Raha Behnam

I was asked to share some writing at the closing of this exhibition. I believe I was asked to participate in relation to a project I have been working on called Heirloom Zine, a project which has taught me great things about culture, loss and the violence of assimilation. I have learned that assimilation is the means through which an individual self experiences systems of imperialism, cultural genocide, and global domination. 

But today, I would like to focus on grief as a phenomenon rather than talk about Heirloom. First, I would like for us to notice our togetherness in this room. Togetherness is our greatest resource, and it has everything to do with grief, loss and healing. Because every burden is too heavy for just one person to bear. 

Grieving is an at. It is something we can do. But it requires our togetherness. I see you and you see me. We grieve each with a completely unique experience of what our grieving feels like and what it is about. Yet we must witness and hold space for each other for grieving to be successful. One of the points I really want to make today is that loss is almost always a consequence of systemic inadequacies. Our losses are not isolated incidences, and it is not precisely death that haunts us, but the means and the meaning. We suffer or we witness suffering that is caused by oppression, whether it is economic, gendered, racialized, or class-based. What I mean is that grief is not just personal to you or to me. It involves all of us and the systems that govern our lives. Healing, therefore, must also involve us all. 

What we need to grieve are the many systems that rob us of our full humanity and create suffering in the world. When we gather, and hold space for each other, and allow ourselves to plumb the depths of our feelings, we eventually come out the other side. There is no bottomless pit even if it sometimes feels that way. This process, this digestion of emotion in collectivity or as ritual is as ancient as we are. It is a practice that humans have somehow known to do – as birds know to fly south in the winter – and so we have done it. It is an alchemical process that transmutes suffering into something else; into the appreciation of life again and into new understandings. 

We have known to do it, except when we haven’t. Our culture as infiltrated as it is by capitalism and the monetization of time, has directly assaulted our togetherness and our wisdom of the ancient practices of collective grieving. Let’s interrupt the systems that attempt to precent us from even our innate, human capacity to heal. Because that is what grieving does. We grieve in whatever way we must, we allow our hearts to break for every soul that has suffered at the hands of human systems, until we come out the other end anew. 

There is no telling how long any one grieving process will take. And it is recursive, non-linear and unpredictable, like creative process is. It does not happen in neat pockets of time around your nine-to-five work day. So instead, we can demand the space to feel and grieve as a universal human right, untouchable by the desperate exigencies of capital. Our world would begin to look very different. 

The common aphorism “hurt people hurt people” holds true. Demanding space for grieving can tangibly shift the trajectory of the future. It might be one of the most radical shifts we can make, as more and more of us begin to act from places of healing rather than pain. Grieving turns a wound, into a scar that becomes a beautiful tattoo, a memory integrated as a soulful part of us. We digest the hurt and obtain its nutrients, the lessons that particular wound offers us; the diamond within the rough. 

This exhibition propels me to imagine new possibilities for art galleries and other such spaces, as spaces to feel together. Places to become vulnerable in the soft arms of each other. To look, see and share in loss and in life.