The Birds Don't Sing: A Call for Public Grief

Grief is now private, suppressed, and unproductive in this capitalist world.

I always hoped that third act of my life would be writing full time.
I did not expect that writing to be about grief.
I am glad that I live a life where there’s room to write about grief.
Honestly, Alisha

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The Clipse and their parents. Collage created by Alisha Gordon

Across many African cultures, we are able to find common themes of public expressions of grief, spiritual connections to the dead, and communal participation in grieving.  Public grief, including wailing, crying, mourning, and even dancing, exists in these cultures, normalizing the very real human response to death and loss. These practices found their way to the Americas during the Transatlantic Slave trade, showing up in the songs, rhythms, symbols, and religion adapted from ancient African cultures. In the Christian faith, the Wailing Women in Jeremiah were called upon Israel’s God to mark the destruction and suffering of Judah. A shared story in both the Christian and Islamic tradition, Hagar (or Hājar), the mother of Ishmael, is depicted crying out to God after being left in distress in the desert. Other faith traditions have varied orientations to public displays of grief and many cultures share countless stories of loss, grief, and a communal response to it all.

Black art has always been a place for public grief: The Blues, Gospel, Jazz. R&B singers twirling in the rain in a leather trench coat, arms outstretched, over a love lost. Negro spirituals like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen." John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Stevie’s ‘They Won’t Go When I Go.’ Annie Lee's "Blue Monday." Mr. Cheeks reeling over the loss of ‘Reneé,’ Aaliyah’s ‘I Miss You’ that became a prophetic requiem after her death, or Kendrick Lamar’s “United in Grief.”

I’m particularly moved by The Clipse’s decision open their first album in 16 years with a song about their parent’s deaths. ‘The Birds Don’t Sing’ is a raw retelling of what could be considered another call for public grief, one that attempts to reconcile the signs we miss when death is an unexpected visitor knocking on a loved one’s door, bargaining with the what-ifs, and regrets of parallel lives converging in an unexpected end.

Pusha T recounts his last conversation with his mother where he shares he planned to go to Turks and Caicos for Thanksgiving instead of spending it with her in Virginia:

Seein’ you that day | Tellin’ you my plans but I was leavin’ you that day
It was in God’s hands, Ye was at Elon’s waiting to get with me
On my way to Texas, that’s when Virginia hit me. — Pusha T

I remember the night before my mom passed, I asked the hospice staff to pick her up and have her sleep there for the night. I didn’t know this then, but when someone is dying and lucid, they’re constantly moving around, can’t sit still. This meant round the clock attention to her, coaxing her back to the couch, administering Lorazepam, turning the oxygen tank up as far as it could go to keep her levels steady. A rotation of boiled eggs in the morning, apple sauce for lunch, and Panera’s butternut squash soup at night. After she was settled in the hospice center, I vacillated on whether to stay the night or take the opportunity to go back to Decatur, grab some food, and get a good night’s rest. I texted my Spelman sister and shared that I wasn’t sure what to do. That I felt guilt about leaving her until the next day. Like Black women often do, she convinced me that self care was the best care I could offer myself and her.

So off to Waffle House I went.

With a belly full of hash browns scattered and smothered, I fell asleep on the couch. Not even four hours later, she was gone. I still go back and forth about whether or not it was the right call. And, as that same Spelman sister told me the following day, she couldn’t have passed peacefully with me in the room anyway.

The veil between worlds is thin, translucent, and concurrent.

No Malice, the older of The Clipse brothers, discovered both parents when they died in their respective homes four months apart.

Found you in the kitchen, scriptures in the den
Half-written texts that you never got to send.
—No Malice

This kind of compounded grief, multiple losses in quick succession, can feel like suffocation. We are often stunted in our ability to publicly grieve, to share with others the pain points of loss – whether that’s over a loved one, a job loss, an election to save Democracy, divorce, or unresolved trauma – because there’s no room for it.

Where could it go?

Every inch of our being is squeezed between the constant onslaught of loss, death, change. As soon as we catch our breath from one thing, here comes another pushing us from the calming center back to the torrent edges of grief. I mean, Theo’s gone for God’s sake.

Though we come from an ancestry whose grief was public and communal, today, grief is now private, suppressed, and unproductive in this capitalist world.

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But we must make room for it. We must call it grief. Give it a name.

We must recall buried memories and stories and bring them to life over 808 beats and electric guitars and public chants down the avenue and wailing of bullhorns to disrupt fascist groups. We must sing and dance and pop, lock, and drop it and write, write, write. We must remember the thinness of the veil between this world and the next and draw in ancestral knowings and cornbread dressing recipes and old wive’s tales and hoodoo and scripture that gives us the power to ward off haints and go tell it on the mountain.

We must let babies cry and giggle and babble for it interferes with the frequencies determined to keep our grief quiet. What did Mother Zora say? “If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” We gon’ grieve in public — and let God sort [the rest] out.

To the untrained ear, a bird’s song sounds like a sweet melody. But those of us who are living in and through grief, we recognize the screeching pain between refrains.