[Revisit] Grief is the Medicine with Malkia Devich Cyril

We won't be dropping a new episode this week, as Prentis is away mourning the passing of their father. 

To honor this tender moment we are resharing an episode from last season with Transformative grief activist, movement strategist, and 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.

Thank you all for your kind wishes and we will be back soon with new episodes.

Follow Malkia on Instagram @culturejedi and support the projects they mentioned in this episode:

• Movement Innovation Collaborative (MIC)
• Vision Change Win
• Highlander Center
• Political Research Associates
• The 22nd Century Initiative

Transcript

Encore_Malkia
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Prentis
00:00 - 00:24
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Becoming the People. I'm Prentice Hemphill. This is usually the time in the month in the sequence where I do a mini episode and I would love to do a mini episode except this week I'm not going to be able to because My father is transitioning right now.

Prentis
00:24 - 00:47
He's currently in hospice and I am going to be with him as he makes his transition out of this life. For those of you who followed my work, who know some about my story, you know that this is a complex relationship that I have with my father. There's a lot of love and there's a lot of pain. There's so many things.

Prentis
00:48 - 01:26
And so I'm going to take the time to just really be with all that's showing up for me. There's really so much. And, you know, I was just looking back and I actually messaged Elua Arthur because last week's episode was our conversation with Elua Arthur, who's the death doula, Going with Grace, founded Going with Grace, where she trains other people. to be death doulas and we were talking about end of life and death and we recorded that about a month ago and at that time I didn't know that I would be in this place right now where my father was transitioning.

Prentis
01:26 - 02:27
So there's something really, I feel a lot of gratitude that I had that conversation with her, that I was readying myself for what this journey has already been and will be. And I guess I want to just, I don't know, bring us back to the kind of core messages of that episode, that death is all around us, it's with us, and to remember to live as fully as we can, with as much presence as we can, and to also prepare for the inevitable, to prepare as best we can, the ground for our passing, for our loved ones to hold this transition, I'm certainly sitting in a situation where there's very little preparation and feeling the cost and the strain on relationships. So for all of those listening, maybe roll back that episode, heed the warning of that episode, take it very seriously because we all really end up at these crossroads.

Prentis
02:27 - 02:51
So that said, instead of doing a mini episode this week, we are sharing a throwback episode for those of you who are just joining us here on Becoming the People. We have a whole catalog, a whole library of amazing episodes where we've talked to so, so, so, so many brilliant people. And we want to bring some of those forward. Now felt like a good time to do that.

Prentis
02:51 - 03:14
So just following this intro, there's going to be an amazing episode for those of you who have listened all the way through. It's time to get reacquainted for those who are new here. It's your first time getting acquainted with where we've been, and we've been so many places, so this is a Digging in the Crates episode, and I hope you enjoy it. As always, you can support this podcast on Patreon, support what we're trying to build here and try to do here.

Prentis
03:15 - 03:36
We really, really, really appreciate it, and thank you all for your support, whether it's on Patreon or through your kind words and messages. All of that reaches us and touches us, and we're so grateful for it. We'll be back next week with, we'll have another episode, a new episode up. And I will maybe be back the following week with a mini episode.

Prentis
03:36 - 03:50
We'll see how things go. But either way, I'll be back soon with you all. And I can't wait for it. Sending all my love to all of you out there, those who have gone through this strange initiation, as I call it, and those who have not yet.

Prentis
03:50 - 04:31
Sending all the love. 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.

Prentis
04:32 - 05:15
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've 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.

Prentis
05:16 - 05:55
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.

Prentis
05:56 - 06:27
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.

Prentis
06:27 - 06:45
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.

Prentis
06:45 - 07:03
I feel like we have had so many different kinds of relationships over the years. So I'm really excited about this one 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?

Malkia
07:04 - 07:34
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.

Malkia
07:34 - 08:05
So I didn't even know those people and I related to me, for example, I was much, much, much older. You know, 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 something or lesbian writers or something like that. or maybe it was Black women writers or something.

Malkia
08:06 - 08:32
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.

Malkia
08:32 - 09:09
and ended up as a spoken word poet as a teen at the Nyorican 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.

