“The capitalist system also doesn’t care if we die. So insisting on the value of human life, insisting on grieving, particularly grieving publicly and collectively, is a real statement against this entire death-making system,” says author Sarah Jaffe. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Jaffe and host Kelly Hayes talk about the lessons of Jaffe’s latest book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.
Note: This is a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about grief and how we experience it. How do we navigate, survive, and reconcile loss? What are the consequences of suppressing our grief? Should we treat the grieving process like its labor? We will be joined today by Sarah Jaffe, a writer whose work covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. Sarah is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back, Necessary Trouble, and From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. Sarah’s latest book offers an essential intervention, and one that feels particularly valuable for those of us engaged in movement work. As Sarah writes in From The Ashes:
[Grief] 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.
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KH: Sarah Jaffe, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Sarah Jaffe: Thank you so much for having me.
KH: How are you doing today?
SJ: You know, it is a… as I said before we turned the recorder on, it’s been a week or two of some really awful news, and it’s been kind of rough to try to process that and function as a human in the world.
KH: Yes, we are in an ugly stretch of tragedy and disaster that is definitely taking a toll on so many of us.
SJ: Yeah, it really, really has been, you know? I click on a story, and it’s like armed militias driving away FEMA people who are trying to actually help in western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and people burning alive in Palestine. It’s really just been frustrating and sad. We try so hard and it doesn’t seem like… sometimes, it really doesn’t seem like we’re getting very far.
KH: Well, I really appreciate you making time to talk amid everything that’s happening right now.
SJ: Well, it’s always good to talk to you, and hopefully some of this will be helpful to everybody else who’s also trying to process all of these awful things.
KH: It’s always good to talk with you, too, and I think a conversation about your most recent book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, is right on time, given everything we’re experiencing. People are probably used to hearing us talk about labor struggles, but today we are talking about loss and how we experience and survive it. So, can you say a bit about why you decided to write a book about grief?
SJ: A lot of people probably know me as a labor journalist, and my last book was called Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, and that’s still true. But I have been, well actually since before I wrote that book, dealing with sort of grief in my own life. My father died, which was now six years ago, and so in the background while I was writing this very sort of focused book about work, I was also thinking about grief and experiencing grief, and that really led me to see it kind of everywhere, in all the stories I was working on. I would see, oh wait, people are grieving. That’s what’s happening here.
And it started to make sense to me not only as a way to sort of understand the transformation that was happening in my own life, but also some of the political crises that I was just referring to, and the things that feel really big and intractable in political discourse in the world these days. They all really struck me as being issues about grief, and that we don’t have space to understand and talk about, let alone to fully experience grief in this world, because we’re all too busy trying to make ends meet.
KH: That resonates so much. I think our communities and our movements are so overwhelmed by feelings of loss and powerlessness. There is a sense of impotence, because we don’t have the power we need to stop a genocide, and also ineptitude, because we don’t know what to do with ourselves or these feelings. Our society doesn’t make room for those feelings. Our movements don’t make room for those feelings. So, people thrash about, and all of the emotions that are bound up in grief, including rage, just come firing out of us, in all sorts of situations. I think it’s turned the left into a sort of omni-directional firing squad, and I hate that for us. That’s why I was so grateful for this book. I really experienced From The Ashes as a call to reckon with the enormity of what we’ve lost in recent years, and how those losses are shaping us, our work, and our relationships.
In sharing your own personal journey with grief, in the book, you said something early on that I thought was really important. You named that grief wasn’t something you could “work through.” Can you talk about that realization, and why you couldn’t translate your experience of grief into a kind of labor?
SJ: I mean, it’s interesting, right? Again, because I was thinking about this stuff while I was working on a book that was about work, and in that book, I was making arguments about the unpaid work that gets done in the home, and the way that emotional labor is labor. And so it was kind of interesting to come around at the flip side of it and be like, okay, but grief isn’t work. And then trying and thinking about grief to try to sort of theorize like, okay, what’s not work? If I will make a certain argument about certain things being work, like, I also want to reclaim some things from work.
