a sentence can also be a space for living

September 9, 2024 12:51 PM

"We should rid our writing of the domestication of atrocity, rid our writing of the tense that insists on the innocence of its perpetrators, the exonerative tense of phrases like 'lives were lost' and 'a stray bullet found its way into the van' and 'children died.' We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence. We should refuse the logic that produces a phrase like 'human animals' and a 'four-year-old young lady.'" Christina Sharpe in the Yale Review, on writing and thinking during and about genocide, climate change, deaths in the family and death in history: The Shapes of Grief.
posted by mittens (2 comments total)

(i debated whether to add a sort of editorial note to this one--i have this fear someone will see the word 'genocide' and think okay but we have a thread for that. there's this concept of moral injury that gets talked about, when we're talking about huge, devastating injustices that are out of our control, and i think this essay in its careful fragments is about using language, clutching at language, as a way to try to deal with the emotion of living through (even as a spectator, even as a very distant spectator) such events. its quotes on craft--the way the craft of writing is used to sanitize the horror away--were i thought almost unbearably poignant: the idea that all you have to use to get through this is words, and there exists an industry to publish those words, but first you must make the words palatable, first you must deracinate the words from the bloody ground in which they grew. and yet this is the very way we process grief, the way we talk to our beloved dead family; all we have is words.)
posted by mittens at 1:31 PM on September 9 [8 favorites]

the stroke, the glyph, the mark, Steffani Jemison's [artforum/archive] essay which was linked out from the OP, offers drawing as another way (another language?) to palette shapes from emotion
posted by HearHere at 6:18 PM on September 9 [3 favorites]