Guilty Grieving in an Age of Ecocide

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Sakiru Adebayo, Bilgin Ayata, Stefano Bellin, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Mihaela Mihai, Jennifer Noji, Michael Rothberg, Alexis Shotwell, Arielle Stambler and the anonymous reviewer for their generous and helpful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cunsolo and Landman, “Introduction,” 6.

2 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 12. See also Rothberg, “Preface.”

3 Albrecht, “Solastalgia and the New Mourning,” 296.

4 “We Have Met the Enemy.”

5 Morton, Dark Ecology, 9.

6 Ibid.

7 Menning, “Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination,” 39-40. Or as Owain Jones et al. succinctly put it, ‘To grieve is one thing, but to grieve as one kills off what is to be grieved is quite another’ (Jones et al., “Everyday Ecocide,” 396).

8 Kahn, “Soak Up the February Sun?”

9 Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame, 7; Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 23.

10 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 21.

11 Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)”; Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling; Ahmed, “The Affective Politics of Fear”; Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.

12 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 4-5.

13 Ibid., 69.

14 Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame, 131.

15 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 93.

16 While this is arguably the contemporary consensus on the relationship between guilt and shame, alternative perspectives that elevate the role of shame are provided by Jennifer Jacquet’s Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, Tanveer Ahmed’s In Defence of Shame and Julien A. Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno and Fabrice Teroni’s In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion. Jacquet and Ahmed both lament the stigmatisation of shame in Western societies, interpreting its decline as a sign of growing individualism and hailing its alleged beneficial potential as a proxy for group ties and a shared morality. Deonna, Rodogno and Teroni for their part articulate a novel, positive account of shame that rejects the mainstream view of it as an essentially social and morally dubious emotion.

17 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 105.

18 Ibid.

19 This distinction is not absolute or clear-cut, though, as our being informs our actions, and our actions help shape our being.

20 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 26.

21 Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame, 165.

22 Craps, “Introduction,” 5.

23 The following discussion of Cade’s novella draws from and builds on Craps, “Ecological Mourning.”

24 Cade, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, 75.

25 Ibid., 19.

26 The same conceit of grief as a pandemic is used by adrienne maree brown in her novel Grievers, which also came out in 2021. Exploring racial rather than ecological grief, Grievers is a plague story in which a mysterious new illness sweeps through Detroit, devastating its struggling Black communities. The illness, which causes its victims to suddenly stop moving and speaking, and to slowly deteriorate until they die, crystallises the compounded griefs of living under racial capitalism.

27 Cade, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, 6.

28 Ibid., 7.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 71.

33 Ibid., 4.

34 Ibid., 17.

35 Ibid., 72.

36 Ibid., 56.

37 Ibid., 60.

38 Ibid., 49.

39 Ibid., 27. See also ibid., 72.

40 Ibid., 36-37.

41 Ibid., 73.

42 Ibid., 6.

43 Ibid., 30.

44 Ibid., 32, passim [original emphasis].

45 Ibid., 67.

46 Ibid., 70.

47 Ibid., 50.

48 Ibid., 72 [original emphasis].

49 Ibid., 20.

50 Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu,” 88.

51 DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene, 7.

52 Cade, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, 7.

53 Ibid., 33.

54 Ibid., 34.

55 As Deborah Bird Rose points out, ‘[s]ettler colonies are built on a dual war: a war against Nature and a war against the Natives’ (Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, 34). Australian history is marked by both ecocide and genocide: ‘the loss of large numbers of plant and animal species’ as well as ‘the loss of around 90 per cent of the original Aboriginal population’, along with most of their languages and cultures (Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, 35).

56 Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia. The condition of the Grief-stricken characters in The Impossible Resurrection of Grief also recalls the kind of impossible mourning or melancholia described by Margaret Ronda in her essay “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene”. Ronda focuses on Juliana Spahr’s Anthropocene poem “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”, which she analyses as a failed elegy that ‘lingers in self-punishing grief because there is no way to cope with or atone for the sense of human culpability that emerges here, no way even to grasp its material or psychological consequences’ (Ronda, “Mourning and Melancholia”).

57 Barnett, “Vigilant Mourning,” 14. See also my discussion of Derridean ‘mid-mourning’, which disrupts the Freudian distinction between successful mourning and pathological melancholia, in Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 62-63.

58 Quoted in Jordan, dir., Albatross.

59 Ibid.

60 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 123.

61 Quoted in Craps and Olsen, “Grief as a Doorway to Love”, 127.

62 Jordan, dir., Albatross.

63 Ibid.

64 Jensen, Ecologies of Guilt, 142.

65 Ibid., 143 [original emphasis].

66 Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, 20.

67 Barnett, Mourning in the Anthropocene, xi.

68 Quoted in Craps and Olsen, “Grief as a Doorway to Love”, 117.

69 Quoted in ibid., 121.

70 Quoted in ibid., 118.

71 Hatley, “Blaspheming Humans,” 13, 16. See also Jones, “Everyday Ecocide,” 399-400.

72 Correal, “What Drove a Man.” Buckel’s action was followed in 2022 by a similar protest suicide by the fifty-year-old climate activist Wynn Bruce, who set himself on fire on the steps of the US Supreme Court on 22 April – i.e. Earth Day – and died from his injuries one day later (Cameron, “Climate Activist Dies”). Moreover, it had been anticipated in a 2016 cli-fi novella by the Dutch author Jan Terlouw, Kop uit ’t zand (“Head Out of the Sand”), which features a fictional climate activist who burns himself to death in a public square opposite the Dutch parliament in The Hague to denounce inaction on climate change.

73 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Buckel’s letter, which to my knowledge has nowhere been published in full, are taken from Koulouris, “Honorable Death.”

74 Correal, “Very Real.” See also Van Susteren et al., “Viewing a Suicide as an Environmental Protest.”

75 Englander, “A Man Set Himself on Fire.”

76 Kathan, “Killing Yourself in the Anthropocene.”

77 Hughes, “Lamentation for Songbirds”; Scrimer, “The Self-Immolation of David Buckel”; Sherrell, “Letter to an Unborn Child”; Sternfeld, Our Loss.

78 Pilon, “I Found a Dead Body.”

79 Scrimer, “The Self-Immolation of David Buckel.”

80 Ibid.

81 Quoted in ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Pilon, “I Found a Dead Body.”

84 Correal, “What Drove a Man.”

85 Scrimer, “The Self-Immolation of David Buckel.”

86 Ibid.

87 Mays, “Prominent Lawyer.”

88 Riley, “The Site.”

89 Scrimer, “The Self-Immolation of David Buckel.”

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Stef Craps

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University in Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Recent publications include the New Critical Idiom volume Trauma (Routledge, 2020), co-authored with Lucy Bond, and a guest-edited special issue of American Imago on ecological grief (2020). Email: [email protected]