Malkia
09:09 - 09:46
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 when 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 expanded. So it was just a time of extraordinary loss. you know, as a time of extraordinary loss and a life that had been defined by loss and a set of politics that was about transformation.

Malkia
09:46 - 09:50
And that's where my political identity was formed.

Prentis
09:51 - 10:18
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 that 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.

Malkia
10:18 - 10:44
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 a significant loss, right? That's often how people think about it. We think about it as the acute portion of that experience.

Malkia
10:44 - 11:11
We think it's time-bound, that at a certain point, I won't feel this way anymore. And you think about grief at 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.

Malkia
11:11 - 11:25
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.

Malkia
11:25 - 11:55
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.

Malkia
11:55 - 12:10
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.

Malkia
12:10 - 12:23
that include death and include change. Even migration is a way of understanding and managing loss. We lose the season, we move. We lose the water, we move.

Malkia
12:23 - 12:54
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.

Malkia
12:55 - 13:16
And then our responses to that loss is also shared. We think of grief as one, that it has one face, but I call it the grief ABCs. When you're thinking about, you know, 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.

Malkia
13:16 - 13:32
Grief that comes, you know, in the face of, you know, 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.

Malkia
13:32 - 13:46
you know, 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? You know, I haven't seen my father in 25 years.

Malkia
13:46 - 14:07
I don't know if he's dead or alive. You know, I left him in Nicaragua. I don't know, you know, I don't know what happened to him. you know, 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, you know, many losses.

Malkia
14:08 - 14:36
There's that grief that has been criminalized or the thinker and therapist, Pauline Voss, you know, talks about smothered grief or criminalized grief. She also talks about that ambiguous grief as well. you know, that grief that has been criminalized, right? A real interesting example of criminalized grief is mass protests, you know, is rebellion, right?

Malkia
14:36 - 15:17
You are rising up in response to loss, and then, you know, protests like the campus protests are criminalized, and that's grief that has been criminalized, which is different. than grief that has been disenfranchised, 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.

Prentis
15:19 - 15:48
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.

Prentis
15:49 - 16:01
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?

Prentis
16:01 - 16:13
Did y'all learn that along the way? It felt like you... There was no beginning and end to it. It was like there was space for everyone to be in the grieving.

Prentis
16:13 - 16:38
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.

Malkia
16:39 - 17:01
Yeah, Alana was and continues to be a guiding light, you know, in my life. She is absolutely a joy mentor, my mentor around boundaries. She will cut you off. She was not about to let nobody mess with me.

Malkia
17:01 - 17:15
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 one who taught me that loss is a shared experience that was my mother.

Malkia
17:16 - 17:36
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 experience that together in the context of shared conditions of oppression. The real collective experience is love, is care.

Malkia
17:37 - 18:03
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.

Malkia
18:03 - 18:19
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.

Malkia
18:19 - 18:37
That was a shared value, you know, that love was meant to be shared. It was something she was more private than me. She was more inclusive than I was, but also she was a stand up comedian. So, you know, so the communal factor.

Malkia
18:38 - 19:08
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?

Malkia
19:08 - 19:18
Remember when I 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.

Malkia
19:18 - 20:00
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 two 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 one another and the understanding that as someone crosses from one plane to another, whether that's in birth or in death, that

Malkia
20:00 - 20:15
it requires hands to catch you and have the 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.

Malkia
20:15 - 20:35
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 costs. But I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have had the nice apartment that we had for that period without additional support.

Malkia
20:35 - 20:45
We couldn't afford it. And I wanted a nice place for Alana to die. All of that was something that I needed help with. For a long time, she could only eat pureed foods.

Malkia
20:46 - 21:02
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.

Malkia
21:02 - 21:25
In fact, I went to the hospital. during the time 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 is the event.

Prentis
21:26 - 21:46
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.

Prentis
21:47 - 22:07
Just gratitude to you for sharing some and actually also activating something in me through 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.

Malkia
22:08 - 22:34
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.

Malkia
22:34 - 22:45
My girlfriend was murdered when I was 16. My cousins were killed. My mother died. My mother's sister, my aunt, died.

