The Civic Lives of Grief

• In Event: Literature and Political Philosophy

Abstract

The Civic Lives of Grief

The bookends of this paper come from March 2022 edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, which adds a new psychic disorder, “prolonged grief,” and from the writing – poems and archival reports - of the Argentine poet in exile, Juan Gelman, whose “prolonged grief” is articulated through creative politically attuned texts. He wrote not only to express his grief over his son and daughter-in-law’s murders and his granddaughter’s abduction during Argentina’s dirty war but also to recover the truth of the experiences of many of los desaparecidos (the disappeared). In between the paper explores and analyzes the political initiatives of other families who have lost children and other relatives, for example the Argentine “Madres” who for decades demonstrated in a Buenos Aries public square, the families who have marched in Mexico’s capital with banners asking “where are they,”, and the diverse genres of protest over the disappeared in Cambodia, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as in other Latin American countries. Conceptually, the paper is concerned with contrasting the spaces and temporalities of grief while arguing that it functions as a powerful source of radical empathy as well as political expression.

Author

• Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii, Manoa