Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning
By Kimberly Juanita Brown
The MIT Press, 168 pages
Published February 18, 2025
Are Black bodies permitted to express their grief? Put differently, what might it look like for Black bodies to grieve despite the denial and erasure of Black pain and death? Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning attempts to make visible the seen and unseen registers of grief in those marked by the transatlantic slave trade. Professor Kimberly Juanita Brown, director of the Institute for Black Intellectual Life at Dartmouth College, actively rejoices with those who rejoice and weeps with those who weep. As an act of remembrance for the dead, she dwells among the ghosts of places and spaces: plantation sites, coastal ports, archives, visual media. This dwelling requires an acute attention to the sensorial – sight, sound and touch – as “ghosts” are seen in Black art, heard in Black music and touched in Black historical sites. These sites carry a history that beckons the reader to acknowledge them despite the constant censorship of grieving Black bodies. While the world denies this reality, Black grief lays everything bare.
This mode of analysis offers a rich landscape through which Brown confronts and engages with Black grief because, for her, “it is not enough to simply grapple with loss, one must also commune with it, make a space at the table for grief, see it, touch it, and listen to its demands.” Communing invites an encounter with the past, present and future as the viewer gazes upon the conditions that bring about the need to express grief. Through the lens of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, writers like James Baldwin, singers like Marvin Gaye and films like “Moonlight,” grief is embodied through one’s presence and willingness to sojourn with it.
I am most interested in a statement Brown makes near the conclusion: “This project, despite its preoccupations, is not about death, but rather an examination of the denial of vulnerability negotiated by black Atlantic subjects since antiblackness is routinely made palatable so that the past continually informs the present.” This language makes Black life – and by extension death – more than an academic exercise. To be Black is to carry a history that cannot be ignored: a history of pain, suffering and death that must be told plainly. However, death must not have the final say. I understand this project not as Brown trying to make meaning out of Black death, but instead, as Brown acknowledging that there is an otherwise for Black bodies. The aforementioned “vulnerability” reveals the unaffirmed areas of life that make up Black life. It leaps out of a photograph, mourns with the sorrow songs, explores uncharted territory with prose and textures life through film. This vulnerability is abundantly more than grief, as it does so without White approval. It is unequivocally Black.
Black Elegies has something to offer anyone who approaches with an honest heart. Writers and artists will find inspiration for their work. Photographers and filmmakers may find new ways to occupy a medium. Pastors and community leaders might draw upon Brown’s insights to reimagine lament for the communities they empower. Ultimately, Black Elegies is more than a meditation on mourning; it invites readers to see, hear and touch what hides in the shadow of loss that is the Black life.
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