Seven stages of grieving and the longest memory PDF

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Essay written in practice to help me get ready for the upcoming exams...

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Throughout both historical and modern times, misplaced notions of Western superiority have resulted in great loss — both physically and metaphysically. Both Fred D’Aguiar’s polyphonic neoslave novella The Longest Memory and Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving, a study of the destruction of Indigenous culture, expose the true depth of grief as a consequence of loss. In their respective texts, the authors explore the true meaning of loss — giving rise to a wide spectrum of psychological, emotional, and physical consequences that affects those who have lost not only their loved ones, but their culture, homes, and identities. Both the play and novella aim not only to alert the general public to the ‘stages of grieving’ as experienced by characters in the texts, but to encourage them to actively acknowledge the fact that the society that they know and love has its foundation on a bedrock of grief and loss, and that there are members of the African American community and the Australian Indigenous community who still feel the relentless effects of intergenerational trauma. [1:17 PM] Scene 9, titled ‘Black skin girl’, is one of the play’s physical representations of assimilation in the Indigenous community. In the scene, letters of the English alphabet are projected onto Mailman, representative of how Western culture and language were imposed upon the Indigenous causing loss of identity and culture. At first, it seems like an unserious ‘game’, but it is quickly clear that this imposition is tiring and forceful, demonstrated when the woman tried evading the letters by taking off her dress. The removal of her dress is symbolic in a way, highlighting that the Indigenous were figuratively left almost naked after the loss of their culture and freedom of life, emphasising their collective vulnerability due to this humiliation and breach of civil rights. Finally, the letter Z is left projected onto Mailman’s chest. It is a symbol of finality, a final reminder that this assimilation is so emotionally taxing that it has been left embedded in their hearts and hence have accepted all aspects of the language and culture of the Westerners, from A to Z. Western assimilation has therefore worked to a large extent, further reinforced when in Scene 13 Aunty Grace, Mailman acknowledges that she is a ‘Christian woman’, a religion introduced by the Westerners. Therefore, the Indigenous community has experienced great loss of culture and D’Aguiar, Mailman, and Enoch explore the psychological and physical effects of repressed grief on the characters in their respective texts. Scene 13, titled ‘Aunty Grace’ tells of the return of the assimilated Aunty Grace to her homeland in Australia to mourn her long lost sister, after living in England for fifty years. However, the difference in her appearance is quite obvious to the rest of her family — the fact that her skin had ‘gone pale for want of sun’ references both the figurative and literal darkness of England, portraying it as a place of evil where the sun doesn’t shine, and hence a place where Aunty Grace never belonged. Her features are ‘well preserved’, signifying how Aunty Grace has not felt any significant emotional or psychological change, like grief, unlike the rest of her family in Australia, further reinforcing how distant she is despite being right in front of them. This disconnection is clearly felt among the Indigenous community, since they think that she ‘wasn’t really family’ to them. However, she is symbolically redeemed to a small extent when she fills her empty suitcase, representing her lost connection with her community, with the red earth of her homeland — a final statement allowing her to grieve properly ‘at last’ for not only her sister, but for the five decades lost due to separation from her family, identity and culture. Unification through grief forms a link between herself and her estranged family. She is finally able to express her long-repressed grief, indicating that she had also lost the freedom to grieve openly when she first left Australia. Similarly, Whitechapel experiences the same feelings that Aunty Grace has felt, since he too is shaped by his repressed grief. However, his circumstances are different to Aunty Grace’s, since she had left her homeland willingly, while Whitechapel was forcefully taken from his African home and hence had no choice in his loss of identity, family, and culture. His silent grief, despite his attempts to conceal it,

clearly takes a heavy mental and physical toll on him, to the extent that his grandchildren call him ‘sour face’, which is a description of the sorrow and pain that he continually feels. When his son Chapel is being whipped by the overseer Sanders Jr, he witnesses his son ‘surrender to that whip’ in a symbolic representation of Whitechapel’s own life, by highlighting how his identity as an African with a proud heritage and family was stripped away from him, painfully and mercilessly by the Westerners. However, just as Chapel had stopped screaming in pain not long after the whipping started, Whitechapel cannot properly express his grief since his long years of suffering had conditioned his mind to be ‘numb’ to the pain. The examples of Aunty Grace and Whitechapel remind the audience that proper expression of grief is crucial for it to release its grip on the mind and body.identity due to assimilation. Both texts explore the necessity to work towards social healing by acknowledging the grief and loss of the past, and hence, memory and history have become continual sources of pain, but also sources of progress and reconciliation. In The Longest Memory, the chapters ‘Remembering’ and ‘Forgetting’ presents Whitechapel’s paradoxical viewpoint — he doesn’t want to remember all of his grievances since he believes that ‘memory is just pain trying to resurrect itself’, but he also bleakly acknowledges that his pain ‘cannot now be undone, only understood’ by future generations in a collective effort to enact change. This idea is paradoxical because to enact change, remembering of the past must happen, but Whitechapel doesn’t want to remember, and hence inadvertently passes the responsibility of social progression with hope on to future generations along with his trauma, since he can no longer continue his fight. D’Aguiar therefore stresses the importance of remembering the past — ‘a complete day needs both light and dark’ — because all the grief and loss, symbolised by the dark, that has been experienced in history by the enslaved needs to be understood by the world before reconciliation, symbolised by light, can happen. Mailman and Enoch convey a similar message to their audience, however they believe that before reconciliation, not only must their past grief and loss be understood, but significant changes to social structures and cycles that continually oppress the Indigenous community. Scene 18, Story of a Brother, tells of the never-ending cycle of Indigenous incarceration and the devastating effects for an Indigenous person standing up for civil rights against the police. Injustice is evident when Mailman’s brother is eventually incarcerated for refusing to let the police take away his friend, who had done nothing wrong, resulting in shame that ate ‘[his] spirit, [his] life’. However, the real loss here, ‘seen too many times’, is that many Indigenous Australians sentenced to jail never make it out, hence highlighting that jail for a poor Indigenous Australian who committed a minor offence could mean a death sentence — injustice on another level. This is why Indigenous Australians’ storied ‘need to be told’, because without awareness of institutional racism and the devastating effects it can have in Indigenous communities, unjust deaths will continue to occur, and hence, further loss and grief can be prevented. Like Whitechapel and the enslaved, Indigenous Australians are willing to remember and tell their stories if it leads to reconciliation and social healing....