Grief is the Medicine with Malkia Devich Cyril

In this powerful episode, Prentis is joined by transformative grief activist, movement strategist, writer, Malkia Devich Cyril. Malkia shares stories and wisdom from their personal experience of loss, the possibility that emerges when we attend to our grief, and their insight about how we choose to grieve can determine how we can change the world.

Follow Malkia on Instagram @culturejedi and find out more about the projects they mentioned in this episode:

You can learn more about Prentis’ work below

Join the Why Feel? Healing Our Lineages + Transforming Our Communities virtual workshop on July 24th + 25th 2024.
Prentis' new book What It Takes to Heal is available now, and you can find their U.S. book tour dates here!
Follow @prentishemphill on Instagram to see show clips
Become a Patreon Subscriber to support the podcast and gain access to the full unedited conversations and visual episodes

The Becoming the People Podcast Team:
Producers: Prentis Hemphill & devon de Leña
Sound Engineer and Editing: Michael Maine
Research Assistant: Bhavana Nancherla
Original Music: Mayyadda

0:08

Hey everyone. This is a special episode for me. To be fully transparent, many years ago, Malkia Cyril, who is today's guest, was my boss at Media Justice, an organization that they founded and led for over 10 years. It's an organization that is working on issues of racial justice, rights and dignity and the digital age. Malkia is still a leader in the realm of media, talking about technology and race. And they've always been someone that I look to and rely on for their discernment and their political clarity. Their work lately has taken on a more emotionally evocative tone and a really timely turn, I think. They really started to work on collective grief and articulating the social and political and movement implications of understanding collective grief. In this episode, they really ask us to grapple seriously with loss. The loss we experience in our lives, the loss that's inherent to living, and the outsized and increasing loss I think that many are experiencing around the world. Some of you who've read my book and gotten to the last chapter might recognize Malkia's name. I quote Malkia talking about grief and their journey with their late wife through the end of her life, Alana, and their work around love and our need to practice love. And that's so much of our conversation today. I really hope you enjoy this episode. You know, Malkia has this way of making such precise and profound connections between our very human emotional experiences and also the structural barriers that really try to shape how and what we feel. I do want to offer a disclaimer for this episode which is that there's very open talk of death and dying so if loss is really acute for you right now, perhaps more than other episodes. You might want to be resourced in listening to this and maybe take your time. There is also a lot of joy, a lot of laughter, a lot of love, and really, really incredible and helpful insights. And I hope you enjoy it. Mack, it is a pleasure to be with you. I feel like we have had so many different kinds of relationships over the years, so I'm really excited about this 1 and grateful to be in conversation with you. I wonder if you can just tell us a little bit about what feels important to say of your story that gets us to this point in this conversation today. Anything you want to share? Well, first of all, I'm thrilled to have this conversation. My mother was a founding member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party. My father was a member of the Black Liberation Army and provided security for folks like Fred Hampton and others. The people that I grew up with as aunties and uncles for the most part were other members of the Black Panther Party and other political movements. So I didn't even know those people and I related to me, for example, until I was much, much, much older. An example of the way that I grew up is that when I was around 13 or 14, maybe, my mom had taken me to the Medgar Evers Black Writers Conference in Brooklyn. And at that conference, you know, there was a panel on lesbian fiction or lesbian writers or something like that. Or maybe it was black women writers or something. And Barbara Smith was on the panel. And so my mom dragged me to the mic during the Q&A and whispered very loudly into the mic, tell them you're a lesbian, you know, and you want to be a writer too. You know, I was like, no. But that's how I then connected with Barbara Smith, became mentored by Audre Lorde, and ended up as a spoken word poet as a teen at the Neorecan Poets Cafe. And so it's like, it wasn't just that I was born into the aftermath of a destroyed political organization, but also that I was cared for in such a way that I also was in queer movement, writing circles and a creative circle with some of the most amazing writers that have ever graced the planet. So there's a lot of intersections there, a lot of places to learn and gain experience, insight and suffering. The last thing I'll say is that my mom had sickle cell anemia, which means that she had a fatal genetic