REBELLIOUS MOURNING / THE COLLECTIVE WORK OF GRIEF EDITED BY CINDY MILSTEIN AK PRESS PRAISE FOR REBELLIOUS MOURNING In a time when so many lives are considered ungrievable (as coined by Judith Butler), grieving is a politically necessary act. This evocative collection reminds us that vulnerability and tenderness for each other and public grievability for life itself are some of the most profound acts of community resistance. —HARSHA WALIA, author of Undoing Border Imperialism Before the analysis and the theory comes the story, the tale of the suffering and the struggle. Connecting mothers demanding justice for their children killed by the police, to neighbors monitoring the effects of radiation after Fukushima, to activists bringing water to immigrants crossing the borderlands, or fighting mountaintop removal in West Virginia, or keeping the memory alive of those who died of AIDS, Rebellious Mourning uncovers the destruction of life that capitalist development leaves in its trail. But it’s also witness to the power of grief as a catalyst to collective resistance. It is a beautiful, moving book to be read over and over again. —SILVIA FEDERICI, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation Our current political era is filled with mourning and loss. This powerful, intimate, beautiful book offers a transformative path toward healing and resurgence. —JORDAN FLAHERTY, author of No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality Rebellious Mourning offers thoughtful, artful essays by resisters on the meanings and uses of grief and mourning. This collection encourages us as people and organizers to understand the Phoenix-like power of these emotions. A primary message here is that from tears comes the resolve for the struggle ahead. —RON JACOBS, author of Daydream Sunset: ’60s Counterculture in the ’70s In our imperfect world, grief is distributed as unequally as wealth. Certain losses and lives are mourned while others are cruelly disregarded; a minority pays attention to suffering while the majority turns away. This intimate, moving, and timely collection of essays points the way to a world in which the burden of grief is shared, and pain is reconfigured into a powerful force for social change and collective healing. —ASTRA TAYLOR, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age The great Wobbly agitator, Joe Hill, famously told us, “Don’t mourn, organize!” But he was talking about the loss of hope and confidence that we can contribute to the struggles for justice, that it is a way of life, a culture of resistance. These essays by some of the most dedicated organizers among us today show that honoring and remembering—yes, mourning—actually strengthens our solidarity and vision. Cindy Milstein has created an essential and dynamic work. —ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States Grief is often regarded as one of those “negative emotions” we simply have to “get through.” But can it also be a process of sharing and learning, motivating us to make the world a better place? This book’s answer is a resounding yes! —GABRIEL KUHN, author of Playing as If the World Mattered: An Illustrated History of Activism in Sports Political organizers, whose lives are devoted to ending the injustice that causes inordinate grief in others, too often dismiss our own grief as shameful or self-indulgent. But this beautiful collection of essays is a clarion call to turn and face the truth of our own sorrow— and its power, as editor Cindy Milstein writes, to “open up cracks in the wall of the system.” Here, thinkers, organizers, and artists, from Ferguson to Appalachia to Fukushima to Oaxaca to maximum-security prisons, share their lives, their work, and the various ways in which acknowledging grief—that unavoidable leveler of souls—can allow despairing, isolated peoples to rise together as one. —SUSIE DAY, author of Snidelines: Talking Trash to Power Rebellious Mourning gathers together a motley assortment of grief narratives—voices of authentic mourning usually segregated and silenced by design. This groundbreaking anthology offers access to diverse experiences of what it feels like to grieve for those we’ve lost, within the context of all-too-often-deadly systems of global hegemonic control. Milstein and contributors explore the challenge of making contact with the pain of mourning not as a liability but rather a necessary step toward the reclamation of collective power. As such, Rebellious Mourning represents an indispensable road map by which those of us grieving many kinds of losses might find our way back to generative struggle, during a time when the Left so urgently needs new sites for building connection. —KATHLEEN MCINTYRE, editor of The Worst Like songs of sorrow sung together, or laughing in pain and survival around a campfire, this book leaves us whole, grounded, ready for movement, as grief shared in connection should. —CINDY CRABB, author of Learning Good Consent: