[The following is a transcript of a sermon I was invited to deliver at Sanctuary London on June 6, 2021. The passage from the lectionary was Luke 1.39-56, but I was also asked to speak to the topic of decolonization in light of the recent revelation about 215 Indigenous kids (some as young as 3) being found in a mass, unmarked grave on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This is what I said.]
Discussed in this post: 8 books (In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; Between Realism and Revolt; Cops, Crime and Capitalism; The Last Refuge; Having and Being Had; Entangled Life; When My Brother Was an Aztec; and Feed); 8 movies (Somewhere; 24 Frames; Aniara; Salt of the Earth; Elena; Cat Soup; The Invisible Man; and Freaky); and 7 documentaries (Mayor; Sasquatch; Athlete A; The Devil Next Door; Grey Gardens; Above and Below; and Allen v. Farrow).
The river flows Not as it has always flowed But still It flows Brown and frothing Where it falls
In 1824 a European Describes sturgeons Of an immense size Seven feet long One hundred and fifty pounds In this river In 1821 another European Described the river As delightfully transparent
Today the settlers Whose houses line the banks Describe the river As peaceful Oh so peaceful But I remember May 24, 1881 And the steamboat SS Victoria Her boiler torn loose Scalding some to death Crushing others On the way down The upper deck collapsing Onto the people below And holding them underwater As the ship promptly sank And this peaceful Oh so peaceful River Peacefully claimed One hundred and eighty-two settler lives On the birthday Of their Queen
And the river flows Not as it has always flowed Emptied of sturgeons Filled with sewage And pesticides from local farmlands Fields that once were forests Around this The Forest City Brown and frothing Where it falls It bides its time And waits
A still from Eiichi Yamamoto’s 1973 animated film, Belladonna of Sadness.
Grief takes ahold of you. It overpowers you. You do not get to decide when you have had enough of grief. You will want to stop grieving. You will want to move on. You will wish you could process things faster or better or “more like other people,” but you will find that the precise amount of grief that is allotted to you is yours and yours alone. You do not get to say when you have grieved enough. It is grief, itself, which determines when it has had enough of you. Grief works from its own timeline, not the one you bring to it. And the timeline grief has for you is not the same as the timeline grief has for other people. Other people telling you that you’re taking too long to work through your grief is just as useless as you trying to tell your grief you’re done with it now. They don’t get to make that call. And neither do you. You must grieve your grief through all the way to the end uniquely set aside for you, wherever and whenever grief determines that end is. You must grieve passionately which, as with any passion, is something that requires endurance.
Discussed in this post: 9 BOOKS (Genome Editing and Engineering; Security, Territory, Population; We Do This ‘Til We Free Us; The Tragedy of Heterosexuality; Work Won’t Love You Back; Heart Berries; Mountains of the Mind; The Taiga Syndrome; and Tenth of December); 5 MOVIES (About Endlessness; Gretel and Hansel; Relic; Saint Maud; and Midsommar); and 3 DOCUMENTARIES (A Survivor’s Guide to Prison; This Way of Life; I’ll be Gone in the Dark; and A Glitch in the Matrix).
We are wrong when we say of the dead They are no longer with us Because the room where she lived Is full to bursting With the presence Of her absent self
I don’t blame the heart That decides It has suffered enough And refuses To start beating again The lungs That refuse To start breathing again The brain that refuses One more minute Of fear Worry And loneliness I don’t blame the one Who lies down And never gets back up again I’ve longed for that moment Often enough Myself
I knew her for exactly Sixty days But what does it mean To say that my knowledge of her Is in the past tense? I still know her And she still is Her The only one of her That ever was Or is Or will be
It’s just that The days in which I came to know Her Are no more I will not have another day in the presence of Her voice Her mannerisms Her weeping and laughing Just sixty Only sixty No more
And now begins The long count of days In which I do not Hear Her voice Witness Her mannerisms Join Her weeping and laughing One Two Three And onward Until I too Am only present As an absence
She lost consciousness on Sunday Machines kept her breathing Until Wednesday And then they didn’t anymore Wednesday was her move-in day Her end to homelessness day Her welcome home day And I had to call her housing support workers Oh no I had to tell them Good god I had to tell them I’m so so sorry I had to tell them She is dead
I am just writing to say That I understand more now About how good people do terrible things And are subsequently and justly judged As bad people About how oppression is sustained in part By those who desire to end it About how at least some war criminals Mostly those in the rank and file of war criminals Were just doing their best And still deserved to die
Discussed in this post: 17 books (Hermeneutics of the Subject; The Question of German Guilt; The Dark Side of Democracy; Border & Rule; The Vulnerable Observer; Entitled; Looking for Spinoza; Against the Loveless World; Girls Against God; Selected Poems; Patterson; An Africa Elegy; Ceremonies for the Dead; nedi nezu; No Heroics, Please; You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense; and Scribbled in the Dark), 5 movies (The Sacrifice; Earth; The Wind that Shakes the Barley; The Turin Horse; and You Were Never Really Here), and 4 documentaries (The New Normal; Las Marthas; Roll Red Roll; and Challenger).
Discussed in this post: 14 Books (Phenomenology of Perception; Ethical Loneliness; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Canada in Africa; Tomorrow’s Battlefield; Lamarck’s Revenge; The Wild Places; Noopiming; Laurus; EEG; Fatelessness; Wicked Enchantment; Postcolonial Love Poems; and Ban En Banlieu); 4 Movies (The Wolf House; Hagasuzza; The Handmaiden; and Cargo 200); and 3 Documentaries (Welcome to Chechnya; Cheer; and The Painter and the Thief).