disease my entire life in which she was always dying. And so you combine that with then growing up in the 80s, you know, in New York, Brooklyn, where everybody was dying. AIDS became rampant, crack was flooding the streets, gun violence and the carceral system expanding. So it was just a time of extraordinary loss, You know, as a time of extraordinary loss in a life that had been defined by laws and a set of politics that was about transformation. And that's where my political identity was formed. Thank you for that. You mentioned loss and I will say it's really grounding for me especially when you put it in the context of that time period but I often think about the 80s as a time of tremendous loss it doesn't really get talked about. I'm curious how you even define grief or how you understand grief and what you understand it to be doing if you can talk a little bit about that. Well grief is often or you could say traditionally been defined as the the anguish, sorrow, the distress that an individual experiences in the direct aftermath of significant loss. That's often how people think about it. We think about it as the acute portion of that experience. We think it's time bound that at a certain point I won't feel this way anymore. And you think about grief as short term. We think about it as an emotional response to loss. But all of that is really too narrow to really understand grief in the context of inequality, in the context of power imbalances, in the context of history, even in the context of science. That's really not what grief is or how it works. In my mind, grief is an evolutionary response to loss. We evolved grief to manage change. Loss is change. And when you add colonialism and conquest and build into systems an unequal relation of power, what you're building in is a mechanized loss. You're building in loss that is inevitable, that is unequal, that is disproportionate, and unnatural. Loss itself is natural, but loss as the result of unequal relations of power is unnatural and often traumatic. Loss itself is not traumatic. It doesn't have to be. It's simply part of life. And in many indigenous cultures around the world, there are ceremony and frameworks and ways of understand- worldviews, ways of understanding life that include death and include change. Even migration is a way of understanding and managing loss. You know, we lose the season, we move, you know, we lose the water, we move. But when you constrain those forces, the natural ability to move, whether physically or emotionally, you constrain the natural path of grief, you constrain the naturalness, the indigenous body nature of grief, You add to the oppression and repression of both individuals and groups. And grief is not an individual experience, but especially not when oppression is collective. You know, then grief also is collective. Loss is a shared experience, and then our responses to that loss is also shared. We think of grief as 1, that it has 1 face, but I call it the grief ABCs when you're thinking about grief in response to colonialism. There's anticipatory grief, that grief that is generated by all the constant expectation of future loss. There's ambiguous grief, grief that comes in the face of when you have dictatorships and thousands of people are disappeared. You don't know what happened to them. Are they dead? Are they alive? Or in the context of migration, some of that migratory grief, losing of land, but also then you can mix and match, right? Migratory grief and ambiguous grief. What happened to my mother on the journey? I haven't seen my father in 25 years. I don't know if he's dead or alive. I left him in Nicaragua. I don't know what happened to him. There's that what they call that complicated and compounded grief, you know, like that grief that is coming from multiple sources or as a result of many losses. There's that grief that has been criminalized or the thinker and therapist, Pauline Boss, talks about smothered grief or criminalized grief. She also talks about that ambiguous grief as well. But that grief that has been criminalized, right? A real interesting example of criminalized grief is mass protest, you know, as rebellion, right? You are rising up in response to loss and then your protests like the campus protests are criminalized and that's grief that has been criminalized which is different than grief that has been disenfranchised right ignored determined unimportant you know discounted discarded you know so there I ignored, determined unimportant, discounted, discarded. So there are all these different ways that we can think about the faces of grief inside of inequality that are more complicated and more complex, more interesting and more accurate. Your wife, Alana, passed away. I don't, it feels like just happened and it also feels like maybe it's years at this point. But from my perspective as somebody on the outside of that, the process that you both created, the communal process, felt, I mean, it was like nothing I'd ever seen. And so when you talk about loss as a shared experience, You lived that in a way. I feel like you and she showed it to us. Did you know that before? Did y'all know that? Did y'all learn that along the way? It felt like you, it just, there was no beginning and end to it. It was like there was space for everyone to be in the grieving. There was a space for everybody to learn about love through the grieving, about loss through their own loss, through the loss of this person through the grieving. It was just such a dynamic, instructive ritual that you all convened. