“Where does all that pain go?” – The White Lotus
One recent afternoon, I found myself in a spotlight. THEE Roxane Gay, author of exquisite works like Not That Bad, Hunger, Bad Feminist, and the necessary recent volume The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, recommended my own book—Humane Insight—to her followers. As is the way of social media, that tweet brought me, not only great joy and accompanying gratitude, but also attention, more celebration, and followers.
I am not used to the spotlight, even though I have ardently, even desperately, sought to be heard and recognized.
You see, the book I wrote is about death. More precisely, Humane Insight is a book about the death of Black folks: African Americans who were put beyond the reach of language by the devastations of capitalism and white supremacy called by different names: slavery, Jim Crow, “natural” disaster. Writing it meant spending ten years listening to the dead and the loved ones who tried to make of their bodies a witness and end to lethal cruelties. Since publishing the book in 2015, social media has become a more significant a part of the world and of my life. I have seen it transform the logic of public work into a plea for attention. I do not want to be taken for someone profiting from the harm done to Black folks. I understand my work as insisting upon a reckoning with the facts. We as a public have yet to fully attend to and grieve the 500-plus years of funerals and homegoings and disappearances that we never got to mourn.
That’s another story that I will speak on sometime, perhaps. At the moment, my mind is on how, it seems, all of a sudden, people who I knew and people who I did not know personally showed up to corroborate Gay’s compliment or to happily pursue her recommendation and engage with my work. I am humbled and grateful—two emotions that hold and ground me.
I won’t lie: Being complimented and embraced by so many people—in particular Black people who I love with all my heart and whose miraculous survival inspires me daily—felt great. I was elated. Especially in the thick of isolation born by the pandemic (another event that is being weaponized to kill Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks; see, for example, the Georgia and Mississippi governments), it is a blessing to be held. I moved through that day—the auspicious 21st of September for which Earth, Wind & Fire provided a soundtrack—with joy and no small portion of confusion about how to handle the attention.
I tried to handle it by reminding folks that my work was only that of a conduit. My task was to listen to the ancestors—Mamie Till, Emmett Till, and so, so many more whose names we don’t know—and to try to narrate the purposeful mourning that they directed and elicited through the spectacle of Black suffering.
Perhaps I ought to have known that, as a consequence of what I now feel is my calling—to mourn publicly as a form of resistance—would invite, not only celebration, but more grief. New Orleanians and Gulf Coast African Americans—who are some of the freest and most beautiful Black folks in the world—have a tradition of incorporating bliss and despair in jazz funerals and the Second Line. Though I love that tradition very much, combining those emotions does not come naturally to me. When I mourn, I feel pain and am often unsure of what to do with it.
There is a line in the television series The White Lotus that has intrigued me for a month now: “Where does all that pain go?” Though the show’s resolution to its upstairs-downstairs dilemmas staged between tourists and hospitality workers lacks a satisfying insight into the legacies of inequity, I remain compelled by a question posed about the final destination for the pain of the systemic, ruthless destruction of the earth, animals, people, and cultures.
I have speculated with my friend and fellow public mourner, Kiese Laymon, that one destination is certainly onto the bodies of Black folks. I know, too, for certain that it is heaped upon Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, queer, and gender non-conforming folks. The White Lotus seems unable to stomach that and other truths as it (spoilers) leaves those who do not conform to white settler heteronormativity to suffer in silence, off screen, their pain reduced to one line of exposition or an evocative high-angle shot. It looks away from the pain it brings forth, unable—it would seem—to fully reckon with its own implications in a network and industry of culling pain.
I thought about this as I drove home from work after Gay’s tweet and all the retweets and DMs and texts and calls and likes I was getting. As I floated along the highway, having a little dance party in my new car, grateful as fuck and overwhelmed, I drove under an overpass upon which throngs were gathering. The traffic was bad so the approach was slow and therefore I could take in the whole scene: A giant American flag hoisted between two raised firetruck ladders, the spinning lights of the firetrucks and ambulances, numerous cars, and the outline of several people—some hoisting more flags—standing in silhouette, backed by the sun.
I knew something was wrong.
In this moment as in many previous moments, spontaneous rallying around the flag has been a signal of patriotism of the foulest sort: not at all an inclusive embrace, but a shoring up of the boundaries of who really belongs (supposedly) and of who constitutes a threat (supposedly). I have seen it before. Humane Insight was born in part out of the devastations of September 11th, 2001 and my particular relationship to that time and to the city that was once the gravitational center of my life: New York.
In the days that followed the falling of the Twin Towers, I watched as my intimate grief curdled into others’ propagandist grist for war. It is not lost on me that this is a war that has only very recently has been declared to be over, leaving thousands, maybe millions of Afghanis facing a new terror that follows the one imposed by the US and its self-serving commitment to forever war.
Something was wrong. The assembly foretold it. When I got home, I revisited my social media accounts to see compliments interspersed with new pictures of an old terror. Vicious Border Patrol agents were rounding up and otherwise terrorizing Haitian refugees along the U.S. southern border. Their vehicles were horses, and their weapons were whips.
Something in me collapsed. The suffering and pain being wantonly inflicted was being freshly inflicted by antique technologies and hackneyed logics. We have not outrun the past. As has been said, the past is not prologue; it is barely even past.
The secret is that I do not know how to manage this level of grief and pain. Surely, the conditions of the pandemic have pushed our ability to apportion our rage and sorrow to their very limits. I cast about in that moment after seeing the rally, inviting a friend to indulge in the darkness with me. Graciously, gratefully, he demurred. I meditated instead and let the tears come.
I do not have answers. My book is not that. Maybe it’s a meditation and invitation to cry. One thing it does have going for it is words. I think about Kiese and his commitment to words and to revision, to keep talking and writing lest, silence is mistaken for acceptance.
Where does all that pain go? Of this I am sure: It cannot be reduced to one sentence of exposition, to death or prison or both, or left unutterable. It is too present. Perhaps it is the awful inheritance of our era to grieve hundreds of years of incalculable devastation. The trick is how to live in the midst of that. I fear very much for those who don’t have the words, for whom suffering is a private affair, whose pain is denied by others and even by themselves.
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive. — Audre Lorde
Without speaking, writing, and creating in grief, we will surely die. Many of our generation and so many other generations have been sucked down into the gutters of despair as the poet Allen Ginsberg so precisely remarked. I grieve for them, too.
And so I write on, unsure of who will receive my words, unable to know whose readership will itself be a tremendous gift of spiritual embrace.
I wish for everyone the room, the peace (even temporary), to communicate their not-okay-ness. We have so many lifetimes to mourn. May we have the grace to do so in community, with language as one of our connective and consoling tissues.