And you know, this first, again, occurred to me as a very personal experience, which was that I sort of thought… My father had been sick for a while when he died. I was like, okay, I’m going to go back into therapy, and I’m going to focus on this, and I’m going to be good at grieving, you know? I’m going to do my homework. And wow, it does not work that way, you know? And you can’t get away from the word “work,” right? It’s kind of everywhere. We trip over it all the time. I sort of start the book beefing with Sigmund Freud about what he describes as the work of mourning, because I think it is neither work nor is his description remotely accurate.
But to think about things that aren’t work, and how we experience sort of processes that happen in the body, and that happen between people, and that happen in social spaces, that aren’t quite conscious, that aren’t quite volitional, and then thanks to the wonderful Dave O’Neill at Bookforum, I ended up interviewing Namwali Serpell, who had written this beautiful, beautiful novel called The Furrows, which is all about grief. And she and I were talking, and we were talking about how Freud is wrong, and she recommended to me this essay by a, I think performance studies scholar, called Bronislaw Szerszynski, and I apologize if I’m pronouncing that wrong.
But he had written this piece about drift, and it was in the context of sort of climate and ecology, but in the piece, he points out that there is a middle voice in a lot of languages, and particularly a lot of ancient languages that we don’t really use anymore, that is somewhere between active and passive, you know? And we’ll talk a lot in active voice, and particularly as journalists, we’re supposed to use the active voice, and then there are certain situations where the passive voice gets used a lot. See what I did there? And that’s often when there’s a police killing, and it’s like, oh, “A teenager was killed today,” or when Israel is doing something, somehow 200 people in Gaza died in a hospital bombing. Well, who bombed the hospital, y’all? You know?
But in-between these two things, and he uses the word “drift” as an example of this, right? Are things that we are doing, but not really, kind of that are being done to us, but not quite, and they sort of happen in-between. It had struck Namwali Serpell, and then of course me, after I read the piece that she sent, that this was a good way to understand grieving as something that happens somewhere between sort of active and passive, that is sort of always working on us, whether we are working on it or not. God, you really can’t avoid using the word “work.”
KH: I really appreciate this idea of grief as something that’s always working on us, whether we are acknowledging it, or making room for it, or making sense of it or not. I also really appreciated the personal journey that you shared in the book. The sections where you talked about your experiences with the loss of your father, who died in 2018. I lost my father in 2017, and a lot of the words you used to describe your experience felt like words I could have used to describe my own. You really captured what it feels like to be undone by loss, and to be remade in its wake. I feel like I was completely reconstructed in the years after my father’s death. I wasn’t the same person, after the early months and years of learning to live with that loss. And that process of being unmade and remade takes so many shapes.
I’m thinking about how, less than a month after my father’s death, I found myself in D.C., at the Capitol, where hundreds of disabled people were protesting a Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It meant a lot to me to be there, covering that struggle, and amplifying the voices of disabled people who were pulling the batteries out of their wheelchairs en masse to shut down the Capitol. They were causing the most righteous havoc and, in that moment, moving through the chaos they were creating felt right. My friends were saying, “What are you doing there?” Because they didn’t believe I was up for it, but it felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, making my father proud.
But the reason my friends didn’t believe I was up for it was that, on most days, I couldn’t leave my apartment. Visiting with me meant sitting somewhere near me, staring at whatever I was staring at, which was usually a television show, but sometimes, just the light coming through the window. I had nothing, absolutely nothing to offer the people I loved or the world most days. So, it was shocking to them to see me on social media, zipping around this protest, energetically reporting on what I was seeing.
Then, of course, those activists were victorious, and the Graham-Cassidy bill was stopped, and it was time to go home, and pretty quickly, I was back in that zone of not having anything to give.
The only thing I can compare it to is my experience of physical disability. There are days when I get up, I feel strong, I walk two miles, I laugh, I have great ideas, and I don’t even think about the wobbly state of my spine. Then, there are days when I barely make it out of bed, when the pain is at the center of my world, and there really isn’t room for anything else. It’s like negotiating with a current, if you’re a swimmer or a surfer. You........