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about loss as a shared experience and if there's anything in the learning of that process that you'd be willing to share with us. Yeah, Alana was and continues to be a guiding light in my life. She is absolutely a joint mentor. My mentor around boundaries, she will cut you off. She was not about to let nobody mess with me. She wasn't loud. She was quiet. The point is she's a unique individual who has shaped my adult life, But she's not the 1 who taught me that loss is a shared experience that was my mother. Because it's not loss per se that is the shared experience, although loss can be. Loss as a shared experience is about the material conditions of losing. We experienced that together in the context of shared conditions of oppression. The real collective experience is love, is care. And that started before Amana was diagnosed with a terminal cancer in 2016, because when we got married, we live-streamed our wedding. Thousands of people participated in our wedding, who I didn't even know. And the wedding itself was a source of joy for so many. But even before that, we made videos on the internet and posted them to YouTube. I would always interview her for the purposes of humor and laughter. And she was a comedian, a stand-up comedian. And I was an organizer. And we all, and a strategic communicator, and we both believed that our life was meant to be shared. That was a shared value, you know, that love was meant to be shared. That it was something, she was more private than me. She was more reclusive than I was, but also she was a stand-up comedian. So the communal factor is love, and love as it translates into care, collective care and that is something I learned from my mother, having a parent with a fatal illness. Growing up in a context where we had family, but we didn't really have, especially as we got older, people that helped us with our mom. And so, you know, we as children were constantly, were often shuttled about when she would go to the hospital. My sister and I talked the other day about, where were you? Remember when mom was in the hospital? I remember I was in this person's house, but where were you? I don't remember you being there. I have no idea where I was. And so we kind of like learned both through the absence of that kind of support, but also through the presence of it at other times, that care has to be collective. And love is a collective experience. And loss and grief are simply reflections of those 2 things. The communal nature of loss may be about the material conditions of inequality, but the collective condition of grief is about the sense of connection we have to 1 another and the understanding that as someone crosses from 1 plane to another, whether that's in birth or in death, that it requires hands to catch you and either hands to push you or hands to catch you. You know what I'm saying? Somebody's hands need to hold you as you cross over. And I felt that to be my job, but I couldn't do it without hundreds. I mean, I'm going to tell you, I raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on GoFundMe to care for her, for her medical bills. I spent every dime of that on medical and related cause, but I couldn't have done it. Couldn't have had the nice apartment that we had for that period without additional support. We couldn't afford it. And I wanted a nice place for her, for Alana to die. All of that was something that I needed help with. For a long time, she could only eat period foods, or the fact that there was a period of time she could not walk, and I needed assistance to get her in and out of the house, or when she finally did go into home hospice, we needed care, we needed help. I couldn't do 24 hour around the clock. In fact, I went to the hospital during the time that she was in hospice because I became so ill with trying to do everything. So care is the communal activity, and grief is the collective activity, and love is the collective activity. Loss, loss is the event. Thank you for that. That is really, really clarifying. You talked about so many different kinds of grief and thank you for sharing also some of your story and some of Alana, just a little bit of who Alana was because I mean, for many people that know you and know both of you, Alana has changed many lives. It's changed my life. Just gratitude to you for sharing some and actually also activating something in me, doing sharing about her. You talked about the different kinds of grief, and I wonder if you can talk maybe some more about the barriers to grief, how we are stopped from grieving, and what that might serve. First, let me say this. Since 2016, I've lost about 22 close friends and family members. In late March, I lost my uncle, my cousin, and