“Feeling the Weight of Tragedy”

I arrived at work this morning to a particularly harrowing push notification: “America’s violent weekend; US rocked by back-to-back shootings across the country.” This weekend was marked by gun violence and tragedy in Indianapolis, Chicago, Austin, Kenosha, Columbus, Omaha, and LaPlace. This, along with the recent and all-too-familiar killing of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis and Adam Toledo in Chicago. This, at the same time as the ongoing trial over George Floyd’s killing. Even still, we know there are many more tragedies that don’t make the front-page headline.

It is impossible to respond appropriately to all the evil. There’s a tension now between engaging and feeling the weight of tragedy versus numbing and avoiding it so that we can go on surviving. I get that; the 9-5 doesn’t allow space for grief, and we have not adapted the ability to take in every daily horror and go on without pause. If we do nothing, it keeps happening. If we start conversations and repost news, it keeps happening. If we take to the streets to protest, it keeps happening. If we vote blue or red or green or pink, it keeps happening. So, what do we do? 

In short, I don’t know. But I do know that art helps us connect to our shared humanity and process tragedy. And I believe that this must come first; before we add nuance to the situation or discuss practical steps, we have to allow ourselves to feel it. The poet Tsitsi Ella Jaji wrote the following piece in 2017, and I think it is a helpful exercise to sit with its heaviness for a moment.

To Bless the Memory of Tamir Rice

By Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Plant twelve date palms in a ring around the tarmac. Make them

tall, slight towers, leaning into the wind as princes do. Fear that

the sweetness of dates will churn your stomach. Plant them anyways.

Plant the pudge of his fuzzless face in the arrested time of a school portrait.

Plant his exotic name—found in a book that spelled dreams

of eminence and hope for an uncertain coupling—in your ear.

Know that whether it leaches into the soil or not, this ground

was watered with his blood. This tarmac turned a rioting red. Strike that.

There was a screech of brakes, and sirens howling like a cliché, then

a volley of pops that might have been a game if only

what came next was not such utter silence.

The tarmac was red. There was no riot.

Build a circle of palms and something to keep them safe.

Build a greenhouse around the twelve palms.

Yes, a green house. This land is not our land.

Dig up the tarmac, the dark heavy loam of this side of town.

Be sure to wear gloves as you dig through the brownfield’s

mystification. Once the Cuyahoga River was a wall of fire.

God knows how rain melts metal.

Dig into that earth and build

a foundation. Quarry it.

Let the little boys and little girls of Shaker Heights and Orange

bring a Game Boy or cellphone, or other toy made out of coltan that,

chances are, a little boy or little girl dug up by hand in the DRC.

Let the children lay their shiny toys in the foundation.

Seal up ground with molten lead. Die-cast its melted weight.

Yes, make a typecaster’s mold, and leave it a dull grey, like flint.

Stamp out a broadside, only set it in the foundation’s floor.

Let us read the letter that says this officer was unfit.

Let us go over it step by step, every time we walk toward the green

house of imaging what this boy’s boyhood should have been,

the fulfilling of his name, his promise.

Plant an oasis here. How is not my problem.

*

Let someone who remember how cook de rice.

Let she cook de rice with palm oil ’til is yellow an sticky.

Of course dem have palm oil in Cleveland. Dis no Third World we livin in.

Let she cook she rice an peas. Let she say

how she know to do it from a film she seen. In de film, dem people from

de sea island gone to Sierra Leone and dema find dey people,

dey people dat sing de same song with de same words. Come to

find out dem words is not jes playplay words, dem words for weeping. So dema

sit down together, an weep together, dey South Carolina an Sierra Leone family.

Dey weep over de war, an de water, an de fresh and de forgotten,

an dey cook dat rice ’til is yellow and sticky. Dey nyam it with dey hand,

outta banana leaf and de old, old man, him say,

you never forget the language you cry in.

Let all dem little girls from Shaker Heights skip the gymnastics meet.

Let dem come and eat rice and eat rice ’til they don’t want to eat rice no more

an let dem still have rice to eat. Let them lose their innocence.

Let horizons settle low.

Let dates and raisin and apples and nuts seem a strange mockery

of the new, the sweet, the hoped for. Let us share the matter.

Let us sit here under these date palms,

and haggle over whose fault it is. Let the rage that says tear this shit down

tear this shit down.

Let us start with the glass walls of the greenhouse, as a demonstration.

Let the rage that says I cannot speak not speak.

Let it suck speech into its terrible maw and leave us shuddering in silence.

Let the rage that says, black lives matter matter.

Let that other rage that says all lives matter be torn down. Let the matter with how

we don’t all matter in the same way churn up a monumental penitence.

Let the date palm offer us shade.

Let us ask why we are still here.

Let us lower eyes as we face his mother, his father, his sister.

Jaji’s exploration of communal grief offers a few suggestions for how to wrestle reality. Build a greenhouse, she writes, a public space of memorial for those gone too soon. Imagine what his boyhood should have been, grieve the loss of another life. Find your people and weep together, she says. Be angry, fight, take action, tear things down… or be silent in your anger. Recognize what matters in these moments of grief: victims, communities, healing, change. Listen to those closest to the tragedy, ask what matters to them. Find comfort in the midst of sorrow, but don’t forget why we are here, at the memorial. With his family.   

So, I suppose the best that we can do in the middle of grief and tragedy and fear and confusion is fight to be human. It seems simple, but so much of our lives are structured to keep us from being. It is purposeful: exhausting people to the point of inaction and numbness is the only way to uphold the status quo. “The way things are” is the very thing that keeps us from “the way things could be.” In the meantime, it keeps us from feeling sorrow, fighting for joy, building memorials, tearing down corruption. All of these things are necessary, and all of these things have a time and place.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, ESV).

I’ll leave you with this: tragedy has happened and we can’t avoid it forever. Many of our friends can’t avoid it at all. As much as you can manage, allow yourself to be human and feel. These feelings, this grief and powerlessness and anger and passion for change, are what connect us all, and what connect Christ to us. Christ wept when he lost a friend, he felt powerless in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ felt anger when he flipped tables, and, thankfully, Christ’s passion for change created a way for all of creation to experience redemption, restoration, and renewal.