Malkia
22:46 - 23:04
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.

Malkia
23:04 - 23:23
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. You know, my mother died when she was 59.

Malkia
23:24 - 23:54
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.

Malkia
23:54 - 24:19
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.

Malkia
24:19 - 24:54
They're disproportionately found in some because of our material conditions. The fact that my 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 Njuzi, who was shot in the head when we were 16 after DJing the party, oh Lord, we gonna have this problem with the cat. You can't just knock the mic over?

Malkia
24:54 - 25:18
Look, I unlocked 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 Njuzi who was shot in the head, or it's my cousin BJ who was run over by a bus, or it's my girlfriend Jackie who was raped and murdered and thrown off a building in the Bronx, The list goes on and

Malkia
25:18 - 25:47
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. In fact, it is a criminal act to mourn us.

Malkia
25:48 - 26:20
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 inciter 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.

Malkia
26:21 - 26:41
The denial of grief is in somebody's interest. It's in the interest of the same people who produced the loss. So this is why the enslaved African was not allowed to have their mourning ceremony. This is why you weren't even allowed to grieve the loss of your child.

Malkia
26:41 - 26:54
You know what I'm saying? Like, 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.

Malkia
26:54 - 27:30
I cannot find him for three weeks. And, you know, 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?

Malkia
27:31 - 27:42
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.

Malkia
27:43 - 27:56
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.

Malkia
27:56 - 28:24
to prevent it, whether it's the rules, the laws that suppress protests. 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.

Malkia
28:24 - 29:09
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.

Malkia
29:10 - 29:28
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?

Malkia
29:28 - 29:56
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.

Prentis
29:57 - 30:39
That's kind of where I want to go in this next piece. Well, one, I want to pick up this thread about, you know, grief is both, you know, quote unquote, natural and also imposed and imposed disproportionately. When we are witnessing, you know, massive destruction, massive death, There's also the 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?

Prentis
30:40 - 31:03
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, this is likely part of what we will experience moving forward.

Prentis
31:03 - 31:22
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?

Malkia
31:26 - 31:50
I think there are three or four 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.

Prentis
31:50 - 31:55
Mac, I'm learning right at this moment.

Malkia
31:56 - 32:13
I'm happy I can give something to you because I've been learning from you for years. 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.

Malkia
32:13 - 32:23
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 some path by which you can make that natural or normal. You can't.

Malkia
32:23 - 32:32
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.

Malkia
32:33 - 33:03
But how can we navigate? 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.

Malkia
33:04 - 33:19
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 gotta do is acknowledge it, right?

Malkia
33:19 - 33:36
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.

Malkia
33:36 - 34:03
This is the path of being liberated at the sight 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.

Malkia
34:03 - 34:26
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.

Malkia
34:26 - 34:45
Or, you know, 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.

Malkia
34:46 - 35:01
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.

Malkia
35:02 - 35:18
It's coming. You can't change that, right? But what you can do is practice in this space. And so that is that acknowledgment, that decision to turn and face death, to turn and face loss of various types, this is the first step.

Malkia
35:19 - 35:30
Acknowledging loss, that is the first step to empowering grief. You know how they say you have to feel it to heal it. Everybody has these little slogans or whatever. I don't believe that you need to heal grief.

Malkia
35:31 - 35:38
Grief itself is the healing. Grief is the medicine. You know what I'm saying? Grief is not trauma.

Malkia
35:38 - 35:50
People get that confused. Loss can be traumatic, but grief itself, that's the medicine. You know, and us figuring out that's the movement. That's right.

Malkia
35:51 - 35:59
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.

Malkia
35:59 - 36:14
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.

Malkia
36:20 - 36:50
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.

Malkia
36:56 - 37:18
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 at the crematorium, to have our own version of a wake, to have people come and visit with her.

Malkia
37:18 - 37:37
She looked like an angel. She was dressed and she was wrapped in African cloth. And she had a small smile on her face. And then when it was time to cremate her, there's something called a self-directed cremation.

Malkia
37:37 - 38:01
in which a loved one 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.

Malkia
38:01 - 38:21
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.