my mother's best friend, all within a week and a half of each other. And that of course doesn't count the people I lost as a young person. My girlfriend was murdered when I was 16. My cousins were killed. My mother died. My mother's sister, my aunt died. All of them died young. Nobody reached elder age. My uncle died at 67 and he's the oldest. And so I want to say that as I think about what prevents grief, we have to also think about what causes this unnatural form of grief, this unnatural pace of loss. I shouldn't have lost this many people, dozens and dozens of people. I'm only 50 years old and I shouldn't have lost so many children. My mother died when she was 59. This is not natural and these are, I would say 90% of these people are Black. Most of them are Black women in my life in particular. So the same thing that prevents us from grieving healthfully is what causes the loss in the first place. In this case, it's this unnatural inequality that serves to deprive some to empower others. That deprivation, that loss is intended to produce privilege and power for somebody. You know, so the losses from medical neglect, losses from the kinds of diseases Black people have generated over generations, diabetes and heart disease, which are the losses. Those are diseases of inequality. Those are not natural diseases. They're disproportionately found in some because of our material conditions. The fact that my aunt Baba had her legs cut off when I was young, that many of the people in my life who were disabled were disabled by disease. These losses, which are the context of my life, my cousin and Juicy, who was shot in the head when we were 16, after DJing the party, oh Lord, we gonna have this problem with the cat. I apologize. The cat just knocked the mic over. Look, I'd unlock them out and they just opened the door. They opened the door and came in. I closed the door. Anyway, the point is whether it's my cousin and Juzi who was shot in the head or it's my cousin BJ who was run over by a bus, or as my girlfriend Jackie who was raped and murdered and thrown off a building in the Bronx. The list goes on and on and on. The ones who have died from cancer, my mother who died from sickle cell anemia, the cadence of loss, all of this is like we die younger, we die more violently, we die more frequently. And then after that, those who survive us are told that our lives either are criminal and not worth grieving, not in fact it is a criminal act to mourn us, that the processes by which we died they try to gaslight us into believing they are natural, they're inevitable, there's nothing that can be done about them. We are pushed into individualization, pushed away from collective action. Collective grief is a insider of collective action. And so anyone who seeks to deny organizing as a methodology for change is also going to deny grief as a methodology for processing loss. The denial of grief is in somebody's interest. It's in the interest of the same people who produce the loss. So this is why the enslaved African was not allowed to have their morning ceremony. This is why you weren't even allowed to grieve the loss of your child. You know what I'm saying? There's reasons why when our people go to prison, I just have a young man who I've known since he was 12, go to jail. He's very sad, he's depressed. I could not find him for 3 weeks. And he is not allowed in prison to mourn the loss of his freedom because that's considered his fault. So keeping us narrow in this way, keeping our grief unprocessed and unmetabolized, knowing that that unprocessed grief is going to be stored in our body, is going to cause us physical, it's going to cause us psychic harm, it's going to focus our nervous system on survival. You know what I'm saying? It's going to make our range of emotion narrow. It's going to disable our capacity for connection. It's going to mess us up. You know, It's going to mess us up. You know, it's going to mess us up. It's going to disrupt our ability to organize for our freedom. And it's certainly going to focus us on surviving the here and now, which makes us better workers. It is in the interest of the ruling class. So there's all these mechanisms to prevent it, whether it's the rules, the laws that suppress protests, a censorship, and book banning is a form of disenfranchising grief. All of these things are ways to prevent people from communicating their grief, from feeling their grief. Even the curriculum wars, the culture wars that the right is engaged in, the refusal to acknowledge Black history, this is a way of disenfranchising grief. And here we are in the context of watching on live stream more than 30, 000 people murdered by an oppressive state. And yet here in the United States, our journalists are being fired for speaking on that. We have senators who just yesterday posed a bill to put forward a suspicious activity reports on many of the entities that might be supporting student protests. We've seen the campuses, the campus presidents of various universities unleash police on their own students and faculty for expressing their mourning, for saying stop murdering these people, right? Stop the loss. So