today’s post is part two of the “deathdoulasfortheliving” series. if you have not already read part 1, please check it here. “deathdoulasfortheliving” falls within Death Work and the labor/care work of Death Doulas, which I use interchangeably.* being in conversation is important to me — so feel welcome to email/message me your reflections.
Here, Death Doulas are the anti-imperial cultural workers – acutely aware of the performance of and the grammars of death worlds, yet, in the midst of the wake1 and compounded grief, they are committed to survival, in sync with Spirit and tools of divination, with ritual making and with memory keeping. This care work prioritizes archiving, truth-telling, anti-imperial communal solidarity, and tending to our Land – rejecting Empire’s desire for our Bodies as non-human/machinery.
Death Doulas rests on the fact that genocide and war are the baselines of the Western world, but that our resistance is not a metaphor and attends to the multiple ways that death appears – physically, environmentally, intellectually, spiritually, culturally, socially2 – while most intimately aware of and committed to our Dead and those still living.
Numerically, the year has changed, but our demand for a Free Palestine, a Free Sudan, a Free Democratic Republic of Congo, and a Free Land — void of anti-Blackness, imperial & military/police presence — will always continue until it’s so.
Over the past few weeks, The Conflicted Womanist, in collaboration with the Decolonial Feminist Collective, had a study group on Dr. Jasbir Puar’s book, The Right to Maim, and it has been a robust and transformative collective space. Some of my takeaways from our sessions will be woven into this piece, and the full-length pdf of session 1 is attached below.3
Sitting with Death Doulas or Death Workers as a collective embodiment practice, there are a few thoughts I’m carrying at the moment:
First, week after week, as COVID cases only dramatically increase and debilitate our livelihoods,4 we’re seeing how the US has been committed to normalizing mass death and mass disablement. They’ve continued to downplay the severity of COVID and its effect on all of us — where instead, the priority is to return to “normal” rather than fortifying structures of wellness and communal responsibility. This “return to normal” is instead a push to fulfill the means of production as soon as possible while keeping labor consistent and workers stuck in this death-churning cycle.
Second, the ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and DRC have already and are unveiling a deeply insidious interlocking web of globalized death-making. Global-South internationalist solidarity,5 being rooted in a local grassroots organization, and political education are what keep me here and what I hope brings you here, too. I’m drawn here because of grief. I’m drawn here because I know the anti-imperial struggle is both global and connected.
Next, I’m growing aware of the linkages between the US, antiBlackness, and fascism – all of which give way for imperialism, colonialism, Zionism, and capitalism to be deeply rooted. How do these show up in our bodies, in our lands, in our demands for freedom, in what we do/don’t have access to, and as weapons of warfare? Reading Erica Caines’s article on Liberal Democracy: The Bedfellow of Fascism6 has made this more clear:
When George Jackson advised in 1970 that we “settle our quarrels” because “fascism was already here,” it was with the astute understanding that the ongoing decolonization movements happening in the US and abroad were creating a crisis for the white world. Fascism, which emerged in Europe inspired by movements in the US like Jim Crow, did not break from the totalitarian logic and practice of European colonialism. Understanding ourselves as a colonized people within the US (politically, economically, and socially), we can understand that our lives are dictated by the authoritarian policies of a ruling class of a settler colony. The US has always been fascist from inception.
the blood cries out from the ground
Part of the Death Doula’s/Death Worker’s priority is the right to live and die in dignity. We’re concerned with troubling what it really means to live and die – because this two-fold binary of “life” and “death” doesn’t actually exist within fascist, capitalist, and settler colonized lands (aka “death-making systems”).
The in-between shows up as slow deaths that, for us still living, we witness all around us. This looks like the “shooting to cripple” methods used by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians - meant to torture and give claims for ”self-defense”; this looks like the intentional starvation of the Palestinian, Sudanese, and colonized people in resistance struggles. This looks like the bombing of every hospital in Gaza - completely shattering the healthcare and reproductive healthcare system in its most critical moment.
These are some examples to fit under what Puar labels as “will not let die,” “let die,” “make die,” and “will not make die.”7 These horrors extend when we make the linkages that maiming and varying slow deaths continue because it is a financially generative pull within the -isms known as the rehabilitative economy.”8 The rescue organizations that only show up when the damage is “complete,” the mission trips that launch just in time to spread the message of a “savior,” the narratives written that code the colonized in their resistance struggles as helpless and in need of rescue, the adoption agencies that form new markets in the cycle of crises…
The realities of slow deaths show how maiming, injury, disablement, debility, varying levels of bodily capacity, “usefulness,” or “being a good citizen” aren’t just random coincidences and categories in this climate we exist in but are absolutely intentional harms done by imperial and colonial powers like Israel, the US, the Western world, so the work towards new futures are disrupted, and that the injured state is the permanent state -which they have already accounted for - to control the quality of the livelihoods + death conditions of the populations (biopolitics and necropolitics).
maiming functions as slow but simultaneously intensive death-making, as targeting to maim is an accelerated assault on both bodily and infrastructural fronts…maiming masquerades as ‘let live’ when in fact it acts as ‘will not let die.’ — pg. 138
The Body / The Machine / Our Rituals
Genocide and war are not only the intentional elimination of a people group but, as Achille Mbembe calls it, it’s also a “war on life support.” This includes water, sewage, transportation, mobility, hospitals, electricity, telecommunications, access to food, schools, and all life support systems. The desecration of these by fascist, capitalist, zionist, and settler colonial regimes is, at the core, a fracturing of the communal networks we used to/do have available to us, like the birth & abortion doulas, the griots, the herbalists, the diviners & interceders, death doulas, and beyond.
Death Doulas still holds the determination that for us to build our survival tools, it is through remaining in principled struggle with one another. We learn from each other how to sustain and maintain our resistance movements. We study alongside each other, our revolutionary ancestors, and keep close to our revolutionary Guides still living.
We’ll continue to do our work day by day.
- for reflection -
what is out there for us when the materiality we are forced to tie our spirits to does not provide anything that can keep us alive?
- Question posed by Poet @sun.sonics in conversation & reflection on Death Doulas -
updates & notes
The Global Strike for Palestine starts today, January 21st, and ends on January 28th. Check out this infographic by Protect Palestine Org for the calls, actions, and steps.
Whether you joined us for this month’s study group or are looking for another opportunity to be in collective study, for our next read with the Decolonial Feminist Collective, we’ll be covering Dr. Joy James’ newest release, “New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner.” Stay connected with us on Instagram at @theconflictedwomanist / @decolonialfeministcollective for dates and details.
the footnotes
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness & Being
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death
DFC + TCW Reads: The Right to Maim - Session 1 Recap
DFC + TCW Reads: The Right to Maim - Session 1 Recap
I recommend listening to the podcast episode from Millennials are Killing Capitalism with Fred Moten who makes clear the difference between “international” and being “internationalist.” Listen here
Erica Caines - Hood Communist, Liberal Democracy: The Bedfellow of Fascism
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 138-140
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim p. 128