Malkia
38:21 - 38:28
You know, not just like a word, I love somebody, but like getting all in there.

Prentis
38:28 - 38:53
Yeah. You know, it actually reminds me, in a way, a lot of the birthing process, too. Like, so much has been sanitized or taken away or, you know, 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.

Prentis
38:53 - 39:07
It is portal. 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.

Prentis
39:07 - 39:16
So I hear that too in what you're saying about moving Alana, Alana's body through that last moment, loving her all the way through.

Malkia
39:17 - 39:34
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.

Malkia
39:34 - 40:03
And it's very difficult. The next thing I think that is important for us as individuals and as a people 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.

Malkia
40:03 - 40:14
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. And that's just the truth. You're not alone, though.

Malkia
40:15 - 40:30
There are threads connecting you. No one can die for you and no one can be born for you. But you can be accompanied, and you can be in relationship. And I wrote about the dark night of the soul.

Malkia
40:30 - 41:13
I think we've all experienced that place where pretty terrible, you know, and everything is changing, and you don't know which way is up, and everything just feels horrible, you know, 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, you know, 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 alone time is not natural.

Malkia
41:13 - 41:24
We all need that. I'm talking about isolation. Isolation is an imposed When you talk about isolation, that's an imposition. Somebody that has been imposed upon you.

Malkia
41:24 - 41:43
And whether it's the nation state that's giving you that message, or it's your employer that's like, here go three days of 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 gonna love again? That's okay, you can have another child.

Malkia
41:43 - 41:51
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 one.

Malkia
41:52 - 41:58
I don't care if I love again. I loved. My love was unique. It was specific.

Malkia
41:58 - 42:08
And she's gone. So loving again is not the point, per se. You know what I mean? These are not replaceable people.

Malkia
42:09 - 42:49
So if we can come to understand that carrying 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's a lot of things that would be different. Because the principle there is that relationship is the medicine for unattended grief.

Malkia
42:49 - 42:56
You feel me? And that's where we begin. That's where we move into collective action. That's where we move from collective grief.

Malkia
42:56 - 43:07
That's where we get to be together in our losses. We get to share with one another. We get to learn from one another. And we get to process this thing.

Malkia
43:07 - 43:40
that requires energy and movement. I talked about being liberated at the sight 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. 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, you know, I'm a human with a traumatic history, you know what I'm saying?

Malkia
43:40 - 44:17
Like, you can't lose 27, 35, however many people in your own sovereignty in 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 find the principles that give you dignity. And so for me, there's a path that's maybe like the Bodhisattva path.

Malkia
44:17 - 44:48
I don't know how to quite articulate it, but this path of the transformative griever. 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, you know, wherever my grief shows itself, can I understand it as medicine rather than as a burden?

Malkia
44:48 - 45:11
It's something that's freeing me rather than something that's oppressing me. How do I respond, what I'm choosing to do? 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 three-pronged something that I'm thinking about.

Prentis
45:11 - 45:29
That's genius. And I'm gonna 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, Mack.

Prentis
45:31 - 45:56
Stop playing with the people right now. I mean, we gonna 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, how does that path relate to movements, to shifting conditions, to power?

Prentis
45:56 - 46:04
How, what do we do? with our grieving selves and how does it relate to building power? What do movements need to know?

Malkia
46:05 - 46:46
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, right?

Malkia
46:46 - 47:17
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. We're in a transition right now. Neoliberalism kept a measure of stability while maintaining systems of oppression in place.

Malkia
47:18 - 47:42
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.

Malkia
47:43 - 48:03
Fascism grows in chaos. If you ever, anybody that ever watched Game of Thrones might remember that scene when the priest was a pimp. You know, he said chaos is a ladder, and that's the reality, right? The more chaos the more possible authoritarianism and fascism is.

Malkia
48:04 - 48:24
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, mass shootings in grocery stores. All of these are essentially various types of hate crimes.

Malkia
48:24 - 48:50
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?

Malkia
48:50 - 49:13
Nobody, none of us. How many of us understand the way grief works on the body, the way mass loss can work to demobilize? How many of us understand this concept of the melancholia of the left? that can come from understanding Marx and some of the ways, some of the philosophies and teachings of Marxism.

