September 2024
I composed this editorial many times over in my head, but had trouble putting the words down. This text surmises months of thinking and of avoiding thinking.
Under frameworks of Western social values, loss and grief are often siloed; only appropriate in certain circumstances. [1] Western mourning practices are marked by offering condolences, like: ‘I’m sorry for your loss’. A western singular understanding is that mourning follows a linear trajectory or ‘stages of grief’.
There are two fundamental tenets defining loss under this restrictive framing; the inability to speak of death or integrate it into daily life, as well as its unspoken pervasiveness. [2] The thematic for un Magazine 18.4 good grief began from questioning the reductive tendencies of these western concepts and practices of mourning that fail to account for the essential sense-making, atemporal and generative elements, that is; important healing processes that exist in the value systems of the more-than-western world/s. My call for proposals asked; What is the use of making art in a time of such great loss? What can be made with what remains?
The open call took its cue from Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2001) edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian. Noting that loss is inextricable from what is lost, they argue that the losses of the twentieth century are laden with temporal, imaginative, reconstructive possibilities. The ‘Loss’ anthology went into production prior to the events of 11 September 2001, the editors’ hoped that the essays might provide critical understandings of particular losses as well as call for complexity to challenge the idea of the ‘war on terrorism’. [3]
More than twenty years after ‘Loss’ was published and the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ was declared by the United States George W. Bush Administration, and one year after Israel initiated a renewed phase of dispossession of the Palestinian people and continues to enact its genocidal campaign, the collective struggle to engage with the reconstructive and imaginative possibilities of loss is palpable. [4] As Eng and Kazanjian argue, it is a matter of reframing; losses are the very thing constitutive of the ego, of identity itself. [5]
Tamsen Hopkinson’s contribution to this issue is ‘an expanded index’, which contrasts two or more selected terms. [6] These pairings highlight how a term’s existence relies on its opposite (or ‘other’), drawing attention to its boundary, its origins and construction as a term. In CIRCULAR / LINEAR / TIME Hopkinson offers contrast to a western cultural sense of linear time or progress, she writes,‘In Te Ao Māori, time is cyclical: both the beginning and end are part of the same phenomenon. The past, present and future are experienced simultaneously...’
Shaad’s clock - wakatna (our time) (2020) is an artwork by Zainab Hikmet that features on the cover of this issue. Hikmet hand-paints numbers in Arabic lettering on a circular clock’s face as she remembers them; born in Baghdad shortly after the 1990–1991 Gulf War and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, Hikmet re-presents a memory of and connection to her homeland and culture. Her subjectivity is figuratively and symbolically inscribed onto this object, that marks the present and indicates both the past and the future. [7]
This collection of written and visual pieces engage with historical traumas and the legacies of war, genocide, AIDS, climate crisis, de/colonisation, land rights, migration and displacement, and political hegemony. The contributors acknowledge the hopeless qualities of these profound losses, while engaging these very losses as material to create in the present. On the flipside of 18.4 good grief is Nadia Refaei’s issue 18.3 Sabaar and Other Counter Archives, which invites readers to reconsider the past institutional hold over archives and to think of the many ways people make their own living and resistant archives and collections. Together, our issues counter traditional notions of loss and of the archive, as we question how loss is apprehended and history is named. The reader is invited to navigate the material of both issues at any order, in their own time. As Anna Emina El Samad writes in a fictionally private but public letter to Zainab Hikmet: ‘The incredible thing about fate is that its timing is always perfect,’
[1] ‘Stuart Hall makes the point that the West is an idea or concept, a language for imagining a set of complex stories, ideas, historical events and social relationships. Hall suggests that the concept of the West functions in ways which (1) allow ‘us’ to characterise and classify societies into categories, (2) condense complex images of other societies through a system of representation, (3) provide a standard model of comparison, and (4) provide criteria of evaluation against which other societies can be ranked.’ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples, University of Otago Press, ‘Chapter 2: Research Through Imperial eyes’ pp. 42–43.
[2] Delistaty argues that mourning processes in the twentieth century western world moved from the public to private sphere and became taboo. Public grief widely announced and shared via the internet and social media in the twenty-first century is ‘rooted in private interests’. Cody Delistraty ‘It’s Mourning In America’, The New Yorker, June 22 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/its-mourning-in-america (accessed 5 August 2024).
[3] At the time of the publication the editors noted: ‘The violence of the tragedy and its militaristic aftermath foreground the profound relationship between loss and the politics of mourning.’ David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, University of California Press, 2001, pp.x.
[4] This includes the military air and ground assaults on Palestine, Lebanon and Iran in 2024.
[5] David L. Eng and David Kazanjian argue for a reframing of Freud’s Melancholia in Melancholia and Mourning as something dysfunctional and pathologised, to having a great creative potential and a palimpsest like quality. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, University of California Press, 2001.
[6] David L. Eng and David Kazanjian argue for a reframing of Freud’s Melancholia in Melancholia and Mourning as something dysfunctional and pathologised, to having a great creative potential and a palimpsest like quality. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, University of California Press, 2001.
[7] In the past year, Hikmet made limited editions of this work for sale to encourage donations for a mutual aid fundraiser for Palestinian women and children forced to flee Gaza and seek refuge in Australia. Hikmet’s reproductions echo the circumstances of the original artwork’s making: forced displacement and exile, the movement of bodies across borders and homelands.