On Healthy Relationships and Survivor Support Dedication TO CHIKANOBU MICHIBA (1967–2016) ALL THOSE LOST LIVES NAMED IN THIS BOOK ALL THE LOSS HELD BY THOSE STILL LIVING AND MY THREE NOW-DEAD PARENTS, BARB AND DAVE MILSTEIN, AND MARY BURKS PROLOGUE / CRACKS IN THE WALL CINDY MILSTEIN Your struggle is a crack in the wall of the system. Don’t allow Ayotzinapa to close up. Your children breathe through that crack, but so do the thousands of others who have disappeared across the world. So that the crack does not close up, so that the crack can deepen and expand, you will have in us Zapatistas a common struggle: one that transforms pain into rage, rage into rebellion, and rebellion into tomorrow. —SUBCOMANDANTE GALEANO, “The Crack in the Wall: First Note on the Zapatista Method,” on the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students We are, at present, swimming in a sea of grief. That sea includes death, but it is also so much larger, encircling all sorts of sorrows. In a better world, many of these disappearances would be avoidable, even unimaginable. For now, given the loss-filled waters we inhabit, how to better navigate through them, and without drowning? How to shift course, veering closer to a more humane self and society? Such loss is not new by any means. But it feels all the more imperative in a time marked globally by rising fascism and authoritarianism, the largest displacement of people in human history, and the greatest structural devastation of the very basis of life, the ecosystem as a whole. I come to this anthology through my own pain, yet it is inseparable from the pain of this world. I have traversed “the worst,” sometimes deftly, oftentimes not; sometimes with others, too frequently alone. This pain laid bare much cruelty, some of it systemic, some of it due to socialization. One of the cruelest af- fronts, though, was the expectation that pain should be hidden away, buried, privatized—a lie manufactured so as to mask and uphold the social order that produces our many, unnecessary losses. When we instead open ourselves to the bonds of loss and pain, we lessen what debilitates us; we reassert life and its beauty. We open ourselves to the bonds of love, expansively understood. Crucially, we have a way, together, to at once grieve more qualitatively and struggle to undo the deadening and deadly structures intent on destroying us. Cracks appear in the wall. Rebellious Mourning gathers firsthand, frontline stories—works of artful wordsmithing and agile thinking—speaking to what it looks like when people collectively yet personally disquiet centuries of loss. It asks its contributors and readers to journey without answers, with curiosity, by walking directly into our grief. It sees the work of grief, and spaces for it, as something that similar to water and h h h libraries, should be freely, healthily, and publicly available to all. In this way, precisely because we can more openly experiment with sharing the fullness of life, we can begin to rehumanize the world and ourselves. For if we can’t inhabit the essentials of what it means to be a compassionate human being, we surely can’t be the people capable of inhabiting communities of trust, reciprocity, and care. Indeed, by walking headlong into my own pain and that of others, I’ve stumbled onto more intimacy and sensitivity, honesty and insight, than ever before—something that would not have happened without the hurt. At the hospice that honored my parents’ wishes to die, as one example, I learned that it’s possible to cultivate a counterhegemonic culture, in which our behaviors are guided by the intertwined ethics of alleviating suffering and accentuating quality of life. That walking has also revealed much evidence of hearts taking hold of their own brokenness, generously aided by and mutually aiding others. In the class-war-torn social fabric of San Francisco’s Mission District, which I called home until the eviction epidemic got the best of me, I discovered that organizing “solidarity not charity” direct actions does more than facilitate greater resistance and even victories against rampant displacement. For those being forcibly relocated, it can lift them out of their suicidal despair, and into the understanding embrace of others facing similar loss of home and place. Eviction defense becomes, concurrently, emotional defense. I’ve witnessed pain transformed into weapon, wielded by caring communities in the fierce battle for a slightly less painful world. On the streets of the Bay Area, along with many others, I’ve accompanied families whose loved ones have been murdered by police. My neighborhood engaged in public rituals that were equal parts making and defending do-it-ourselves shrines, marching side by side in processions of remembrance and protests of rage, spray painting and wheat pasting a culture of defiance, angrily disrupting police fictions, and joyously creating community celebrations to honor our dead.