The Pace of Grief

Grief
Written By Nisha Purushotham

Many years ago, I recorded the one and only solo album I’ve recorded to date. On all of the songs, I accompanied myself on either an electric piano or a world percussion instrument. To fill out the arrangements, I enlisted musician friends who added soulful bass lines, steady drum grooves, intricate acoustic guitar licks, driving electric guitar solos, and gorgeous, haunting harmonies on violin and erhu, a Chinese two-stringed bowed instrument. 

My producer friend gave me the option of recording my vocal and accompaniment tracks together or recording my piano or world percussion track first and then singing over it. I chose the latter believing I would record a stronger vocal track without the pressure of simultaneously performing intricate piano and percussion arrangements. 

Given that these initial instrumental tracks would be layered over by several other musicians, my producer friend recommended that we use a click track for the foundational instrumentals. It was a logical choice that would allow musicians recording asynchronously to lock into a steady rhythm. 

When we finished the album, I remember listening to the title song, Living Water, a 9-minute anthem that begins with sparse piano chords, grows through plaintive verses about various communities surviving humanitarian crises*, and crescendos into full band orchestration featuring waterfall-like arpeggios on the piano.

I loved feeling out every chord of that song. I did this on the grand piano of another musician friend. For each verse, I would experiment with different chords, letting their vibrations reverberate in the piano’s soundboard and noticing the sensations as they traveled up my arms into my body. I would alter the chords subtly and listen for resonance. I wanted the subtle shifts to represent specific contexts of communities featured in each verse. I didn’t move on until I was satisfied. Writing the lyrics allowed me to tell the stories of different peoples at the edge of survival without descending into rage or despair. Channeling those verses alchemized these emotions and broke open my heart. 

And yet when I listened to Living Water the first time, my heart sank. Rather than allowing my emotions to move through me, the unwavering tempo of the song through its different textures, tones, instrumentation, and story contexts, did nothing to dislodge my rage and despair. If anything, it further embedded these energies in my being. They had nowhere to go. Nothing to move them and shift their shape.

Steadiness is not always what I need to create coherence in my recordings or my life.  

I’m thinking about this recording at a time when I’m allowing grief to move through my body. This grief is like multicolored skeins of yarn jumbled together into one massive ball. There are skeins related to the death of my mother 50 years ago. Skeins representing long buried memories of being othered, bullied, and abandoned as a child. Skeins which constitute years of choosing self subjugation over creative freedom. There are skeins entangled by the slow dying of an intimate partnership. Skeins symbolizing internalized colonizer ways and forgotten ancestral practices. Skeins that hold my anguish over the devastation of human and more than human communities who we sacrifice at the altars of late stage capitalism, settler colonialism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy. 

Given the size of my grief, there are parts of me that want to spring into action and get to untangling it. But as I listen to my body and the Earth body, who in the Northern Hemisphere is moving slowly and taking rest, I feel into a pace of grief that is slow and spacious with no perceptible metronome click signaling the start of its next cycle. In the slow and spacious pace of grief, grief rises like a tidal wave. It fills my chest and constricts my throat. It throbs behind my eyes. It crashes, gathers itself up, and rises again. In the present spaciousness of my life, grief has lots of room to move. It can quicken, slow, and even come into stillness in the service of its medicine.

I am aware that my current privilege as a middle class, formally educated, documented settler on Turtle Island allows me choice about the pace of grief in my life. As I bear witness to Palestinian women who have suffered the death of children, partners, siblings, and parents as well as the destruction of their homes and livelihoods in Gaza, I lament the absence of space for their grief. I imagine their grief needing to be buried and the survival responses of hyperarousal and hypervigilance setting in. I reflect on how my own unattended grief has taken root in my body as chronic anxiety, fear, hopelessness, and rage which cannot be metabolized into choiceful action. 

At a recent gathering of the Coaching for Healing, Justice, and Liberation Network, there was a powerful panel with the theme: Break My Soul: Transmuting Grief into Joy. The panel featured powerful beings who have grieved / are grieving the devastating loss of loved ones. One panelist, Sol Gonzalez spoke about the forms unmetabolized grief can take. They noted that in the individual body, it can take the form of chronic illness and in the collective body, it can take the form of the nation state with an imperialist agenda. 

Sol Gonzalez’s insights echoed a chilling and illuminating perspective of Resmaa Menakem in his seminal book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. In a chapter entitled “European Trauma and the Invention of Whiteness”, Resmaa Manakem points out that while European colonists from England, Spain, Portugal. France, Scotland, Sweden, and Holland had all colonized parts of Turtle Island, “it was the English who controlled nearly all the colonized territories in what would become the united states.” (Menakem, R. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press). He goes on to highlight how torture was an official instrument of the English government in the 1500’s and the first half of the 1600’s and notes that torture was not “just wildly popular, it was a spectator sport”. Resmaa Menakem quotes Barbara Tuchman, who in her book, A Distant Mirror (Tuchman, B. 1978. A Distant Mirror. New York: Alfred A. Knopf) reflects this graphically: (Warning: The following quote is graphic in its description of violence inflicted on the human body and should be skipped over if you are likely to be triggered by this):

“The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminals flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls.”

In Resmaa Menakem’s view, such inhumane violence led many people to flee England. He contends that the barbaric violence endured and/or witnessed by English settlers prior to landing in the colonies was never processed leaving the trauma to fester within individual bodies and the collective body. Patterns of this trauma echoed in the colonies as more powerful English bodies carried out whippings, branding, and mutilations of less powerful white bodies, This pattern took the form of torture methods English settlers used to steal lands, subjugate and displace Indigenous peoples. The pattern of unprocessed trauma continued in European colonizers’ acts of capture, forced migration, and enslavement of Africans who then had to endure the dehumanization and oppression of racial capitalism in the forms of chattel slavery and the plantation system. 

There are layers of unprocessed fear, rage, and grief wherever settler colonialism lives. This is why we cannot eradicate historic, institutional, and structural racism and genocidal strategies by policy, diplomacy, and systemic change alone. It requires spaces where unmetabolized emotions which we carry in our bodies and our ancestral lines are our focus. Where deep practices such as Somatic Abolitionism, Family Constellations, Racial Affinity Groups, and Collective Trauma Integration Practices compassionately guide us to feel the layers of emotions embedded in our own body, our ancestral lines, and the collective body. We need time for these practices. Time to become keenly aware of what we lost and what was taken from us. We need to go at the pace of grief, creating and finding spacious containers so grief can unravel and its slowness, quickening, and stillness can move through us. Through this, we receive grief’s medicine and remember what we need to heal and return home to ourselves and one another. 

For more information on the practices named above visit:

*In the early 2000’s, these crises included The July War, a conflict believed to have killed between 1,191 and 1,300 Lebanese people, and 165 Israelis and severely damaged Lebanese civil infrastructure, and displaced approximately one million Lebanese and 300,000–500,000 Israelis. Another crisis took place in the region of Darfur and involved the Sudanese government, the Janjaweed (a government backed militia group), and rebels and civilians residing in the Darfur region. Following an insurrection by Darfur rebels in protest of the government’s neglect of the region, the Sudanese government funded the Janjaweed to squash the rebellion. The Janjaweed terrorized civilians and prevented international aid from delivering much needed food and medical supplies. By 2007, the crisis had left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced more than 2 million people. One last crisis highlighted in Living Water was the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 where breached levees caused massive flooding and local, state, and federal government response to communities most severely hit was slow, ineffective, and negligent. 

Nisha Purushotham
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