this engagement that we have with loss, loss becomes under those conditions a landscape for liberation, right? It's a terrain for transformation and we, you know, because of its nature, you know what I mean? Because of its nature as both something natural and something deformed, both together. So for us to think of it as short term, for us to think of it as just this acute moment, for us to think of it as something that only belongs to those who deserve it. It therefore becomes something very precious, something actually essential to movements and for movements to understand. Unfortunately, we often don't. That's kind of where I want to go in this next piece. Well, 1, I want to pick up this thread about, you know, grief is both, you know, quote unquote, natural and also imposed and also imposed and imposed disproportionately. When we are witnessing massive destruction, massive death, There's also this sense, I mean, there's multiple things going on, but there's also the sense of like, how are we to process this amount of pain? How can we relate to what we are witnessing, which feels beyond what is even comprehensible? And that's at a distance, Imagining people that are experiencing this, moving through this every day. And you know, something I've heard you speak about before as this period of tumult, violence, grief, destruction. And I've heard you say, this is likely part of what we will experience moving forward. But how do you imagine we face something that is natural, but is not natural in this proportion. What are we going to have to do? What are we going to need to do in this moment to face what I've heard you say is you believe is coming and here? I think there are 3 or 4 steps that we as individuals and we as a people have to take. And I don't know, I'm in the process of researching this. I'm still learning. I'm a person who I believe in learning, so I don't want to say anything as definitive. Mack, I'm learning right at this moment. From you. Right now. You know, I'm happy I could give something to you because I've been learning from you for years. So first of all, let me say this. It's not natural to lose 30, 000 people in a few months to have them murdered in your face and then justify. So that's not natural. There's actually no way to process it. I don't want to normalize. I don't want to make it seem like there is a path by which you can make that natural or normal. You can't. That's right. You know, you can't. The only real way is to transform the conditions that produced it. So let me say that to begin. But how can we navigate? You know, how can we navigate in the healthiest way possible given those conditions? I think the first thing is we have to move from our grief being unattended and unseen to seen and felt. We have to move from unattended grief, grief that is just being disenfranchised, discarded, and what Steven Levine calls unattended grief, to grief that is seen and felt. We have to center in grief. Yeah, we have to feel it, you know, and to feel it, you know, you have to acknowledge it. That's the very first thing you got to do is acknowledge it. And from acknowledgement, we move to embodiment. From embodiment, we move to enfranchisement. Right? So this is the path, you know, this is the path of transformative grief. This is the path of being liberated at the site of loss. Loss is not only a burden, there is also, because there's agency in every moment, because we have choices in every moment, whether you're in a prison cell or somebody dropping bombs on you, there is a moment of choice inside of you about how you live your life. And I speak that to myself. This is something I remind myself of all the time. But in that space, there's an opportunity to be liberated at the side of love. And, you know, when my wife died, Alana, that moment of her last breath, which felt like it was my last breath, or the moment when my mom died, she died next to me as I slept beside her, or the moment that my uncle died, you know, like he died as I sang to him and held his hand. There is a moment of practice there for me, A moment when the loss is not simply happening to me, I am also happening, you know? I'm also happening. And so if we can practice all the time, then we can in the moments when there's this thing happening that feels, that was not in my control. I could not stop that. You cannot stop death. Once it's coming, it's there. It's coming. You can't change that, right? But what you can do is practice in its face. And so that is that acknowledgement, that decision to turn and face death, to turn and face loss of various types. This is the first step, you know, acknowledging loss. That is the first step to empower and grieve. You know how they say you have to feel it to heal it. Everybody has these little slogans or whatever. You know, I don't believe that you need to heal grief. Grief itself is the healing. Grief is the medicine. You know what I'm saying? Grief is not trauma. People get that confused. Grief Loss can be traumatic, but grief itself, that's the medicine. And us figuring out, that's the movement. That's right. That's the whole, that's the energy, That's the energetic process