exploring time as a carceral force
After watching the play Hamilton, adrienne maree brown remarked that it was like looking at baby pictures of a person who later abused you. Where did that innocence, that purity, that beauty go? As a country whose foundations are genocide and the atrocity of chattel slavery, it is clear we have not faced - nor metabolized - what those foundations mean. James Baldwin writes that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The need to collectively face - to grieve - the legacy and continuing adaptations of our original sins feels like a project whose day has come. But when it comes to public grief, what do we do with time? “Time heals all wounds” is a known platitude. Popular discourse argues that “too much time” has passed since the end of colonization and chattel slavery to do anything about it. “It is so long ago - no one directly impacted is still alive” is sometimes cited, assuming grief only resides within an individual’s body. While time can be an element of healing, in this essay I’d like to explore time as a carceral force. As it relates to public grief - or facing ourselves - how is time deployed to dismiss, oppress and maintain a societal - and economic - relationship to death that is predicated on racism and capitalism?
What is time? In the modern context, time is often used to signal human progress. The Oxford English Dictionary describes time as “a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.” What is the material reality we are demarcating and for whom? Derek Thompson fits this question squarely into colonialism and the rise of Industrial Revolution as he writes in The Atlantic: “The creature became the creator: The economy re-invented time. Or, to put things less obliquely, the age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time.” Time, therefore, has been a measure of capitalistic and colonial exploitation. Thompson continues: “in colonial campaigns like the First Boer War and the Third Burmese War, British commanders tied little clocks to their soldiers’ wrists.[...] the innovation proved extremely useful for coordinating troop movements.”
Can this tool, this measure we call time, be used to both optimize violence and also heal from it? It is in this contradiction that we can explore deeper understandings of how the hegemonic national psyche refuses grief. And, perhaps more nefariously, a concept or construction we use to deny our essential humanity is paradoxically marketed as a salve.
Significantly, the spectacle of Black death in and at the hands of the hegemon of the United States is - in a sense - timeless. Writing about the horrors inflicted by white terrorist Dylan Roof, Claudine Rhakine writes that “the spectacle of the shooting suggests an event out of time” (Millstein, 28). Rhakine continues:
“We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in the ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons. Historically there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained, or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.” (Millstein, 29)
If time is an attempt to quantify a rate of change, then so has time in the United States been metered to a cadence of death and violence -- recapitulated as productivity and progress. The unsaid - or what has been made invisible or erased in the name of production - is that such so-called progress depends on unlivable lives and what Butler calls “ungrievable deaths.” Progress, in the capitalist sense, is both measured and fueled by the ungrievable deaths of Black, indigenous and people or color. As a society, we maintain this racialized power arrangement by avoiding grief and using time as the accomplice in that logic system. The transformative force of grief threatens the power structure. But at what cost? What might be possible if we re-negotiated our collective relationship to grief - grounding it in what we know from a more deeply human perspective - and re-imagined the systems that restrict it?
Grief exists without time. Wounds do not heal if they are left alone, or processed in isolation, much less told their pain is not real. Grief is not held only within one body, one life - but grief is so deeply human that it connects us across generations and geographies. In Alternating Mourning, they writes to grief: “I am feeling about you the way waves feel about the shore. You come at me in endless loops, your moods, the looks on your faces, my lost ones, more alive by the minute, and the color in your faces tinting with the seasons.” (9)
Grief is a public good. By denying grief, we deny our essential humanity - cutting ourselves off from the essential materials that make up democracy (or the promise of one). As Terry Tempest Williams writes:
“The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?”
How can we live in a democracy if we do not know democracy in our hearts? By repressing grief, we repress democracy. Millstein writes: “the work of grief, and spaces for it, as something that similar to water and libraries, should be freely, healthily and publicly available to all.” (4)
Grief is resistance. Millstein continues: “Over human history, loss also became the impetus for rebellions and revolutions, including those that challenged — and still do — the instrumental logic of capitalism, which inherently turns us into mere things, commodities, thereby privatizing and wholly debasing our lives.” (8) Benji Hart writes: “Let grief be part of the movement-building process for which we allow hallowed space, and let it build within us the compassion, wisdom and rage that propel us into new battles.” (23)
In the coming months, as reasons to grieve seem to compound each day, it feels important to sit with these questions, this grief and these possibilities. How can we sit in and surrender to the transformational power of grief in a way that changes us?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/a-brief-economic-history-of-time/510566/
