It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing. [Ocean Vuong. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.]
In the context of such enormous structural violence, how was it possible to imagine that a beautiful life is possible? Even more unthinkable was the idea that one might create it, not in the future, but now. [Regard for One Another: A Conversation Between Rizvana Bradley and Saidiya Hartman]
Arthur Jafa has spoken1https://open.spotify.com/episode/0KnHRmY1Jp4sJnosbpbR7n?si=Yx1KP71bS-y7Tpdy3fivwA about mixing and transposing as a kind of modality that proposes transhumanism. Something that breaks the boundaries of things that may, at first, appear to be discrete. I thought about this a lot in relation to a new project by Zara Julius, in collaboration with Zoé Samudzi – ‘A Funeral For…’. At its core, the work seems to be taking fragmentation, selection, cuing, transposing, and sequential composition of image, text, song, memory, story, matter, as a way to recognise what exists but also to make space for something else to emerge. The idea of death and grieving is held alongside a deep insistence on living….and having that life be beautiful.
‘A Funeral For…’ is a hand-bound art book that explores the entanglements of death-in-life, land, and the necrographies of both imperial violence and indigenous memory through the respective practices of each contributor, with essays and archival images in conversation throughout the book.
When thought of in its particularity, the project examines ethnographic museum collections through mourning practices. It brings together spiritual praxis, rigorous theoretical frameworks and creative process as a form of engagement with ongoing colonial violence. Thinking through Institutions that harbour stolen material artefacts but also human remains in states of suspension that make the possibility of rest unattainable. The genesis emerges from a visceral recognition that ethnographic museums function as spaces of spiritual containment. As Julius explained in a Zoom interview, her experience in these institutions “always felt like walking through a cemetery,” a sensation that moved beyond metaphor into lived reality during her work in various museums worldwide as part of her research. What began as an intellectual project transformed into something far more demanding when she realised she was exposing herself to the spiritual field, essentially working with ancestors that are stuck. The impulse then was to cut through the bureaucratic language that typically surrounds discussions of cultural restitution (think “responsible stewardship”), exposing the realities of what is actually at stake.
More broadly, the work critically reflects on legacies of settler colonialism, displacement, mining and plantation slavery, forced migration, revolt, marronage, armed conflict and various systematic attempts at erasure of Black life. By thinking about funeral and mourning practices in indigenous and dispossessed communities, the contributors found possibilities of maintaining relationships across temporal and spatial boundaries. There is a recognition that life is lived differently depending on geography, and that death, too, functions differently in multiple contexts. In South Africa, Black death is not systematised through the violence of the slave ship but through apartheid’s spatial arrangements and structural violence, whose effects we continue to experience to this day. These different forms of life-making and dealing with death require approaches attuned to local conditions that still allow a kind of global or universal kinship. Julius points me to burial societies, for instance, and how they use ritual, connection and coexistence, able to hold the idea that death is part of life. Alongside this is a clear and profound insistence on living. This insistence on living includes developing sophisticated practices for working with death, ancestry, and spiritual presence. Life and Death are both central. Whether we read it as Schopenhauer’s ‘will to live’ – an animalistic force to endure and flourish, or Achille Mbembe’s powerful response of nurturing a durable and shareable life, re-imagining the world that moves beyond the history of race, colonialism, and segregation. This, to me, is critical because it acknowledges that there is still a significant amount of death NOW and that power decides who lives and who dies. Violent death is not historical; it is very much present. Julius and Samudzi made it clear to me that they are aware of the need to attend to “the materiality of the African present rather than oblique references or even romanticism, as often happens, of a pre-colonial African past.” The present is marked by what they identify as “a differentiated condition of Blackness in places that have and that are run by Black people”, where “Black leadership can also enthusiastically continue dispossession, enabling all of the violent modes of extraction.” Marikana. Darfur. Goma.
I was struck by how the images in the book lend themselves as emotional carriers of memory and lives lived. They embody the principle, aptly described by Julius, that “death is part of the process”, which is also the name of a project by Julius, which is a six-channel audiovisual installation informed by research with the audio, oral history and photographic collections in the Mayibuye archives in Cape Town. Death is part of life and therefore part of the process – as a reminder too that grief is perennial work in progress and a collective ritual that is ongoing. Julius and Samudzi dialogue with other interlocutors, Meghan Ho-Tong and Abdud-Daiyaan Petersen, in an attempt to reckon with grief and Black death. Samudzi reminds me that the philosophical foundation underlying their collaboration draws heavily on the actual demands of ethical personhood and the obligations that tether individuals to community.
Death is morbid, but it is also melancholic and beautiful. The book contains these complexities alongside what I read as a sense of optimism. Not the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ kind of optimism or that there is glory in suffering, but rather that there is potential for a rapture through the difficult work of remembering.
Rather than approaching death as loss or an ending, ‘A Funeral For…’ centres death as a fundamental life-making practice, as reflected in the introduction to Daiyaan Petersén’s text, who notes, “Amongst the cultural practices of the Cape Muslim community of South Africa exists the veneration of saints. Their gravesites are known as kramats. The term kramat itself comes from a Cape pronunciation of the Malay word keramat, which holds the same meaning, and its etymology is traced to the Arabic word karāmāt, referring to miracles performed by the saint in their life or after their death. On the Indian subcontinent, these shrines are known as a dargah or mazār, whereas in the Arabic-speaking world, they are referred to as maqam. While these names and architecture differ throughout the global Muslim world, the concept remains the same. These kramats constitute deathscapes larger than just sites of burial: they also comprise sites of pilgrimage, healing, refuge, and homeland.” In this sense, deathscapes aren’t only about places where dying and mourning occur but also places of remembrance and refuge.
Death is difficult. But so is Life. I have immense gratitude for this kind of lifework that fearlessly approaches muck, terror and catastrophe. At the end of which we find life again. Death and Life. Death in Life. Semblance and resemblance. And semblance once again.