Malkia
49:14 - 49:33
How many of us understand the way sorrow is a demobilizing and decelerating force politically? What impact will sorrow have on the upcoming elections? What is the relationship between sorrow and pessimism? These are questions that require answers.

Malkia
49:33 - 49:49
What is our stance on armed struggle, right? We're talking about mass loss, and sometimes to prevent mass loss, it requires self-defense. What is your position on that? We don't have one.

Malkia
49:49 - 50:30
As a movement, we've been stuck in liberalism for a very long time. And so we have, we look to the third world and we say, okay, we make judgments about war, we make judgments about armed struggle, but we ourselves in countries like the United States haven't necessarily had to, movements have not had to assert or assess, what is our position? What are our principles? How do you have enough courage to have a principle around peace that allows for the possibility of self-defense while retaining enough of a clarity around your position of violence to use as little of it as possible?

Malkia
50:30 - 50:40
See, all of this are skills. These are skills. These are conversations that we have to have. This is what I call grief leadership, and we need to learn it.

Malkia
50:40 - 50:50
And there's nobody to teach it to us. There are various places we can get it from. We can get it from some of the Buddhist teachers. We can get it from sisters like Norma Wong.

Malkia
50:50 - 51:03
We can get it from your work on courage, you know, from Evelyn Shen's work on courage. There are lots of places that you can pull from. You can pull it from semantics. You can pull it from martial arts.

Malkia
51:03 - 51:29
You can pull it from African traditions. but nobody has put it together. And the thing is, I just said a lot of things, but one thing I didn't say is that 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?

Malkia
51:29 - 51:40
Some people are coming at it from healing. We need more healing in the organizing. Some people are coming at it from accountability and conflict. We need more different ways to whatever.

Malkia
51:40 - 52:01
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?

Malkia
52:01 - 52:17
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.

Malkia
52:18 - 52:39
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 any place else in the world.

Malkia
52:39 - 52:46
We neglect ceremony. We neglect ritual. We neglect each other. On the one hand.

Malkia
52:47 - 53:16
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.

Malkia
53:16 - 53:36
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, grieving members, grieving staff. Our bereavement policies need to change.

Malkia
53:36 - 53:49
We are so stuck in a nonprofit law. I'm sorry, I didn't join a movement to be in nonprofit law. I'm trying to get free. The nonprofit is simply a structure by which we are trying to be able to process our resources.

Malkia
53:51 - 54:01
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.

Malkia
54:01 - 54:12
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.

Prentis
54:12 - 54:24
I feel like that's a very Mac note to end the conversation. And I hear you completely. I hear you. I do.

Prentis
54:25 - 54:32
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?

Malkia
54:32 - 55:10
I'm really proud right now to be working with the Movement Innovation Collaborative, now called MIC. And we are really trying to increase the capacity and the power, the strength of power building organizations here in California. And one of the important tributaries to that strength is this healing and grieving and sustainable work practice that we're trying to innovate. That edge is where we're trying to innovate.

Malkia
55:10 - 55:45
And I'm really honored to be engaging with them right at the very beginning. And engaging so many organizers in California as part of this development is 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.

Malkia
55:46 - 56:18
There are people out here thinking hard. you know, about how we fight fascism in a very real and concrete way. And fighting fascism 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, where I'm also proud to be on the board.

Malkia
56:18 - 56:39
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.

Malkia
56:39 - 56:46
That's my four directions. And so I love all the organizations working in that four directions with me.

Prentis
56:48 - 56:55
So beautiful. Mack, thank you so much. I feel fed. I feel excited.

Prentis
56:56 - 57:07
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.

Malkia
57:07 - 57:10
Same, same, same, friend. Thank you for having me.

Prentis
57:12 - 57:34
Of course, of course. Becoming the People is produced by devon de Leña, sound engineered and edited by Michael Maine. Our theme song was created by Mayyadda. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts.

Prentis
57:34 - 57:47
And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon, Prentis Hemphill. We are having a great time over there building community, learning together. Come join us. And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming the People.

Prentis
57:48 - 57:55
We're becoming the people