we're going through. That's grieving. And we don't want to avoid it. We don't want to turn away from it because it's uncomfortable. We want to engage with it. And then that second piece, that embodied piece, that part that's about. So first is acknowledging it. It's like, hello. You know, and I chose when Alana died, I chose to wash her body. I chose to invite people over to help me wash her body. I chose to sing and people came over to give her kisses and sing to her. I chose to assist the funeral home, which they're not really allowed to do, but I let them know that I would definitely be assisting. I know you did. I'm like, either you can allow me to assist or I'll just do it myself. Thank you. But, you know, to move her body to the car, you know, to the... And then to the... At the crematorium to have our own version of awake, to have people come and visit with her. She looked like an angel. She was dressed and she was wrapped in African cloth and she had a small smile on her face. Then when it was time to cremate her, there's something called a self-directed cremation in which a loved 1 can put your body into the crematorium and press the button. And I did that. I chose a self-directed cremation because our bodies are each other's responsibility. And to me, if I love you, then I will hold you from the moment of our connection to the last. I will put you in the fire, you know, myself. And I waited across the street, outside, near. I held vigil until the cremation was done. It takes many hours. When I say acknowledgement, when I say taking responsibility and facing, this is what I mean. Not just like a word, I lost somebody, but like getting all in there. Yeah. It actually reminds me in a way a lot of the birthing process too. So much has been sanitized or taken away or tried to be made efficient. It's like, let's not get messy or afraid or try to take all of that away, which is, I think, so important if you've ever been present for a birth. It is portal work. You are on the edge of life and living, and it means something to know that. It changes your relationship to each other to know that. So I hear that too, and what you're saying about moving Alana, Milana's body through that last moment, loving her all the way through. Yes. And I don't think I understood that before then, but I do now. And since then, I've carried several people through to the end of their life, and it's an honor, and it's very difficult. The next thing I think that is important for us as individuals and as a people is, is this piece around moving from isolation and alienation to accompanied and relational grief. Like this piece around when you're born and when you die, people say you're alone, but it's not true. It's not true. When you're born, you're born from a body to a world, and when you die, you die from a world to a body, you know? And that's just the truth. You're not alone, though. There are threads connecting you. No 1 can die for you and no 1 can be born for you. But you can be accompanied and you can be in relationship. I wrote about the dark night of the soul. I think we've all experienced that place where it's pretty terrible. Everything is changing and you don't know which way is up and everything just feels horrible. And the writer who wrote about that, Francis Weller, is somebody who I really respect and I love reading what he has to say. But he talks about the psyche and when the psyche knows that we're not capable of handling grief and isolation. The psyche is very well aware that isolation is not natural. That doesn't mean that having a long time is not natural. We all need that. I'm talking about isolation. Isolation is an imposed alone. When you talk about isolation, that's an imposition. Somebody that has been imposed upon you. And whether it's the nation state that's giving you that message or it's your employer that's like, here go 3 days, a bereavement leave, get over it, come back to work. Or it's your family that's like, look, you've been out here mourning for too long, like get it together. Or your friends that's like, you're going to love again. That's okay. You can have another child. You know what I mean? Right? That's what people say to you. You know what I mean? And it's like, I don't care if I have another child. I lost that 1. I don't care if I love again. I loved. My love was unique. It was specific and she's gone. So loving again is not the point, per se. You know what I mean? These are not replaceable people. So if we can come to understand that caring our grief does not have to be a solitary burden, that it's something we can do in community, that it's something even in fact our systems can incorporate, you know, not just our human systems, our physical bodies, I'm talking about our legal system, our economic system, our social systems can actually incorporate principles of accompanied and relational grief. And if we did that, there are a lot of things that would be different because the principle there is that relationship is the medicine for unattended grief. You feel me? And that's where we begin, that's where we move into collective action. That's where we move from collective, you