African American funeral directors as culture keepers: an interview with Karla Holloway

ABSTRACT

An interview conducted with Emeritus professor Karla Holloway on the African American funeral director as preservers of culture and history illuminates her scholarship and importance to the field of Death Studies. Questions asked in order to understand her interdisciplinary academic background and her canonical book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial were received with answers on how her knowledge of language and letters provide important understandings of death and dying in broad and heterogenous African American communities. Holloway shared her own personal grief narratives and how they inform her work by disclosing her purposeful and continual use of the term ‘Vilomah’ which she borrowed from Sanskit as a way to bring comfort to those who have lost a child. Ultimately, the interview showcases how premature loss in African American communities, inclusive to children and adults, lead to creative and distinctive rituals and memorial work – work born of trauma and pain but also resistance and resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• African American funeral director
• american undertaking
• African American mourning
• last rites ritual
• death studies
• radical death studies
• memorial
• vilomah

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The essay can be located here https://today.duke.edu/2009/05/holloway_oped.html Searching for a word to describe parents who lost a child to death, Holloway returned to Sanskit (the same language that had produced ‘widow’) to find ‘vilomah’. Vilomah means against natural order, as in our children should not precede us in death. For more on this, please see ‘Giving a Name to the Pain of Losing a Child’ National Public Radio. 26 June 2006. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5511147