Last Conversations

This piece politicizes mourning in/and public spaces as agential to public history. Deathwork is a way of being in the world, and a research method countering forgetting. Grappling with method and form, the writing is in mutual composition with the dead in a protocol of reconnecting. This leads to the cacophony/polyphony of matrilineal voices that feature in the work—writing in a way that is collective. The archive in composite voice denies false dualisms of the public-private. The composition evolves from the drawing out of central images, words, and ideas from the whole, then weaving each archival particularity into a collective voice, countering singular representations of the Black woman in history. Poetry does a kind of radical work here. The work itself is a practice of reciprocity—its fracture is intended as diffraction of the moving through grief and hearing the dead.