Remaining After Ruin: The Politics of Lament in Forced (Im)Mobilities

How do survivors mourn when violence controls movement, speech, and public grief? This article reads lament as a political–theological practice that keeps the dead publicly addressable under forced (im)mobilities—conditions in which some are deported, disappeared, or killed while others are compelled to remain amid ruins, surveillance, and stigma. Through a comparative reading of Lamentations and Han Kang’s Human Acts, this study develops “fourth-person lament” to name a ruin-saturated address (“you”) that is relayed through multiple voices and across the boundary of death, refusing to resolve responsibility into a single speaker or a finished story. The analysis shows how lament is mediated through bodies that remain—hunger, wounds, exhaustion, unburied dead—and through spaces turned into archives of violence, so that catastrophe cannot be sealed into closure or denial. By tracing struggles over memory and affect—over who may move, who must stay, and whose deaths can appear as grievable—this article argues that lament operates as resistant passage within enforced (im)mobility: a communal and public insistence that memory, mourning, and responsibility remain open to contestation.