grief web
"death entangles us in multispecies worlds"
Thom van Dooren, 'Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World.'
Please turn on video sound.
ghost sounds - dusky seaside sparrow (extinct 1987) - Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (extinct, last heard 1987) -
live sounds - seagulls outside Park Wood Houses - Blean Woods rustles - wind - birdsong -
- rips - cuts - branch breaking - steps - sirens -
"Whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in our hands.
The answer to the trust of the held-out hand: think we must."
Donna Haraway
inside, against my skin,
i have written names of our dead:
- kin whose deaths shap/e/ed/ing my life - family (blood, chosen, given, found) - my three grandmothers - nonhuman people groups (species) extinct in Turtle Island // North America (1492 to 2022) - brother's brother- childhood companions - people murdered by the police in San Francisco (2000 to 2022) - neighbors - siblings - cohabitants - father of my friend's friend -- kin and kin of kin
of kin of - kin of - - kin of ki-n of- kin- - -
Cecilia Vicuña
Deborah Bird Rose, in conversation with
Aboriginal Peoples of the Northern Territory of Australia
Die if you're gone, I go.
"Las piedras, el agua y el sol hablan. [...]
Antes de ser contaminado,
el río desea ser escuchado."
flying fox people share flesh with flying foxes, emu people with emus, and so on. Dwelling within the same flesh, what happens to one has a bearing on what happens to the other.
KILL since you're gone, they go.
"...each organism changes everyone's world."
Anna Tsing
"
WORKS CITED
van Dooren, Thom. "Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World."
Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 125-144.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 31, 36.
Rose, Deborah Bird. "Death and grief in a world of kin." The Handbook of Contemporary Animism edited by G. Harvey, ed. 1, Routledge. https://doi-org.chain.kent.ac.uk/10.4324/9781315728964.
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 22.
Vicuña, Cecilia. Precario/precarious. Translated by Anne Twitty,
Tanam Press, 1983.