know, collective grief rather. That's where we get to be together in our losses. We get to share with 1 another. We get to learn from 1 another. And we get to process this thing that requires energy and movement. I talked about being liberated at the side of laws, but also another way to think about that, coming full circle, is to be radicalized by laws and transformed by grief. So that there's a path here. This is, you know, in Buddhism they talk about the path of the Bodhisattva and the love warrior, and I've taken that vow to be on that journey as a love warrior. I'm a human. I'm a human with a traumatic history. You know what I'm saying? You can't lose 27, 35, however many people in your own sovereignty and your body and not come out with some challenges. You know what I'm saying? But that don't mean you can't take the path. That don't mean you can't take up the call to be a love warrior and to find the principles that give you dignity. And So for me, there's a path that's maybe like the Bodhisattva path. I don't know how to quite articulate it, but this path of the transformative griefer, which I don't know, I don't have a full analysis of it. It's the way I'm trying to live my life, that wherever loss exists, may I find radicalization rather than despair? Can I generally, you know, wherever my grief shows itself, can I understand it as medicine rather than as a burden? It's something that's freeing me rather than something that's oppressing me. How do I respond what I'm choosing to do in that? And that's where I think we move from that collective grief to collective action to transform the conditions that produce the loss in the first place. So That's kind of the 3 pronged something that I'm thinking about. That's genius. And I'm going to ask you at the end, when do we get to have a book about this? I'll be asking myself that same question. Well, I can also ask you regularly because stop playing with the people, Mac. Stop playing with the people. No comment. I mean, we're going to talk about this offline because let's be so for real right now. I want to touch specifically on movement. So you just, you know, shared a path and how does that path relate to movements, to shifting conditions, to power? What do we do with our grieving selves and how does it relate to building power? What do movements need to know? Well, first of all, These experiences of mass loss that we're going through, the pandemic, the colonial war against Gaza, the civil wars that have been inspired by Western intervention in the Congo, in Haiti, and all over the world, Even Brexit, even the rise of the right-wing in Brazil and in other parts of Latin America, all over the world, there is a transition afoot. We're in a time that Gramsci might call the interregnum, that period between stable governments when what he would say is anything is possible, both the most greatest levels of destruction and the greatest levels of healing and transformation. And we're in it, you know, there's like, we're in a transition right now. Neoliberalism kept a measure of stability while maintaining systems of oppression in place. Fascism and its correlation in authoritarianism, authoritarian systems of government, fascist systems of economy. This is an ending place, yes? And in the meantime, the space between neoliberalism and fascism is lost, profound and utter loss. Fascism grows in chaos. If you have anybody that ever watched Game of Thrones, I remember that scene when the priest was a pimp. He said chaos is a ladder, and that's the reality, right? The more chaos, the more possible authoritarianism and fascism is. And in that we experience these mass loss events. We experience the almost ritualistic murder of Black people by the police. We experience mass shootings in schools and clubs, hate crimes, right? Mass shootings in grocery stores. All of these are essentially various types of hate crimes, churches, synagogues, mosques. We experienced this pandemic. We experienced war. But also climate disaster at extreme levels. Earthquakes and Tsunamis and floods. So we're going to experience more and more mass loss events. How many of us were trained to lead through those types of events? Nobody. None of us. How many of us understand the way grief works on the body, the way mass loss can work to demobilize? This tradition of community organizing needs an infusion of this grief education and this grief leadership. This is part of the transformative organizing that model that many people are seeking to generate, right? Some people are coming at it from healing. We need more healing in organizing. Some people are coming at it from accountability and conflict. We need more different ways to whatever. Some people are coming at it from how we make decisions and how we share power. And my entry point here is to say how we grieve will determine how we change the world. Whether or not we can grieve, whether or not we understand grief, how do you even support grieving members? You out here organizing people who have lost everything. Do you even know what role grief is playing? How do you deal with these uprisings as acts of public mourning and bring ritual into the space? The