist ontology that underpins the meaning of the word grief as currently theorized in dominant Anglophone grief models. In these models, grief is individualized, internalized and medicalized, a “process” consisting of a series of tasks to be undertaken. Such models depend on a particular version of the reality of death, while other ways of understanding such existential issues are relegated as mystical or metaphysical, disconnected from the scientifically framed, psychologized rhetoric of grief. Our next task here, then, is to identify how the framing of death and its aftermath through this word grief is not accidental nor adequately described as cultural. It is a concept in itself that can be explored to make visible harmful structures of power and inequality, bound up with the historically embedded institutions and systems of modernity. Understanding these systems and their consequences presents a major personal as well as intellectual challenge. And once the geo-politics of grief are brought into view we can begin to sketch elements of a scoping framework as a potential window for exploring the implications.
Death and Modernity
Modernity refers to Enlightenment-era ideals that centralize the liberty of the individual, with their own interior life. But ideas do not stand alone, and modernity is closely linked to histories of colonialism, along with the racialized capitalism underpinning industrialization and urbanization. These changes entailed the emergence of the particular political structures and ways of being and knowing that characterize the contemporary whiteness of affluent Western worlds.
But, as Arthur Kleinman points out, there is a flaw at the heart of modernity: “It is our assiduous denial of existential vulnerability and limits that is extraordinary in American culture…. It is as if modernity itself were predicated on fostering this fiction.”
Further, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira suggests that a deep failing results from this: “Modernity as describing our current world order intends to defeat death, and by harnessing this intention, it harnesses our fears of death.”Besides its material benefits for some peoples, modernity promotes a potential certainty about the nature of the world. This certainty depends on a particular universalised understanding of a fixed reality that can be known by being categorized and measured, and consequently controlled through identifying causal connections and minimizing the risk of unwelcome outcomes. Such knowledge promises unlimited progress, whether in regard to quality of life, or mortality, or climate change—but the categories created in this reality also involve political marginalization, extraction, and exploitation. The purported certainty of modernity also promises a personal ontological security, providing a reassuring orderly and expectable way of living. But the ontological security on offer is arguably illusory, and even that illusion is very unequally available to people across the world—though it may stand for a dream that is out of reach for others. Indeed, proximity to death has been argued to be a key marker of life for racially minoritized people.
In many worldviews, therefore, life is understood and made spiritually and existentially meaningful in the inextricable relationship of life and death. However, within the narrative of modernity, death arguably represents the ultimate challenge, even as some might want to deny “the ideology of the inevitability of death,” attempting to assert a reality in which technology can overcome every existential challenge.
A Scoping Framework for Exploring the Language of Grief
The curiosity of how we “word the world” thus raises geo-political challenges in unravelling the English word grief. As Tony Walter suggests, “[Modernity entails]… faith in rationality, science, expertise, progress, the future, and the young, all of which are clearly reflected in twentieth century grief psychology.” But it hasn’t always been this way. In response, can we begin to scope a framework to unsettle grief? What windows might be available to begin such a process?
- History: The roots of the word grief in early thirteenth-century English language were used to refer to hardship, suffering, and pain. It came from the Old French word of the same spelling, which referred to a wrong, an injustice, or a misfortune, and which, in turn, came from the Old French word, grever, meaning to afflict, burden, or oppress.
- Translation: Exploring languages from around the world may bring into view meanings and lived experiences of death and its aftermath that are erased by the language of grief. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner suggests that “what is untranslatable about Indigenous languages is often what is incommensurate about Indigenous worlds.” Speaking more personally in an English language conversation, Ribbens McCarthy recalled, in the course of a personal academic conversation, that when asked about his use of the word grief, Suleman Lazarus, responded, “Yes, that’s the word that’s generally used, but it doesn’t quite fit the contours of my mouth.”Exploring languages from around the world may bring into view meanings and lived experiences of death and its aftermath that are erased by the language of grief.
- Global mourning practices from “elsewhere”: In recent years, the United Kingdom and the United States have seen a bereavement movement that incorporates select practices and ideas from rituals of cultural “Others.” But in the process, these rituals are appropriated as emotional and healing (re)sources, such that the framing of this window turns out to involve a risk of reinforcing the modernist meaning of grief. An example of a different approach can be found in laments in pre-capitalist societies—and existing corners at the edges of modernity—which are experienced and passed down across generations as practices which are intricately woven into the fabric of social life, associated with pain, both personal and collective, women’s labor and public voice.
Reimagining the Term Grief
Is it possible to re-imagine this word grief—to learn, to radically open hearts and minds, in response to the existential threats of the contemporary world? Within the language of affluent Anglophone worlds, do we need different (broader, less individualizing?) words, less centered on emotions, perhaps a return to the origins of grief as injustice and perhaps as a potential source of collective grievance and political action? Or maybe words are altogether too limiting to express the aftermath of death in the lives of the living? We leave you with the question we pose to ourselves: how would death and its aftermath be experienced and made meaningful as a result, and would such changes offer different ways of living alongside death beyond the perils and limitations of coloniality/modernity?
