
Southern mourning rituals are community work. Feed you. Hold you. Shepherd you. Remind you. Love you.
But when the pies and casseroles and bouquets and check-in messages stop—and they always do (or perhaps they never manifested in the first place)—grief finds its way in. A creeping heaviness, or a rush all at once. Many of us know how we're supposed to mourn: We wear the right things, call our folks, and tend to the affairs of transitioning. We flow through mourning's visibilized process. But so many of us also struggle to turn inward and grieve: We begin and get stuck. In denial. In anger. In depression. We try to bargain our way out. We struggle down grief's long, winding, seemingly-forever road, a silent solo trip into the unknown.
Scalawag's "grief & other loves" is a reckoning and an invitation. As the late bell hooks wrote in All About Love: Other Visions, "To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending."
"grief & other loves" is also a reminder: Even though your journey is your own, you're not alone. Sharing stories about how we sludge through the muck of grief and its dovetail, love, allows us to bear witness to our individual processes as we move toward acceptance, together.
If our future is to be the loving, caring, and just world we're fighting for, our healing must be as interconnected as our freedom.
Come and till these soils, where the muck lies, so that we may create bounty together—healing as we reap, as Southerners do.
Let our harvest usher out the legacy of enduring, often devastating loss that marks our beloved South.
The Color of Grief
Photographer Justin Hardiman, a collaborator with Jasmine Williams and Sarah Jené's 'How We Get Over: We Grow On' project at the Mississippi Museum of Art, shares stunning portraits and excerpts from his audio-visual project, 'The Color of Grief.'
A Grief of Our Own
In her podcast Great Grief, award-winning jazz singer Nnenna Freelon uses music and improvisation to express, process, and transform her sorrow into a multidimensional experience, inviting listeners to join her quest of making beauty and meaning from loss.
Schistostega pennata: grief & the luminous land
With "We Grow On," part of the Mississippi Museum of Art's inaugural artists-in-residence program in collaboration with Scalawag, artists Sarah Jené and Jasmine Williams explore grief in an exhibition showcasing rest, beauty, light, and Blackness.
"Dark Matter": A poem for grief & other loves
The other love of grief: loving something you never were, but somehow used to be. Using the formal constraints of the sestina, this complicating and uncompromising ode to Black womxn explores the reflexes, annulments, and returns of gender.
Mausoleums: The Art of Necromancy
A Black Trans Haint on living and dying in a society that denies them authentic grief, trauma, and existence. 'The Living will have nothing to do with the Dead if it does not make itself more palatable—in made-up, morticianed, and mortified silence.'
Against Regulations: Grieving inside a total institution
After losing a grandmother, sister, and friend while incarcerated, one woman's account of how the prison system's total authority denies her and countless others the right to heal. 'Imagine what grief does to this culture of social control.'
Art Under Aggression
Through a diverse array of mediums, Al-Amoor's artwork depicts reflections of time and place through a range of emotions: sadness, fear, and loss. Her key subject matter is her family.
Who said we all survived?
Assigning "more digestible" language to those who have experienced gender violence is dehumanizing—not empowering. It ignores the fact that under the existing conditions, harm for Black folks and gender-oppressed people is inescapable and recurrent.
Grief and Love, Outside the Changes
Six-time Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist and host of the podcast "Great Grief" Nnenna Freelon discusses love, death, and growing through the changes on her first album in about a decade.
Haunting the archive
What happens when the child of a slave writes over the texts that conspired to kill their mother? Haunted by the headlines that dehumanized their mother even after her death, poet Victoria Newton Ford scrapes the media record in order to answer the question.
Remembering Tyrik
My little brother was murdered on his birthday last year. Now I mourn the way violence and trauma disrupted our childhood.
'beyond a better hell' / talking to ghosts: a mixtap/e/ssay
History is a groove according to hip-hop scholar A.D. Carson. But when the soundtrack of Black grief continues to be remixed and sampled without meaningful change, Black folks are forced to compare this current hell to the last one.
Silent Night: When grief doesn't take a holiday
Holiday cheer doesn't cancel out sorrow—sometimes, it augments it. This condolence guide is a gentle reminder: Even though your journey is your own, you're not alone.
Grief, a (grand)mother tongue
How do you communicate love—much less grief—when you don't speak the same language? First-generation writer Mele Girma offers a makeshift grammar.
'Impact of an Icon': Grieving Young Dolph in South Memphis
Up and coming rapper South Memphis Babyface reflects on losing Young Dolph, "somebody I looked up to, somebody that inspired the world."
I was on The First 48. Your true-crime obsession is based on lies.
After 12 years of seeing false narratives play out about him on The First 48, Demetrius Buckley calls out true crime for what it really is: exploitation that reruns peoples' worst moments for profit.
There is no healing in an antiblack world
'We know what it means to be profiled, criminalized, incarcerated, and murdered by police. That trauma doesn't die with us.'
'Left to hold my grief alone.' Grieving platonic love in a culture of romantic domination.
When society places undue importance on romantic relationships, unpartnered people—and other kinds of love—are shunned to the margins.
Successors and failures: Adulting after death
A Black Millennial homeowner navigates complex feelings after inheriting the family home, grieving the mighty loss of the woman who left it to her.
Life and Death in Strawberry Land
My father, my people, and the "truth." A grievous ghost story from Stilwell, Oklahoma.