act of base building is a ritualistic process. There's ceremony in base building. There's ceremony in leadership development. And if we don't remember that, if we don't get back to that, you know, there's a reason our bases are tremendous, significantly smaller here in the United States and all Western countries and anyplace else in the world. We neglect ceremony, we neglect ritual, we neglect each other. On the 1 hand, grief needs to be infused into the practice of organizing in order to elevate our capacity and elevate our ability to build the kind of movements that we deserve and that can win, moving into this future. You can't have thousands and thousands and thousands of murdered people, thousands dead, and not have any understanding of the role that grief is going to play. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. So for us as movements, our leaders need this leadership training. We need to develop this training. Our institutions, our organizations need better policies and practices around engaging with grieving leaders, you know, grieving members, grieving staff. Our bereavement policies need to change. We are so stuck in a nonprofit law when I'm sorry, I didn't join a movement to be a nonprofit law. I'm trying to get free. I don't, I don't, the nonprofit is simply a structure by which we are trying to be able to process our resources. That's all it is. That's all it is. Everything else should be guided by principles and vision, strategy and practice. That's it. So our HR policies need to be radicalized and they need to go beyond the law. And I'm not saying they should break the law, I'm saying that they should engage the law in a more thoughtful way. I feel like that's a very Mac note to end the conversation. I'm in a way. And I hear you completely. I hear you. I do. Really the last thing I want to ask you is are there any organizations that you want to name or lift up at the end of this conversation? I'm really proud right now to be working with the movement innovation collaborative now called Mike and we are really trying to increase the capacity and the power the strength of power building organizations here in California. And 1 of the important tributaries to that, that strength is this healing and grieving and sustainable work practice that we're trying to innovate at that edge is where we're trying to innovate. And I'm really honored to be engaging with them right at the very beginning, you know, so that, and engaging so many organizers in California as part of this development, It's beautiful, beautiful work. I'm thrilled right now to be engaging with some of the folks who are really taking on this question of how to fight fascism. You know, whether it's Vision Change Win, whether it's the Highlander Center, you know, whether it's the folks at Political Research Associates or it's the folks at the 22nd Century Initiative, there are people out here thinking hard about how we fight fascism in a very real and concrete way. And fighting fascism, you know, and the folks who are doing public narrative to figure out the kind of cultural interventions we need. So the folks at Reframe, where I'm proud to be on the board, the folks at Next River, Mia Birdsong's organization, you know, where I'm also proud to be on the board. Like these folks are thinking about new ways of thinking about freedom, new ways of thinking about justice, and we need that. We need that. And so that's my crossroads right there. It's like fighting fascism, transforming culture, building power, and radicalizing grief. Baby, that's my 4 directions. And so I love all the organizations working in that 4 directors with me. So beautiful. Mack, Thank you so much. I feel fed. I feel excited. I'm just so grateful for everything that you're offering us today. It feels like, yeah, things are changing in me and I just feel excited to know you and to be an ongoing community and conversation. Man, same, same, same friend. Thank you for having me. Of course, of course. Hi everyone. This is Prentice coming back just to invite you to a very special workshop that we are offering at the Embodiment Institute. On July 24th and 25th from 7 to 9 Eastern, we will be hosting a workshop called Why Feel? Healing our lineages and transforming our communities. It's a virtual workshop where we are introducing people, our community, to transformational characters and our foundational practices around embodiment. We'd love to have you there and we can't wait to see you. Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delaney. Sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Bhavna Nanjurla is our research assistant. Our theme song was created by Miada. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find more clips of the podcast on my Instagram at PrenticeHimpel. And if you'd like to watch the full visual conversations and help us sustain the podcast, please join us on Patreon at PrenticeHimpel. Thank you so much for listening to Becoming the People. Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom

Becoming the People Podcast with Prentis Hemphill

Grief is the Medicine with Malkia Devich Cyril

Listen to this podcast on