Unprocessed grief is a major fault line in our movements and in our society at large. Tragedy and loss abound, and yet, we often lack the tools — or the willingness — to hold space for our personal and collective pain. Last weekend, I joined Sarah Jaffe, Eman Abdelhadi, and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs on a panel at Socialism 2024, marking the upcoming release of Sarah’s book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. It was an emotional conversation and, according to a number of people who attended, a necessary one. (You can watch the panel here.) While we shared a great deal during our talk, I left the conversation feeling like there was much more to say. So, this week, I continued my conversation with Sarah and Eman about Sarah’s book, the role of grief in our movements, how leftists are treating each other right now, and how activists should navigate a daily barrage of painful news and information.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Kelly Hayes: Sarah, I could see that our panel at Socialism 2024 was a very emotional experience for you, as I think it was for all of us. Can you talk about what it meant to have this conversation and to introduce this book to the world?
Sarah Jaffe: Thanks so much for asking and for being part of that panel. I have been, in a lot of ways, dreading having this book out in the world — I’m not used to writing about myself for this kind of audience, and it’s terrifying to be that vulnerable. And the left is often, I think, susceptible to the kind of thinking Lydia was talking about on our panel: less tears, more action. It’s easy to think that our feelings just don’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things, and we should shove them aside or back down inside and get back to the work. Except the work will break us if we don’t make space for them.
I had no idea how the book was going to go over, and I was really overwhelmed by the response. There were so many people who showed up ready to talk, listen, and hold space for all of our grief and vulnerability.
This is why, I think, we do this work, at the end of the day: we are the kinds of people who can’t simply go through the world unhurt by all that is going on around us even if we, at a given time, have managed to insulate ourselves from being materially damaged by it. We see what is happening in the world, from Gaza to our own neighborhoods, and it hurts. We might have the best political analysis in the world, but we got there because we cared about the world around us.
Eman, can you speak to what it means to engage in conversations about grief right now amid the devastation in Palestine?
Eman Abdelhadi: So many of us are feeling an enormous amount of survivor’s guilt. We don’t feel like we’re allowed to grieve when our homes are safe, and we have food on the table. And we feel urgently compelled to action by the unrelenting destruction. Grief feels at once self-indulgent and like a luxury we can’t afford. Unfortunately, grief has its own logic and time, as Sarah eloquently discusses in the book. Grief will show up on your door, and it will shout and bang louder and louder the more you try to ignore it. All the grief we have been trying to ignore is showing up as burnout, as rage at each other, as nihilistic impulses that destroy both ourselves and our movements. So we have to address our grief, not just for ourselves but for Palestine, for the work we’re trying to do.
Eman, during our panel conversation, you brought up some posts I wrote on social media about how leftists are treating each other in this moment. In those posts, I wrote, “Many people feel powerless. We haven’t had a sufficient impact on the people who are causing the genocide, so when feelings overflow, folks will often let loose on people who are actually vulnerable to their words, which usually means other people who are against the genocide.” Obviously, conflict can be generative, and sometimes, our disagreements will be passionate. However, a lot of what I am seeing lately reminds me of trauma responses that I’ve seen play out in direct action spaces. People who get traumatized by police violence during a protest cannot punish the state for its violence. So, a person who is hurting sometimes zeroes in on a fellow activist, who may have said or done the wrong thing during the action, and that activist gets the full weight of the traumatized person’s rage. I feel like I am seeing this dynamic on social media every day right now, as people attack other leftists whose positions don’t perfectly align with their own. Hurting those people has no strategic upside, but it can offer people a dose of satisfaction on a political terrain where they are presently getting none. Could you speak to how you see these dynamics playing out, why they are harmful, and how we could interrupt them?
Eman Abdelhadi: Huey Newton gave a speech in 1970 addressing the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Networks. I think about that speech nearly every day. In it, he says:
Friends are allowed to make mistakes. The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake, and we suffer from it. But the women’s liberation front and gay liberation front are our friends, they are our potential allies, and we need as many allies as possible.
Newton and other members of the Black Power struggle recognized that movements need allies and that the way you treat a friend who has made a mistake should be fundamentally different from how you treat an enemy.
I would extend this to say that we need to understand that within our own movements, individual groups have different roles to play. The most successful social movements often have radical, progressive, and moderate flanks. We need to recognize our own strategic advantages — where are you best suited to fight? To the streets or to the workplace or local office? Find your work, do it, and do not........