“The lack of space for grief in the West has been a form of social control,” says Camille Sapara Barton. Camille is a Social Imagineer, artist, and somatic facilitator who is the author of Tending Grief, a book that shares embodied rituals for holding our sorrow and growing cultures of care in community. Joining me over Zoom we reflect on the state-sanctioned severing, fracturing, and bypassing that conditions us to package our grief into a socially acceptable container so that we can continue being productive under capitalism. The UK government can be really good at organizing memorials when they think it serves a patriotic purpose, for example, but there hasn’t been any initiation of collective mourning since the pandemic despite the thousands of lives lost. Similarly, when George Floyd was murdered, our expressions of grief, such as protests and vigils, were met with over 10,000 arrests, rather than support. And more recently, a community who have lost three children in a tragic murder in Southport, UK, has also been denied the opportunity to grieve. Instead of fostering unity and collective healing, their sorrow has been ‘hijacked’ by far-right groups, who manipulated their heartache to forward a violent fascist agenda.
